The 97th Annual Academy Awards (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, ABC-TV, aired March 2, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The ABC-TV telecast of the 97th annual Academy Awards was officially announced as starting at 4 p.m. (7 p.m. Eastern time) but I figured I could start watching it at 5 because I assumed the first hour would be a red-carpet special showcasing the celebrities in the audience and – in that rather unlovely phraseology – who they were wearing. (There’s a story about one person taking umbrage at being asked, “Who are you wearing?,” as if they were being accused of skinning a human corpse to get the material for their outfit.) I didn’t turn on the TV until 4:40 p.m. and discovered, much to my surprise, that the Academy Awards were already in progress – though fortunately they were early enough into the show I only missed one awards presentation, Kieran Culkin winning for Best Supporting Actor for a film called A Real Pain. I’d never heard of it and it won no other awards, but the Rotten Tomatoes Web site describes it as, “Mismatched cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the odd-couple's old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history.” I’m still miffed that Kieran’s older brother Macaulay Culkin (by two years: Macaulay was born in 1980 and Kieran in 1982) didn’t get the Academy Award I thought he deserved for his marvelous performance as real-life “club kid” turned murderer Michael Alig in Party Monster (2003) – Macaulay wasn’t even nominated for that terrific performance in a marvelous movie. When I turned on the show at last I saw the Academy give out the awards for Best Animated Feature to Flo by Gints Zilbalodis, Matīss Kaža, Ron Dyens, and Gregory Zalcman and Best Animated Short to In the Shadow of the Cypress by Shirin Sohani and Hossein Molayemi. In the Shadow of the Cypress was made in Iran, and though it doesn’t seem to have any political bent (the imdb.com synopsis says, “Living in a house by the sea with his daughter, a former captain who has post-traumatic stress disorder leads a tough and secluded life”), Sohani and Molayemi nonetheless complained about the country’s repressive political climate and the problems it poses for would-be artists. The makers of Flo were from Latvia, and the host, Conan O’Brien (who has no personality for this sort of thing, plus the camera was close enough to him to show the lines on his face), made a lame joke about how it was now Estonia’s turn to make an Academy Award-winning film. He repeated that joke a few awards later in an even less appropriate context, and my wish was that he’d have made a joke to the effect that it’s a good thing Latvian filmmakers got to win an Academy Award before Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump get together to hand their country back to Russia the way they’re doing with Ukraine.

The political content on this year’s Academy Awards was pretty muted; there was one winner who was wearing a yellow and blue ribbon (those are the colors of the Ukrainian flag) and Zoë Saldána, winner of Best Supporting Actress for her role in Emilia Pérez (the early favorite, with 13 nominations, more than any other film, though it was beset by a scandal involving its star, open Transwoman Karla Sofia Gascón, over some old tweets from 2020 and 2021 that led to the film’s distributors asking her not to have anything to do with the film’s publicity, and Emilia Pérez won only for Saldaña’s performance and “El Mal” for Best Original Song), proudly boasted that she was the first child of Dominican immigrants to win an Oscar. As for the other big favorite, Wicked, it won only for Production Design (Nathan Crowley, with set decorations by Lee Sandales) and Costume Design (Paul Tazewell, who boasted in his acceptance speech that he’s the first African-descended person to win in that category). A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic directed by James Mangold, was shut out completely; I was especially disappointed when the Best Actor award went not to Timothée Chalamet for his incandescent performance as Dylan but to Adrien Brody for once again playing an artist who got screwed over by Nazi Germany, World War II and the Holocaust in a film called The Brutalist about the Bauhaus school of architecture and how the Nazis denounced and banned it as “un-German.” (I was similarly disappointed two years ago when Austin Butler’s similarly amazing performance as Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis was likewise passed over for Brendan Fraser playing a morbidly obese English professor in the film The Whale. Maybe Academy voters recalled what a hunk he’d been once upon a time and decided if he could make himself look so homely, that was great acting.) Another big film in the nominations department, Conclave – a movie about the election of a new Pope that seemed to me from the previews to be a rehash of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons – won only for Best Adapted Screenplay (Peter Straughan, from a novel by Robert Harris).

