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Small budgets win big
While the dominance of last year’s Oppenheimer showed that big films will forever have their place at the Oscars, the Academy has increasingly gravitated to the smaller movie. Back in 2017, Moonlight became the best picture winner with the smallest ever budget (about $1.5m) and since then, films like Coda ($10m), Parasite ($11m) and Nomadland ($5m) have continued to bring indie films back to the main stage. This year, blockbusters like Wicked and Dune: Part Two might have scored major nominations but they had to settle for below-the-line wins, typically where bigger budget films have now tended to remain. The films that won above the line such as Anora ($6m), The Brutalist ($10m) and A Real Pain ($3m) relied on campaigns that stressed the importance of making a lot from a little and it meant that the night was ultimately another success story for independent film-making.
Bob Dylan might have been right to no-show
As Oscar night stretched into its third hour – and boy did we all feel it – there was a strange absence of a consensus pick. Of course Anora would eventually triumph in that regard, but until the ceremony’s final straight, the Academy seemed to be taking a leaf from one of its presenters, Oprah: you get a prize, you get a prize, you get a prize. The Brutalist, Wicked, Dune Part 2, Conclave, A Real Pain, The Substance, even poor old Emilia Perez – the love was being shared among awards season’s many darlings. Except for the film that plenty of us had down as this year’s purest crowdpleaser: A Complete Unknown. Was it the Academy’s general apathy towards music biopics? Or maybe it was just that a likable, if workmanlike, film couldn’t really stand out in such a varied field, where body horror rubbed up against scrappy indie comedies and sugar-rush musicals? Either way, A Complete Unknown ended up bringing nothing back home, and Dylan’s no-show was perfectly judged.
The Oscars still can’t escape Weinstein
Donald Trump might not have been named, but the spectre of another Hollywood villain – Harvey Weinstein – did put in an appearance. Accepting his best actor award, Adrien Brody shouted out his partner, Georgina Chapman – who is Weinstein’s ex-wife – and her two children. Their lives had been, he said, a “rollercoaster”, but he was thankful they had accepted him. “Popsie’s coming home a winner!” he said, addressing them. Letting the world know that Weinstein’s children call Brody “Popsie” feels quite a statement.
... but managed to forget Tony Todd
The Oscars’ in memoriam segment always makes for a strangely traumatic and tense few minutes as you’re reminded again about the deaths of people who have been gone some time (Donald Sutherland died in June), the deaths of people you thought were still alive, and you keep watching to check they’ve remembered this or that big star. This year, some big names didn’t make the cut: Bernard Cribbins, which can perhaps be rationalised because he was so much better known in Britain; Michelle Trachtenberg, maybe because she was primarily a TV star. But Tony Todd, who took the lead in Candyman, and was also a major part of Final Destination, The Crow and more? That’s a bad miss with some nasty optics.
The streaming revolution isn’t quite here yet
This was supposed to be the year of the democratised Oscars – as in, Oscars not just for linear television but also streaming for the first time on Hulu, and thus available to the lowly people who pay for a bunch of streaming services instead of traditional cable. The Oscars for all, they said. Well. Tech glitches dogged the Hulu broadcast, most egregiously when the livestream “expired” just before Mikey Madison’s best actress win, preventing anyone reliant on Hulu to either scramble for a provider login to the ABC app or miss the final two awards. (Maybe Adrien Brody’s speech made Hulu give up?) It was an embarrassing night for the streamers overall – Netflix’s Emilia Pérez only took home two awards (out of 13 nominations), Sean Baker pointedly shouted out both independent films and movie theatres, and Conan O’Brien had a hard-hitting bit on “cinemastream.” The radical pitch? A screen the size of a thousand phones, which you don’t have to hold. His next pitch should be a bunch of TV channels available with one bill and one button.
A 50-piece orchestra is no match for Adrien Brody
In 1942, best actress winner Greer Garson set a new record with a six-minute acceptance speech, which led to the Academy introducing a new 45-second limit. But it turns out if you win best actor, you get to negotiate with the orchestra when they try to play you off: two minutes into his heartfelt, but rambling acceptance speech, Adrien Brody begged the conductor for more time. “I’m wrapping up, please turn the music off,” he said. “I’ve done this before. Thank you. It’s not my first rodeo, but I will be brief.” He really wasn’t. Cue 1,000 jokes about needing an intermission. Other nominees got played off while trying to thank their wives. It is almost like this awards ceremony isn’t egalitarian or something.
Madcap doesn’t always equal fun
After four years of being in safe, if a bit boring hands (sorry Kimmel), the Oscars felt refreshingly madcap with “four-time Oscar viewer” Conan O’Brien at the helm. Yes, his brief musical number dedicated to wasting time didn’t really work, but can you feel unhappy while watching that mad ringmaster dance with a cane in his hand, while a Dune sandworm plays the piano behind him? No you cannot. Did shouting at Adam Sandler for wearing a hoodie work? Not really. But a lot of his jokes did land (“If you haven’t seen Conclave, it’s a movie about the Catholic church, but don’t worry.”), in a ceremony that felt notably muted when compared to 2024’s ceremony. Last year, we got a clapping dog and Ryan Gosling singing I’m Just Ken. Thank god for the sandworm.
