The 94th Academy Awards is here. Keep calm.
Here are some of the things we know about the show, which begins at 4 p.m. PT in the Dolby Theatre, an hour before ABC’s live broadcast itself kicks off:
- The Oscar Best Picture Award winner will most likely be the lowest-grossing Oscar nominee in Oscar history.
- It will be attacked on Twitter.
- Most of the nominated films will have been seen on television sets and computers more than in theaters. This takes away some of that Oscars feeling of an event dedicated to movies that get us out of our houses.
- If ABC and the Academy are lucky, ratings will be among the worst ever.
- Because of the COVID-19 epidemic, at least one nominee and possibly more will not attend the ceremony. This has created a host of new protocols and systems, making attendance more complicated than ever.
- If the show doesn’t invite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to make an appearance, Sean Penn will melt down his Academy Award in public. (He didn’t say whether he’d do that to one or both of his Oscars.) If it does spend any amount of time talking about the war in Ukraine, it’ll be accused of being too political. Regardless, viewers will be distracted by the global conflict.
- The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences membership is still at risk of mutiny due to a plan that presents eight awards prior to the live broadcast and then cuts them into the telecast. There has been talk of Oscar winners flipping their Oscars and Academy members also flipping their AMPAS membership badges.
Yes, the Oscars Show hosted by the wacky team of Amy Schumer, Regina Hall, and Wanda Sykes could be a huge mess (although viewers may not see all the messiness given the edits to the first hour).
But we’ve already written about how this is potentially the riskiest Oscars ever. Let’s look at a different side to the event.
We must acknowledge the diversity of films competing for Best Picture. There’s “Belfast,”Kenneth Branagh’s gentle piece of memory moved me more that anything else in 2021. “CODA,”This story, which could have been a straightforward feel-good story, has resonance because it places a deaf family in the middle of the story. “Don’t Look Up,”Adam McKay’s freewheeling comedy that manages to be both funny and serious in its best moments. “Drive My Car,” a slow-burn three-hour Japanese drama that dominated major critics’ awards and could never have been nominated until recently. “Dune,”A massive sci-fi epic created from a book that was not filmable. “King Richard,”A masterpiece of mainstream filmmaking on the remarkable rise of tennis icons Venus & Serena Williams. “Licorice Pizza,”Paul Thomas Anderson transforms a slow-paced story into a relaxing delight. “Nightmare Alley,”Guillermo del Toro has created a noir film that is richly disturbing. “The Power of the Dog,”Jane Campion, the indispensable director, creates a calm but powerful Western. “West Side Story,” Steven Spielberg’s respectful but smartly reimagined version of the 1958 Broadway musical that is as virtuoso a piece of filmmaking craft as anything released last year.
I loved several of them and liked most of them, and together they mock the idea that the Academy’s 9,000-plus voters only go for one kind of film. Yes, I wanted to see. “C’mon C’mon,” “The Tragedy of Macbeth”And “Cyrano” on that list, and I’d throw in the documentary “The Velvet Underground”The Spanish drama “Parallel Mothers”These are just a few of the many other options.
But in between the controversies and despite the pandemic that refuses to go away, there will be worthy winners, and hopefully some moments when the Oscars does its job of recognizing and saluting the best of the past year’s worth of cinema.
And if nothing else, it’ll bring another endless awards season to a merciful end, after months of excruciating stops and starts caused by COVID variants and surges.
The Academy is grappling with the fact that movies are less central to pop culture. It’s struggling to understand its role in promoting theatre and panicking about how it can turn around a declining ratings slide. But if it does its job right on Sunday evening, it might provide a couple of hours in which the show’s theme, “Movie Lovers Unite,”It makes sense.
The real work of finding out where to go will start Monday morning.