The big winner of the night was a film called Anora that flew so low under my radar screen that I’d never heard of it before, even though Sean Baker won so many personal Oscars for it – he won for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Editor, as well as sharing in its Best Picture award as a co-producer with Alex Coco and Samantha Quan – I got tired of seeing his pasty little face and hearing his queeny voice after a while. (I was pretty sure he was Gay until he mentioned having a wife on his second acceptance speech.) Anora, described on imdb.com as, “A young escort from Brooklyn meets and impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch. Once the news reaches Russia, her fairy tale is threatened as his parents set out for New York to get the marriage annulled,” was hailed as an honest depiction of sex work by Sean Baker and its fans generally, as well as an example of what it’s still possible to do in an independent movie made without major studio backing at all. Anora also won Best Actress for Mikey Madison, who played the title character; the only nomination it didn’t win was Yura Borisov for Best Supporting Actor as Igor, presumably the oligarch’s son who’s being deprived of his partner by his family, who lost to Kieran Culkin. The Best Documentary Feature was No Other Land, a film about the conflict in Gaza made by a team of two Israelis and two Palestinians: Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, and Yuval Abraham. Two of the four alternated giving bits of the acceptance speech and stressed the desirability of a peaceful outcome that respects the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis – nice try, guys (and one gal), but the real situation is going entirely in the other direction, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Right-wing allies advocating a genocidal policy towards the Gaza Palestinians and Donald Trump seemingly willing to come in after the Gaza Palestinians are “ethnically cleansed” and redevelop their land as a super-resort.

The Best Documentary Short seems interesting; it’s called The Only Girl in the Orchestra. It’s described on imdb.com as, “This unsung hero story celebrates trailblazing musician Orin O'Brien and the double bass she plays.” I’m not sure just how much sexism woman classical musicians still have to deal with; they’re a long way from gender parity but every American or European orchestra I see on TV these days (even the Vienna Philharmonic, the last holdout among the major European orchestras), has a smattering of women musicians these days. Dune: Part Two won for Best Visual Effects and Best Sound; my late home-care client, roommate and friend John Primavera used to call Best Sound the catch-all consolation category for which movies that were otherwise shut out of the awards could still win – and I can remember not that long ago where they were two Sound awards, for Editing and Mixing, before they were recombined into just one. The Best Live-Action Short award went to something called I’m Not a Robot, produced and directed by a straight Dutch couple named Victoria Warmerdam and Trent, and according to its imdb.com synopsis it has a quite provocative premise: “After repeatedly failing Captcha tests, music producer Lara becomes obsessed with a disturbing question: could she be a robot?” And the parts of the show I liked best were the musical numbers; while I miss the performances of the Best Original Song nominees that used to be expected on the show, there was a nice tribute to the James Bond movies featuring Lisa singing “Live and Let Die” (I joked, “I’ve heard worse Paul McCartney covers”), Doja Cat singing “Diamonds Are Forever,” and Raye (whose song “Oscar-Winning Tears” really impressed me at the Grammy Awards) doing “Skyfall.” There was also a nice tribute to the late Quincy Jones with Queen Latifah doing “Ease On Down the Road” from The Wiz. Though I would have rather they’d paid tribute to Jones with “Miss Celie’s Blues” from The Color Purple, which he actually composed (“Ease On Down the Road” was by Charlie Smalls, along with the rest of the score from The Wiz), Jones was credited on the 1978 film adaptation of The Wiz as “associate conductor / music arranger / music supervisor / orchestrator.” All in all, the 97th Annual Academy Awards were the usual lumbering spectacle, though since they started earlier than usual they were over by about 7:40 p.m. and my husband Charles and I had plenty of time with which to watch something else.