Horror can’t catch a break
It had felt like a major breakthrough for horror, a historically maligned genre suddenly getting unprecedented recognition from awards bodies that had previously turned their noses up. But gory, gloopy body horror The Substance went in with five Oscar nominations and came away with just one win, slithering away with makeup and hairstyling. With previous winners in that category including The Wolfman and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it wasn’t quite the major moment some in the industry had hoped for. Star Demi Moore was seen as the lead actress frontrunner and writer-director Coralie Fargeat had been viewed as a major contender for original screenplay but they both lost out to Anora, a far from traditional choice yet one that was in safer genre territory. Even the far more serious period horror Nosferatu couldn’t win in any of its four craft categories, rounding out a rather scary night for scary movies.
The ingenue is back in fashion
Going into the night, it had felt like the best actress race would be one highlighted by the power of telling stories of neglected older women: The Substance’s Demi Moore at 62 playing an actor cast aside by a youth-obsessed industry and I’m Still Here’s Fernanda Torries at 59 as a wife and mother protecting her family against barbaric forces. While younger men are famously rejected in the lead actor category (Adrien Brody is the youngest and only under 30 pick at 29), the lead actress category was once known for crowning a parade of young female actors. There was Marlee Matlin at 21, Jennifer Lawrence at 22, Grace Kelly at 25, Audrey Hepburn at 24 and so on until recently where the ingenue rule had been thrown out of the window, allowing women like Michelle Yeoh, Frances McDormand and Jessica Chastain to win. But Mikey Madison has shown a return to an older way of voting, at 25 she’s the ninth youngest and the first under-30 winner since Brie Larson in 2016.
Two best actress fairytales become Oscar nightmares
Mikey Madison’s performance in Anora is remarkable, but it was hard not to feel sad for Demi Moore, who has had a magical run this awards season. We can only hope that The Substance marks a career return for her, and that we’ll continue to see her in really exciting and meaty roles (and perhaps another go at the best actress Oscar?). And what was once a fairytale story – that of Karla Sofia Gascon, the first transgender actor to ever be nominated for an Oscar – was undone through her own actions years before the ceremony, when she posted a series of racist and xenophobic tweets. In a way she got off lightly – O’Brien only made one joke (“Karla if you are going to tweet about the Oscars tonight, my name is Jimmy Kimmel.”) but to see her cringing in the audience, having skipped the red carpet and being left unnamed in Zoe Saldaña’s acceptance speech, felt like an ignominious end.
Kieran Culkin belabours his big moment
Oscar campaigners will surely study the masterful manner with which A Real Pain’s supporting player (who let’s be honest, was the film’s real lead) approached awards season. Every speech had a feeling of dashed-off brilliance that one suspected was really carefully honed: a couple of lines of irreverent, “these awards ceremonies are a bit daft, aren’t they” joshing, and then, bam, hit them with the feels. But right at the death, Culkin made his first misstep as he accepted his best supporting actor prize with a long anecdote about his wife, Jazz Charlton, promising him a fourth child if he won an Oscar (this a year after he had delivered a similar line about a third child at another awards ceremony). It felt, at best like a (probably harmless) private joke that was being shared on far too big a platform, and at worst, a little creepy, with the repeated suggestion of Charlton “owing” Culkin a kid.
The British winners are classily low key
Trust the Brits to reliably be a no-nonsense palate cleanser within the Oscars award speech buffet. This year, they offered us a string of first-time winners with some lessons for the pros: Wicked production design team Noah Crawley and Lee Sandales keeping it simple (Do a goofy dance to the stage! Thank your kids and spouse! Thank your team!) and not at all slick; Brutalist composer Daniel Blumberg, humble and gentle and refreshingly unafraid to just read from a cue card; Conclave screenwriter Peter Straughan, calling out his jumper-stealing daughter; and Brutalist cinematographer Lol Crawley winning the award for just getting the speech done efficiently and with minimal fuss, with a pre-written and perfectly timed note. Manners! We love to see them.
Conclave makes a cardinal sin
It’s been a strange old season with frontrunners never seeming quite firm enough and with films that felt like unusual, often radical choices. There was a musical about witches, a comedy about a sex worker, an opera about a trans cartel boss, a body horror about a magic drug – not exactly conventional Oscar fare. So Conclave, a sturdy, exquisitely made adaptation of a Robert Harris novel filled with familiar older faces, started to seem like it could maybe be the obvious winner we had all brushed past. It was one of the most universally liked films of the season devoid of any controversy and when it won both the Bafta for best film and then the Screen Actors Guild ensemble award, it felt like maybe it could go on to win best picture. But it left the night with just a solitary award for best adapted screenplay, a traditional pick that maybe felt a little too traditional for a voter base that’s younger and more diverse than ever before.
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