Oscar Blitz 2025 – Postmortem

Well, it’s finally over. We’ve made it through the 97th Academy Awards in one piece, and when it’s all said and done, I… well… I think it was fine? I don’t remember anything being too egregiously bad, but very little stuck out as exemplary, either. Like the pandemic ceremonies, it honestly felt perfunctory, and as a reflection of 2024 cinema, it settled for being adequate, but far from special.

That doesn’t mean there weren’t high moments. Conan O’Brien made for an excellent host, and I was genuinely surprised that he was willing to “go there” (or more likely, that Disney let him) with a little bit of edgy humor calling out the controversies surrounding Karla Sofía Gascón and referencing Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime Show, complete with saying Drake is a pedophile. There were a couple of genuine surprises, like I’m Still Here winning International Feature to cement Emilia Pérez‘s consignment to the dustbin of film history, and Flow winning Animated Feature. Hell, it was just nice to hear Andrew Garfield’s real voice for once. We didn’t even really have significant omissions from the In Memoriam reel like we do most years. I’d have advocated for Tony Todd, Martin Mull, and Morgan Spurlock, but that’s about it. Other noteworthy absences like Shannen Doherty, James Darren, Linda Lavin, and Michelle Trachtenberg aren’t all that bad, as I’m guessing none of them were members of the Academy, and their careers weren’t all that film-focused by comparison.

More importantly, while I disagreed with some of the results, most of them were still appropriate, and a good deal of the winners used their platforms to advocate for positive change. Sean Baker took home four Oscars on the night, and each of his speeches had something meaningful to say, including advocacy for sex workers and a plea for a full return of the theatrical model. This was echoed rather hilariously by Conan with a parody of the Nicole Kidman AMC ads, where movie theatres are sold as if they’re the latest streaming service. We got a lighthearted moment from the creators of In the Shadow of the Cypress, who had just landed in Los Angeles three hours prior (given our relations with Iran, they probably applied for their visas the day they were nominated and it only just got processed in time). Daryl Hannah began her time on stage with a salute to Ukraine. Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, upon winning Documentary Feature for No Other Land (itself a shock because it meant that a plurality of Academy voters chose to endorse a pro-Palestinian message), used their time to sue for peace and humanity in the midst of Israel’s apartheid state and continued attempts at cultural genocide. Everyone in my house was cheering for that one.

If there’s one thing to look back on as being truly noteworthy about this ceremony, it’s that the two biggest winners – Anora and The Brutalist – really showed out for independent cinema. You can add the wins for Flow and A Real Pain to that list, and even tip your hat to I’m Still Here and No Other Land. In the latter two cases, most American audiences haven’t gotten a chance to see them, as they don’t have major domestic distribution. I only saw them through AFI Fest and the Independent Spirit Awards, respectively. On the one hand, it sucks because we have two major winners that basically no one got to see, but on the other, it’s a call to action for distributors to get off their asses and start putting out great films again. As for the others, Flow was animated and rendered entirely on open-source, free software, a testament to what determined artists can do, and all four of these films represent a total production budget of about $22 million. Meanwhile, Wicked by itself had a marketing budget of $150 million alone, matching its production budget, and it only got token awards for Costume and Production Design. Despite months upon months of hype, the best movies were the ones that focused on creating art rather than promoting it. This should be a clarion call for studios to put their money behind real quality. It won’t be, but it should be.

