Last night’s 96th Academy Awards was one of the most well produced, entertaining, and incident-free (no violence!) Oscar ceremonies in recent memory. Jimmy Kimmel did a solid job as host, the past winners saluting the new nominees device was touching, and Ryan Gosling’s “I’m Just Ken” big number from BARBIE brought the house down with the feeling of everyone in the room being blown away being gloriously palpable.
I was happy to see the well predicted OPPENHEIMER sweep went down. Christopher Nolan’s epic is a movie’s movie that’s got old fashioned majesty with modern polish, and it well deserved to win the seven Oscars it did (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor (Yay to Robery Downey Jr., the first former SNL cast member to ever win an Oscar – the quote in this post’s headline comes from his speech), Best Film Editing, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Score).
My score of 18 out of the 23 categories was far from my best (22 out of 24, back when Sound was split into Sound Editing and Sound Mixing), but better than my worst, 13 out of 24.
Here’s what I got wrong:
BEST ACTRESS: Lily Gladstone, KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
I, like many, thought it was Gladstone’s Oscar year as she had won the Golden Gl0bes, the Screen Actors Guild, and many critic association awards, but noooooo as Belushi would say (dated reference lost on younger readers), Emma Stone is now a two-time Academy Award winner for POOR THINGS.
But Stone’s emotional acceptance speech was wonderful, featuring this funny moment:
“My dress is broken! I’m pretty sure it happened during ‘I’m Just Ken.’”
MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING: Kazu Hiro, Kay Georgiou and Lori McCoy-Bell, MAESTRO
Another POOR THINGS miss. I should’ve known MAESTRO would go home empty handed.
DOCUMENTARY SHORT: THE ABCS OF BOOK BANNING (Dirs. Sheila Nevins and Trish Adlesic)
This was a stab in the dark, as I hadn’t seen any of the Documentary Shorts. Now I’ll definitely seek out THE LAST REPAIR SHOP, which was the winner of this oft overlooked category.
SOUND: Jonathan Glazer, OPPENHEIMER
This was one I was glad to get wrong, because the sound in Jonathan Glazer’s THE ZONE OF INTEREST is such a major element of that movie, which deservedly won Best International Picture (I got that one right). OPPENHEIMER won everything else anyway.
ANIMATED FEATURE FILM: SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDERVERSE
Simply, I thought the more commercial, and more massively popular film would nab this award like usual, but I’m satisfied that Hayao Miyazaki and Toshio Suzuki’s THE BOY AND THE HERON went home with the gold.
Okay, so that’s my bout with Oscars 2024. You can now go about your day.