96th Annual Academy Awards (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, ABC-TV, aired March 10, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 10) at 4 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the 96th annual Academy Awards on ABC-TV, which was the usual lumbering spectacle. The Academy Awards set the standard for all future awards shows and created the clichés of them, including the fabled interminability (the show lasted 3 ½ hours, half an hour longer than scheduled). One thing a lot of modern-day movie fans don’t realize is that when the Academy Awards telecasts first started in the early 1950’s (March 19, 1953, to be exact: nearly six months before I was born!), they were the only occasion on which you actually saw genuine bona fide movie stars on TV. The movie industry generally regarded TV as an existential threat (though one producer who didn’t was Sam Goldwyn; asked whether TV would put movie theatres out of business, Goldwyn said, “Why would it? People have kitchens, but they still go to restaurants”) and forbade their current contract players to appear on the small screen. If you were a movie star and you did a TV show, it was a sign that you considered your film career to be over and you were sucking off what was left of your former fame. TV talk shows didn’t exist as a medium for promoting films until Steve Allen launched The Tonight Show on NBC in 1955, two years after the first Oscars telecast. Last night’s big winner was the film Oppenheimer, which was nominated for 15 awards and won seven, including Best Picture, Best Director for Christopher Nolan, Best Actor for Cillian Murphy (whom I didn’t realize until the Golden Globes, where he also won, uses the hard “C” in his first name, “Killian”), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey, Jr. as the villain, Lewis Strauss), Best Cinematography (Hayten von Haytema), Best Editing (Jennifer Lame) and Best Original Score (Ludwig Goransson, who’d previously won for Black Panther, which I regard as the Citizen Kane of comic-book superhero movies and, like Citizen Kane, was snubbed for the Best Picture award it richly deserved).

For a while it looked like Poor Things might actually take the top award after it won some of the lesser categories, including Best Makeup and Hair Styling, Best Costume Design and Best Production Design; it also won Best Actress for Emma Stone. (Its imdb.com description was, “The incredible tale about the fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter, a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter.”) I was also a bit surprised that Oppenheimer did not win for Best Adapted Screenplay; Nolan lost that award to Justine Triet and her husband, Arthur Harari, for Anatomy of a Fall. Cord Jefferson (who introduced himself as Black but doesn’t particularly look it) won Best Original Screenplay for American Fiction, while for some reason the script for Barbie was nominated for Adapted instead of Original even though what it was supposedly “adapted” from wasn’t a novel, short story or play, but a doll (literally). Barbie already sparked a controversy even before the show, when the directors’ branch of the Academy snubbed Greta Gerwig for a nomination while the actors’ branch similarly snubbed Margot Robbie for her incandescent performance in the title role, while they nominated Ryan Gosling for his appropriately bland acting as (the lead) Ken. One commentator on X nèe Twitter said that perfectly summarized the plot of Barbie itself, in which the various incarnations of Ken try to impose a patriarchy on Barbieland and the various Barbies pull together in a display of feminist solidarity and successfully resist them. One woman in the Barbie cast, America Ferrera, did get a nomination for being the film’s human voice of reason and women’s equality, but she lost Best Supporting Actress to Da’vine Joy Randolph from The Holdovers. Randolph is a Black woman of size whose acceptance speech contained so many references and acknowledgments to God I joked to Charles, “Now I know why they have the Academy Awards on a Sunday.” (I’m a lot less irritated by awards recipients who thank God than I used to be, but Randolph way overdid it.)

The only award Barbie won all night was Best Song for “What Was I Made For?” by Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas O’Connell, whom I think of as the Richard Carpenter of the 21st century. At least Eilish wore her hair black and didn’t have the patch of green that made it look like a bird had pooped on her head big-time. Another Barbie song, “I’m Just Ken” (sorta-kinda sung by Ryan Gosling himself), was nominated, as was Jon Batiste for “It Never Went Away” from a movie I’ve otherwise never heard of, American Symphony. (It’s described on imdb.com as a “deeply intimate documentary” in which “musician Jon Batiste attempts to compose a symphony as his wife, writer Suleika Jaouad, undergoes cancer treatment.”) The other two best song nominees were “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)” from Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon – which got shut out completely (I didn’t realize that was a Best Song performance because it came right after the film clips introducing the film as one of the Best Picture nominees) – and “The Fire Inside” from a film called Flamin’ Hot, described by imdb.com as an “inspiring true story of Richard Montañez who, as a Frito Lay janitor, disrupted the food industry by channeling his Mexican heritage to turn Flamin' Hot Cheetos from a snack into an iconic global pop culture phenomenon.” (I remember seeing the TV ads for that film and joking that, now that they’d already made a biopic about a shoe, Air about Air Jordans, they were making one about a junk food.) Another movie that got shut out completely was Bradley Cooper’s Maestro (a film I’d very much like to see; I grew up on Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts telecasts and from the clip they showed last night, it seems Cooper captured the spirit of Bernstein’s famously athletic conducting style; I’ve read conflicting reports about how true the film is to Bernstein’s well-known Bisexuality, from people who insist he was totally Gay even though he was married to a woman for two decades and had three kids by her, two of whom were executive producers on the film, as well as from the usual homophobic idiots who complained, “Why’d they have to dredge that up about him?”).

I was amused that three of the Best Actor nominees were up for playing actual people: Cillian Murphy for J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bradley Cooper for Leonard Bernstein and Colman Domingo for Bayard Rustin. Incidentally, like Rustin himself, Domingo is both Black and Gay, and imdb.com lists his “spouse” as Raúl Domingo. Also, the Best Visual Effects award went to four Japanese guys – Takashi Yamazaki, Kiyoko Shibuya, Masaki Takahashi and Tatsuji Nojima – for a movie called Godzilla Minus One, which according to Charles (who looked it up online) is the first time a Godzilla movie has won an Academy Award. The acceptance speech was given by one of the Japanese winners, reading from a prepared text and speaking in very thickly and heavily accented English. Frankly, I’d have much rather heard him speaking Japanese with either subtitles or a voiceover giving us the English. (Quite a few Japanese have learned English as a second language and speak it with almost no accent at all. Many of them are businesspeople seeking to be better negotiators with American or British executives, but this guy wasn’t one of them.) At least the speaker gave the title of the film with the name of the monster in the original Japanese, Gojira Minus One, instead of the rather twisted “Godzilla” name. For me, the biggest single disappointment of the evening was seeing Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon lose Best Actress to Emma Stone for Poor Things, especially since it’s not like Gladstone is likely to get another chance; like Austin Butler in Elvis, she was so unalterably right for this role it’s hard to believe she’s going to make it in anything else. (Then again, it’s quite possible that Butler will win a consolation Oscar next year for Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Dune: Part Two.)

Other than that, it was a pretty typical Academy Awards presentation, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel – who towards the end read something I assumed was a parody of a Donald Trump “Truth Social” media post blasting him as terrible, though this morning Charles ran across an item saying it was an actual Trump post. (The only other forays into political content were from the winners of the films you’d expect it from: the Best Animated Short, War Is Over: Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko, and Best Documentary Feature, 20 Days in Mariupol, about the Ukrainian city the Russians totally destroyed as part of their “special military operation.”) Kimmel actually did this nearly impossible job better than most – though Bob Hope and Billy Crystal remain the best ever, and David Letterman the worst (remember, “Oprah … Uma, Uma … Oprah”?).