Last Night’s Oscar Ceremony Had Strong Winners, An Upset or Two, and a Show We Largely Wanted to Watch

The 96th Academy Awards have only been over for a few hours as of the writing of this piece. So, I’m still very much in the thick of it. At the same time, isn’t that the best time to talk about the show itself? The Oscar ceremony is its own beast, to say the least. There will be more chatter about the winners, the highlights, the lowlights, and more. Today, however, it’s the telecast itself, along with what it entailed, including the winning films and artists.

First thing’s first, the winners pretty much rocked. These are the films that, in part, took home Academy Awards: American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, Barbie, Godzilla Minus One, The Holdovers, Oppenheimer, and Poor Things. That’s not even all of the honored movies, but what a crop that is. I’d argue it might even be among the best group of rewarded flicks that the Academy has gone for in many years.

Beyond that, we had first time winners in folks like Robert Downey Jr., Cillian Murphy, Christopher Nolan, and Hoyte van Hoytema. Now, admittedly they all came from Oppenheimer and its mostly dominant showing, but that takes nothing away from these exciting artists now having Oscars (two in Nolan’s case) on their mantles.

Luckily, it also wasn’t a show completely void of surprises and upsets. We saw The Zone of Interest upset Oppenheimer in Best Sound, while The Boy and the Heron surprised Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse in Best Animated Feature. The other big surprise was in the most competitive of the big categories, where a good night for Poor Things and another Martin Scorsese flick being shut out in Killers of the Flower Moon culminated in Emma Stone taking Best Actress over Lily Gladstone. It was an exciting photo finish there, regardless of who you were pulling for.

Jimmy Kimmel remains a thoroughly fine host, though I think he and John Cena made for a great comedy bit surrounding Best Costume Design. In fact, I think the laughs mostly landed last night, including some of the presenter banter. The best there, for me, was Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling duking it out over Barbenheimer.

More than anything else, the show was one that was enjoyable to watch. I loved the former winners presenting to the nominees. I wish we could do that every year, with the prior year’s winner joining four others to fete the nominated performers. I know it’ll likely come up every so often going forward, but it’s a keeper to me. Things also seemed to zip along, though nothing really felt too shortchanged, with one exception.

Of course, it wasn’t perfect, and the low point of the show again seemed to be how the In Memoriam segment has handled. For some reason, the powers that be seem to think that the performance accompanying the names and pictures of those we lost is of equal importance. It’s not and they’re not, lovely as their performances always are. The focus should be on honoring those we’ve lost. I’d love to disabuse the producers of the notion that this segment needs tinkering with. Just make it respectful and centered on the missing.

All in all, it was a welcome step in the right direction for the Oscars. I hope the ratings are good, because there’s a lot of lessons that the Academy should take from last night. We’ll see if they do, but it goes without saying that they should. More to come on the 96th Academy Awards all this week, but that was my two cents on the actual Oscar telecast. Feel free to chime in with your take in the comments…

What did you think of the Oscar telecast? Let us know!