A bit of distance from an awards show is good, even though it made writing this difficult cause I had already forgotten what happened at the Oscars (life has been interesting chile). Let’s dive in shall we!

The Good
We have not had a big winner in a while and it’s pretty great that Everything Everywhere All at Once is what got us back there. Though the film one won one tech award, it cleaned up in the above the line categories with 3 acting wins, writing, directing, and Picture.

Michelle Yeoh winning and Oscar and Halle Berry being up there to present it to her was pretty magical.

I liked the acting awards being co-presented by last year’s winners + Ms. Berry. Naturally this came out of the fact that Will Smith couldn’t present but it was a really nice way to hand out the awards and also efficient time wise! It also produced some more emotional moments like Arian crying reading out Ke Huy Quan’s name and the amazing moment of the only other woman of color to win the Oscar was there to hand Michelle hers.

Naatu Naatu winning Best Original Song is what we deserved.

The Bad
Jamie Lee Curtis’ win, and not because the performance is bad. Were this a not already famous actress with deep Hollywood roots giving this exact same performance and it won I would still be shook and think that it didn’t deserve to win when there was a much better performance from her own movie in the same category. Now if you had said that you thought Hsu belonged in Lead, I’d maybe hear it. But it is so clear that the majority of the reason why she won is factors other than the performance and now I see people twisting themselves into pretzels about how its fine to take all those factors. In any other year, those same people would be bemoaning this. I am not naive enough to believe that narrative doesn’t factor into it, but the award is supposed to be about performance THAT year, not performance + career accolades + famous parents. It’s honestly reminding me of the MVP conversation surrounding Jokic in the NBA tbh. I like her performance but she is not even the best female supporting performance in the movie, lets be for real please.

A biproduct of this is the “oh so and so will be back” conversation that seems to be routinely set around actors of color. What about the movie industry makes you think they’ll be getting the quality of roles to even be in the awards chase, let alone nominated again, let alone win? It took Angela nearly 30 years to be nominated a second time despite being in many movies that could have netted a nom.

Elvis’ under performance is kind of fascinating. I thought it was going to be on its way to at least three Oscars, but alas.

The only other bad thing was just that All Quiet on the Western Front, which I loved, kept me from winning the Oscar pool at work because it over-performed.

The Ugly
No more March Oscars please. The season is too long and with the advent of streaming, the movie year feels solidly over much earlier than it did in the 90s/00s when movies were playing in theaters for months and years. Hell, we already hit multiple blockbuster movies this year before we celebrated the ones of last year. The Oscars should come the week after the Super Bowl or even better, at the end of January.

The situation regarding Naatu Naatu and the dancers is incredibly disheartening. What should have been a real celebration has now become an unfortunate commentary on the importance of representation.