Oscars 2021: What the actual?

I didn’t think anything on Sunday night would really merit a reaction post, but, well, here we are. You can see my preview post with picks and predictions here.

• I don’t intend for this to be a hot take, but I suppose it is, at least compared to the consensus I’ve seen on Twitter: Anthony Hopkins’ and Frances McDormand’s wins were driven more by age than by race. Both played roles about people aging, and facing some of the scarier aspects of getting older – losing one’s memory, and losing one’s home/income – and for an Academy electorate that has always favored films around those sorts of themes or just older people in general, those two films were probably too tempting to overlook. It may be spun as more #OscarsSoWhite fodder, and I don’t know how to argue against that position without seeming insensitive to the broader point, but I believe those two awards were much more about an aging voter pool than a white one.
• Hopkins would have been my pick for Best Actor anyway, even though of course I wanted Boseman to win and to give Taylor Simone Ledward, his widow, one more opportunity to speak before a national audience. Her acceptance speeches for him in this awards season have been moving, and graceful, and powerful, and I immediately thought of her sitting in the audience or at home (I don’t know if she attended), feeling stunned and hurt by the announcement of Hopkins’ name, especially since the whole telecast seemed set up to end with her speech. But I also believe Hopkins’ performance was just better: a bigger, more difficult role, more central to the film. I thought it was the best performance of the year by any actor, leading or supporting, just edging out Carey Mulligan’s in Promising Young Woman (my pick, obviously, for Best Actress).
• Yeah, so I think Stephen Soderbergh, or whoever chose to flip Best Picture and the two lead acting awards, will not be invited back to do the telecast any time soon, which is a shame because the first two hours or so were quite good. The more intimate setup worked extremely well on camera, and the choice to give viewers some background on nominees made the awards more interesting and personal than when we’re just getting recaps of movies that I’d already seen. Writers, editors, costume designers – they’re just names to people like me who don’t work in the industry. Those biographical bits should stick around forever.
• No one will remember that part thanks to the choice to flip the last two parts of the show, though. I can only assume this was a bet on Boseman winning, and his widow closing out the broadcast, and that the producers told Joaquin Phoenix that if anyone else won he should say the name quickly and bid everyone “good night!” before the place went down in flames.
• I am glad that much of the post-Oscars coverage is focusing on Chloé Zhao’s historic win – she is the second woman, and the first woman of color, to win Best Director. That’s 70 Best Director awards given to men (one to a pair of men, for West Side Story) and two to women.
• I didn’t think the comedy bit worked, especially with Glenn Close so clearly reciting a script (which was cribbed straight from Wikipedia), although I give her credit for dancing to “Da Butt” – all on the same night she tied the record for the most career nominations (eight) without a win.
• I did enjoy Frances McDormand’s big “I already have two of these” energy, though.
• While most of the outrage I saw on Twitter was over Best Actor, I think the worst choice of the night was in the Best Documentary Feature category, where My Octopus Teacher, about a middle-aged white man with all the personality of Wonder Bread befriends an octopus. The underwater cinematography is beautiful, but when the octopus is a more interesting character than the human, that’s a problem. The other four nominees in that category were all about some important issue – Time (Black people caught up in the carceral state), The Mole Agent (the elderly, especially those in nursing homes), Crip Camp (the disabled, and the push for disability rights), and my pick for this award, Collective (government corruption) – and were all more interesting and broader in scope. Instead, we get a film about a white guy with what appears to be no job and plenty of money futsing around like a tourist in the waters off South Africa, talking to squid. Not only do I think My Octopus Teacher was a bad choice to win the award, I don’t even think it should have been nominated. Transhood, on HBO Max, was much, much better.
• Another Round winning Best International Feature over Collective wasn’t a whole lot better, although at least in this case Another Round is a decent movie, just sort of trivial, and, as writer-director Thomas Vinterberg said in his excellent acceptance speech, it’s a movie about a bunch of middle-aged white guys.
• Did anyone look better than Riz Ahmed and his wife, author Fatima Farheen Mirza? I say no, as I shop online for black mock turtle necks.