Worst Oscars ever — or at least in recent memory.
This is what Hollywood gets for pushing out the likes of Ricky Gervais and Chris Rock: a toothless host in Jimmy Kimmel, warmed-over jokes that landed with a thud, and queasy politics that only hit one target hard.
Trump: End times personified. Hamas? Just misunderstood.
Celebrities including Mark Ruffalo and Billie Eilish walked the red carpet with red ‘ceasefire’ pins, but nobody — not even Jonathan Glazer, the writer/director of ‘The Zone of Interest’, a masterpiece about the Holocaust — would stand up for Israel.
Glazer, in a supreme act of self-loathing, went so far as to renounce his Judaism. Thanking his partners, he said: ‘Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.’
Abhorrent.
Celebrities including Mark Ruffalo (pictured) and Billie Eilish walked the red carpet with red ‘ceasefire’ pins, but nobody – not even Jonathan Glazer, the writer/director of ‘The Zone of Interest’, a masterpiece about the Holocaust – would stand up for Israel.
Glazer (left), in a supreme act of self-loathing, went so far as to renounce his Judaism. Thanking his partners, he said: ‘Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.’ Abhorrent. (Pictured, right: Billie Eilish and brother Finneas).
The hostages still held by Hamas warranted zero mentions, not even from Steven Spielberg, wheeled out on the 30th anniversary of ‘Schindler’s List’.
Nor were we told why the ceremony, bumped up an hour early for the very first time, began almost ten minutes late.
As it turns out, pro-Palestinian protesters were blocking the route to the ceremony. But referencing them at all was off-limits.
No one had an issue standing up for Ukraine or awarding the documentary ’20 Days in Mariupol’. Nor was the inclusion of Alexei Navalny in the ‘In Memoriam’ segment — otherwise a disaster of terrible camera angles and interpretive dance — remotely controversial.
Israel and the attacks of October 7, however, went unmentioned.
Instead, the Oscars turned into a Barbie-fest, some sort of weird apologia for snubbing (rightly!) star Margot Robbie and director Greta Gerwig, whose ever-supplicant mugging for the camera — as if she just can’t believe she’s allowed in the room — has aged harder than Al Pacino.
‘Barbie’ was terrible. It was a glorified infomercial for Mattel. Yet we have been told incessantly that America Ferrara’s clichéd, hackneyed speech about the would-be terrors of womanhood is a revelation. A soliloquy on par with ‘to be or not to be’.
Please. Ferrera’s trite sentiment is a bumper sticker from 1975.
Not enough that the Oscars opened with a ‘Barbie’ sketch, that we had multiple ‘Barbie’ musical numbers, that co-stars Kate McKinnon and America Ferrera jointly presented an award, that the ‘Barbie’ theme music closed out the ceremony.
No, we had to endure Rita Moreno paying tribute to nominee Ferrera: ‘Your powerful ‘Barbie’ monologue [about] the most impossible standards females must try to live up to galvanized everyone with a pulse’.
Did it, really? Wouldn’t ‘Barbie’ have swept the Oscars if so? It can’t be a feminist movie while treating womanhood as an inexorable burden.
Israel and the attacks of October 7, however, went unmentioned. Instead, the Oscars turned into a Barbie-fest, some sort of weird apologia for snubbing (rightly!) star Margot Robbie and director Greta Gerwig.
‘Barbie’ was terrible. It was a glorified infomercial for Mattel. Yet we have been told incessantly that America Ferrara’s clichéd, hackneyed speech about the would-be terrors of womanhood is a revelation. A soliloquy on par with ‘to be or not to be’. (Pictured: Margot Robbie, left, and America Ferrera, right).
Not enough that the Oscars opened with a ‘Barbie’ sketch, that we had multiple ‘Barbie’ musical numbers, that co-stars Kate McKinnon and America Ferrera jointly presented an award, that the ‘Barbie’ theme music closed out the ceremony. No, we had to endure Rita Moreno paying tribute to nominee Ferrera. (Pictured: Ryan Gosling).
Here’s another unpopular opinion, one not said in polite society: Lily Gladstone was the worst thing about ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’. Just terrible.
Her performance was wooden, one-note, and somnambulant. It lacked the urgency one might expect in portraying a young wife and mother whose husband is slowly poisoning her to death.
