The Oscars: Our Review

We are taking a little break from video games to discuss the incredibly nuts Oscar ceremony last night.  It didn’t seem to be a terribly significant ceremony.  There weren’t a lot of surprises in who won the awards this year.  Add to that the fact that we didn’t have a movie we were passionately cheering for; there were a lot of great movies this year but there wasn’t a dark horse in the race (we love you Deadpool!).  Jimmy Kimmel was serviceable but his jokes and the acceptance speeches were all fairly toothless and devoid of controversy.  We had actually flipped over to John Oliver and had to flip back when social media lit up in discussing that bizarre Shymalan-like ending.  Suddenly, what had been a good but forgettable Oscar ceremony became the ceremony’s most thrilling night in years.  The Oscars suddenly delivered a more exciting episode than The Walking Dead did last night (we love you Eugene!).  Here’s our review.

Here Jimmy Kimmel estimates the chances of this ceremony become a career-defining clusterbomb.

So Jimmy Kimmel was fine.  He wasn’t terribly funny or terribly off-key, landing somewhere softly and innocuously between Jon Stewart and David Letterman.  The awards went as expected, both Emma Stone’s win for La La Land and Victoria Davis’ win for Fences were deserved and unsurprising.  Casey Affleck’s win for Manchester by the Sea was somewhat surprising for two reasons: first, he seems to have escaped the harassment controversy that’s been haunting him and second, his sleepy, offbeat acceptance speech made me wonder how much acting actually went into his performance as a sleepy, offbeat janitor.  Walmart sponsored some movies about a receipt that I completely forgot about until this moment.  Kimmel dropped snacks from the ceiling and kidnapped some tourists.  Overall, it was a pretty ordinary, uncontroversial award ceremony, until the last few minutes.

Casey Affleck skips any political commentary and hurries through his speech to get back to the floor of the bar he woke up on just a few hours earlier.

Before we get to that, we want to take a quick moment to thank the Academy of awarding the incredible work of Mahershala Ali; there’re a lot of reasons that his win was the highlight of the night.  First, he’s great in everything.  He was the most exciting character in Luke Cage; he’s thrilling in every scene he’s in and his absence is felt heavily when he’s not part of the action.  He’s amazing in Moonlight, where he plays an adoptive father to the movie’s troubled protagonist.  He’s great even in his smaller roles, like Kevin Spacey’s rival in House of Cards or as Taraji P. Henson’s love interest in Hidden Figures.  Add to this the fact that he just became a dad and the story of that birth is pretty wild.  Finally, when watching the Oscars, it’s clear he’s the coolest guy in the room, and that’s a tough trick to pull off when you’re sharing a room with Denzel Washington, Jeff Bridges and Justin Timberlake.  And now, boom, he’s the first Muslim actor to ever win an Academy Award, and nobody deserved the award they received this year more than he did (well, maybe Jessie Eisenberg’s Razzie for his excretable Lex Luthor).

I got to watch Luke Cage again just to see his performance.

And then the finale.  In a year with the craziest Superbowl ever and one the most controversial inaugural month for a Presidential administration we’ve seen in a while, it makes sense that the Oscars would turn into a bizarre heartbreaking nightmare at the end.  We didn’t have any strong feelings about who should win Best Movie this year (there was no Dark Knight or Mad Max this year, though Hell or High Water and Hacksaw Ridge were pretty exciting).  We felt that La La Land was good but we also understood the backlash against a kinda crowd-pleasing, kinda white-splaining movie (not to mention the fact that the director is just 32 years old).   But no matter how you felt about the movie, to see the production team receive the Oscar, discover the error in the middle of their acceptance speeches, and then have to immediately hand the Oscar over to another movie is heartbreaking.  We haven’t seen such a marvelous dream snatched away so heartbreakingly since – well – the end of La La Land.  We appreciated the victory, but the heartbreak of the losing team overwhelmed any sense of joy we could have felt.  Basically, it was the Super Bowl all over again.

I think it will be a long time until we see Warren Beatty back at the Oscar ceremony. But, then again, the Miss Universe pageant had Steve Harvey come back.