The 98th Academy Awards has just taken place in Los Angeles, celebrating the crème de la crème of the past year of cinema.
I tend to go into the Oscars with a little trepidation each year – last year’s Awards were fairly low-energy and sparse on surprises, with Sean Baker’s Anora sweeping most of the major categories. I think we can all agree that mileages vary when it comes to the comedy interludes that bloat the runtime quite spectacularly – but this year’s runners and riders made for a much more interesting night than I anticipated.
This year was always going to be remembered as something of a face-off between Paul Thomas Anderson’s timely political comedy One Battle After Another and Ryan Coogler’s 1930s vampire drama Sinners, the latter receiving a record-breaking sixteen nominations. But the slate of movies rewarded here served as a reminder of just how good a year it’s been. Unlike other years, there seemed to be a genuine argument to be made for just about all of the Best Picture contenders – which, apart from the two frontrunners, included films like Hamnet, The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value – and this tough race was acknowledged in Paul Thomas Anderson’s acceptance speech when One Battle After Another finally took the crown at the end of the night. ‘In 1975’ he said, ‘the Oscar nominees for Best Picture were Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Jaws, Nashville and Barry Lyndon. There is no best among them; there is just what that mood might be that day’.
While he’s right to say as much, there’s no denying that his newest film captured a screenshot of our contemporary mood, with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob chasing Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw across America to rescue his mixed race daughter from the clutches of a white supremacist movement engrained in the government itself. Penn won the award for Best Supporting Actor for his role, but was not in attendance to receive his trophy (granted, he already has a few). Kieran Culkin, who won for his role in A Real Pain last year, presented the award. ‘It is my genuine pleasure to give one of you a moment I hope you will never forget’ said Culkin, before reading Penn’s name. ‘Sean Penn couldn’t be here, or didn’t want to’ he quipped, ‘So I’ll be accepting the award on his behalf’ before making a quick exit – an awkward moment for any presenter. (In fact Penn was in Ukraine speaking with President Zelenskyy)
The night had its share of odd beats, mostly from the dreaded mid-speech playoff which seems to get a little worse each year. Ironically, the team behind Best Animated Feature winner K-Pop Demon Hunters’ original song Golden were played off by the band just as the second speaker approached the mic, cue cards in hand, to thank his family (or manager or his friends, who knows? We didn’t get to hear).
The pioneers behind Avatar: Fire and Ash’s stunning motion capture technology were also cut short while accepting the award for Best Visual Effects; their annoyance was as clear as the crystal blue waters of Pandora. I held my breath as the team behind Best Documentary Short Film All the Empty Rooms’ speech included a grieving mother calling for action against school shootings, but thankfully the organisers had sense enough to give that moment its dues.
Other big winners of the night included Guillermo Del Toro’s Netflix adaptation of Frankenstein with three awards, including Best Production Design for its striking sets, which saw parts of Edinburgh catapulted back to the 19th Century for crowd scenes, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling for the triumphant transformation of Jacob Elordi into The Creature himself (a ten-hour undertaking each time; four-hundred for the production overall).
Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet had been tapped to win big at one point in the run, but took home one single Oscar on the night itself for Jessie Buckley’s central performance in a category that seemed like a done deal from the start. Fantastically overcome by the joy of the moment, laughing with glee, she brought the audience’s attention back homewards: ‘It’s Mother’s Day in the UK today’ she said, ‘so I would like to dedicate this to the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart. We all come from a lineage of women who continue to create at all odds’.
As this awards season reached its fever pitch, there seemed to be more and more traction for Sinners to come out of the Oscars as the big winner, and you could feel that energy pulsing through the room from all the way across the Atlantic. Director Ryan Coogler received a standing ovation as he accepted the award for Best Original Screenplay and the crowd went wild when Michael B. Jordan won for Best Actor, a late-in-the-day upset for Marty Supreme star Timothée Chalamet, who saw a pushback for his rather blasé comments on opera and ballet. ‘God is good. God is good’ said Jordan, clutching his award, ‘I stand here because of the people that came before me. Sidney Poitier. Denzel Washington. Halle Berry. Jamie Foxx. Forrest Whittaker. Will Smith.’
Though it didn’t come home with the biggest award of the night, you could definitely sense that the audience would have brought the house down if it did. It would have been a storybook end to a fantastic night for Ryan Coogler and the team – I must admit I was disappointed when I heard the first syllable of the winner read out – but as a trailblazing director still at a relatively early stage in his career, with two nominations under his belt already (2018’s Black Panther and now for Sinners), that big Best Picture win seems like just a matter of time.