Still there was plenty of cringe to regress the entire ceremony back to the mean. Adrien Brody went on forever just to say nothing. Amazon purchased an entire block of the broadcast just to do a medley of Bond themes, all performed by mediocre pop stars (Doja Cat’s dress looks like she was drenched in shiny ectoplasm), even though the original artists are all still very much alive (and already did this a few years ago), all to promote the fact that they officially bought the franchise, and at the expense of having the actual nominated songs performed. If this is the first indication of the directions they’ll go, I think we can all assume 007 is fucked for the foreseeable future. In order to avoid praising Gascón, the telecast eliminated the laudatory scripting for the Best Actress nominees (which they did for all the other acting categories plus a couple of artistic and technical ones), going straight to clips. The attempts to Wicked-ize the affair were painful, especially the tribute to Quincy Jones. I love The Wiz and “Ease on Down the Road,” but Jones didn’t even write that one. You could have picked any number of classics that he actually wrote, but it was far more important for Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo to dance in the front row (the latter doing so very awkwardly, and she got totally upstaged by Colman Domingo). There was also an ironically bad moment when the winners for Sound got cut off during their acceptance. They didn’t even warn them by showing John Lithgow looking disappointed. Hulu’s live stream actually ended before the final two awards, because the geniuses at Disney somehow didn’t think that a broadcast that runs long every year might not be the best time to institute a hard time limit for the window.

But if there’s one moment that could live in infamy, it’s Mikey Madison’s win over Demi Moore for Best Actress. To be clear, this is nothing against Madison herself. I freaking loved her performance, and she gave me wowsers in my trousers. But her win solidified the very issues that The Substance brought to light. As women in this industry age, they’re treated with less and less value, due to some warped perception that ties their worth to their sex appeal. The film spotlights this in extreme ways by having Moore take a magic drug that literally spawns a younger clone from her back, one that takes over and destroys her life. So to have that powerful of a message and still say, “Hey, that’s great, but this hot 25-year-old wins” just proves Coralie Fargeat’s central thesis in the most on-the-nose fashion possible.

It’s a symptom of the larger problem with this year’s set, and that’s the fact that the Academy likes to present itself as forward thinking and progressive, but oftentimes it only goes as far as performative gestures and ultimately misses the point entirely. You nominate Nickel Boys for Best Picture because of its immersive look at an American tragedy, but you don’t nominate it for the Cinematography that created that immersion. You nominate a film like The Substance for its biting satire and great performances, and only give it a participation trophy for Makeup. You fall over yourselves to nominate Emilia Pérez for EVERYTHING because it’s a “trans movie,” without actually considering how problematic it is, and in the process you ignore genuinely beloved trans stories like I Saw the TV Glow and Will & Harper. The very fabric of our country is being ripped asunder by a Cheeto-stained shit-gibbon who fancies himself as a modern-day Mussolini, and yet the best callout we get is a single joke (albeit a great one) about Anora being the only person to stand up to a powerful Russian.

If the Academy Awards are to remain an essential part of the cultural conversation, the body has to take itself more seriously. And no, I don’t mean eliminating fun (though the bit with Miley Cyrus and Miles Teller was awful and pointless). What I mean is that the membership has to realize that they have a responsibility as the vanguard institution of American film. You have to nominate and reward films that advance the artform. You have to give people the platforms to say and do what is right. And most importantly, you have to set an example for future generations, for both film workers and casual fans. Getting swept up in hype or just nonchalantly handing out hardware to your friends doesn’t cut it anymore. The Academy has to set the bar and constantly raise it, and it just didn’t do that this year, leaving us with a ceremony that matched the tone of 2024 cinema, being largely bland and forgettable. You could say that this means they did their job, as they accurately reflected the state of the industry. But it’s also true that they need to be active agents of positive change for it as well, and for a lot of this ultra-long Oscars, it just felt like they didn’t care.

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That does it for this year’s Oscar Blitz, everyone! Once again, my deepest and most humble thanks for all of you who went down this rabbit hole with me, and I look forward to doing it all again next year! For now, though, I’ve got a bit more housekeeping to do, with a few more reviews in the backlog and the March edition of TFINYW still to come. Then, a well-earned nap. Thanks again.

Join the conversation in the comments below! What was your favorite part of this year’s Oscars? Should Conan O’Brien be brought back to host again next year? Did anyone show up at midnight to play basketball with Adam Sandler? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!