So now we come to the end of an ugly, chaotic awards season.
It was a season disrupted by wildfires that devastated huge swaths of Los Angeles, the city that is home to the entertainment industry … a season rife with social-media takedown campaigns targeting many top contenders, going beyond the headline-grabbing self-immolation of “Emilia Pérez” star Karla Sofía Gascón … a season in which winners increasingly began to use their acceptance speeches to decry a Hollywood economic system that benefits a few and leaves others, including successful indie directors like Sean Baker and Brady Corbet, struggling to make enough to survive.
This Oscar season, which at one point seemed as if it could be the first normal awards season after the impact of a pandemic and two big Hollywood strikes, has been a mess. But here’s the rub: It may have been an ugly, chaotic awards season — but when you step out of awards season, it’s an uglier, even more chaotic world.
“It’s been a great year for film,” Film Independent Spirit Awards host Aidy Bryant said at the beginning of that show on Feb. 22. “And a bad year for human life.”
So “Conclave,” a movie about the election of a new pope, could win as the real pope lies in a Rome hospital in critical condition. “Emilia Perez” and “I’m Still Here,” two movies in Spanish and Portuguese, the languages of South and Central America, are nominated for Best Picture for the first time ever, as people from those countries are being rounded up and deported.
A movie about life in Ukraine after the Russian invasion, as seen through the eyes of Ukrainian artists, could become the third consecutive anti-Russian film to win in the Best Documentary Feature category, at the same time that the Trump administration appears to be breaking with tradition and supporting longtime enemy Russia.
Or the Ukrainian movie could lose to a movie about the horrors of life in Gaza – you know, the place that might be turned into a glitzy real estate development, if one believes the AI video released on White House social media accounts.
Meanwhile, artistic control of the James Bond franchise, one of the crown jewels of the movie business, has shifted from the family that ran it for six decades to a huge company owned by one of the world’s richest men – a move that seems titanic within Hollywood and almost insignificant outside of it, where a guy who seems to be a real-life Bond villain is firing government workers and gaining access to citizens’ personal information.
And in this atmosphere, after enduring fires and racist tweets from the star of “Emilia Pérez” and a world that seems to be falling apart, the Academy gets to put on a show.
And that show needs to draw enough viewers to show that the Oscars are still viable.
Good luck, everybody.
The task is pretty much herculean, given that last year had Barbenheimer and it still didn’t reach 20 million viewers. In recent years, since the all-time low of the pandemic-era 2021 show that drew only 10.4 million viewers, the goal has been to improve on the previous year’s numbers – but given the dramatic difference at the box office between last year’s top movies and this year’s nominees, that seems all but impossible. (Watch for Monday’s numbers to heavily play up not just the numbers on ABC, but the fact that the show was streaming on Hulu for the first time ever.)
There are reasons to be cautious, starting with the fact that host Conan O’Brien can be very funny but isn’t necessarily the guy to give the ratings a boost, not that Oscar hosts typically have much impact on the numbers. In addition, the decision to bring in musical acts but not to have them perform this year’s nominated songs might lead to some good performances, but it also runs the risk of disrespecting this year’s nominees in favor of moments that’ll seem beside the point in a celebration of 2024’s films and filmmakers. (Anybody remember the tribute to the previous decade’s musicals in 2013 or Lady Gaga’s “The Sound of Music” medley two years later?)
But if you strip away the ratings pressure and try to ignore the chaos of awards season and the chaos of the world, you may find something surprising: At the end of this rough, messy road, we have an Oscars that might actually be fun.
For one thing, it’s genuinely suspenseful in many categories, starting with Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Actress and continuing all the way through a trio of baffling shorts races. (I believe that I could get 20 out of 23 categories right in my predictions, but I could just as easily get only 10 or 11 right.)
For another thing, a cringeworthy year is unlikely to produce any cringeworthy winners. The two frontrunners for Best Picture, “Anora” and “Conclave,” are dramatically different but both eminently worthy of awards. The former is raucous and unhinged at times, sexually explicit (it’d be the first Best Picture winner about a sex worker since “Midnight Cowboy”) and both wildly entertaining and surprisingly affecting as it careens from strip clubs to Brooklyn boardwalks; the latter is a gorgeously mounted, hushed thriller that rarely raises its voice but manages to rachet up the tension without ever leaving a handful of stately rooms inside the Vatican.
They could scarcely be more different, but I’d find it hard to complain about either of them winning, even as their competitors include films as bold as “Nickel Boys” and as wrenching as “I’m Still Here.”
The 2024-2025 awards season, it seems, has been chaotic and ugly, frustrating and annoying … and it has lunged and lurched to an ending that could be thoroughly satisfying no matter who wins. Thanks, Academy.
As for what comes after the Oscars are over … well, let’s just sigh and admit that come Monday morning, we’re all on our own.