Gladstone’s nomination felt more like the Academy congratulating itself for including a Native American actress rather than one based on merit.
As for that self-regard: Could the staging of major categories have been more insufferable?
Out came five actors or actresses, former Oscar winners, who spoke directly to each of the nominees as if they had just cured cancer.
How amazing to hear Charlize Theron, addressing Annette Bening for her titular role in ‘Nyad’, mispronounce the legendary swimmer’s first name not once, but twice, as ‘Diane’.
It’s ‘Diana’. Is that so hard?
Bening watched, stone-faced and unamused, as Emma Stone beat her out for Best Actress and took the stage a breathless, tearful mess.
Stone had no idea what she was doing there, she said, and didn’t know what to say — even though she spent months campaigning for this award.
It called to mind the embarrassing profile of Kate Winslet in the New York Times magazine last week. Here we learned that Winslet isn’t just an actress.
No: If you can believe it — and our far-too-gullible celebrity profiler can — Winslet can hold her breath underwater for more than seven straight minutes, while Navy SEALs can only muster three.
And Winslet is so high-minded, so diffident about her looks, that she claims never to have heard of Ozempic.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
HA! This is a woman who has spent years bitching about Hollywood’s fixation on female bodies and her own weight.
Emma Stone took the stage a breathless, tearful mess. Stone had no idea what she was doing there, she said, and didn’t know what to say – even though she spent months campaigning for this award.
Back to the hyperventilating Stone, who admitted in her speech — again, she had no idea what she was doing there! — that she had nonetheless spent the night before freaking out that she might win. She actually said that her director had to talk her down, telling her to ‘take yourself out of it’.
If only!
That was a note Emily Blunt could have taken, draping herself over every single ‘Oppenheimer’ winner — she herself losing Best Supporting Actress to Da’Vine Joy Randolph — while wearing a bizarre dress with hovering shoulder straps.
Only Greta Gerwig rivaled her in hogging screen time, Gerwig planted front row and singing along to Ryan Gosling’s clearly lip-synched, campy ‘I’m Just Ken’ number — Ken, we were told by presenter Christoph Waltz, as the ’embodiment of human empathy’.
Sorry — isn’t Ken a plastic doll with no genitalia?
Which brings us to flailing Kimmel’s Hail Mary, dragging out a naked John Cena, his nether regions covered by an envelope, looking waxed, plucked, tufted and tanned-up for a sight gag that went on far too long and wasn’t even funny.
As ever, I am no Donald Trump fan, but his Truth Social post during the ceremony — read aloud by Kimmel — was dead-on.
‘Has there EVER been a WORSE HOST than Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars’, Trump wrote.
Who here disagrees?
To share yet another unpopular opinion: ‘Oppenheimer’, save the lead performances of winners Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr., is overrated.
It was an excruciatingly long and talky mess. The timeline was hard to follow. The women were underdeveloped – a common critique of Christopher Nolan’s work – and it’s clear that at this point he has zero interest in remedying that.
Furthermore, it retroactively paints President Truman as a MAGA hick who delighted in dropping the atomic bomb on Japanese civilians. There’s a distinct European sneer at America here.
Flailing Kimmel’s Hail Mary: dragging out a naked John Cena, his nether regions covered by an envelope, looking waxed, plucked, tufted and tanned-up for a sight gag that went on far too long and wasn’t even funny. (Pictured: Cena, left, and Kimmel).
Emily Blunt draped herself over every single ‘Oppenheimer’ winner – she herself losing Best Supporting Actress to Da’Vine Joy Randolph – while wearing a bizarre dress with hovering shoulder straps. (Pictured: With Ryan Gosling).
Only Greta Gerwig rivaled Blunt in hogging screen time, Gerwig planted front row and singing along to Ryan Gosling’s clearly lip-synched, campy ‘I’m Just Ken’ number.
Still, the Oscars was not without its highlights, scant as they were.
Robert Downey Jr.’s opening line in his acceptance speech was a killer: ‘I’d like to thank my terrible childhood, and the Academy, in that order’.
Also in attendance was Messi, the dog from ‘Anatomy of a Fall’, fake-applauding in the audience.
Talk about a performance! This dog gave an overdose scene to rival Jennifer Connelly in ‘Requiem for a Dream’. This dog knew how to comport himself: No whining, no salivating, no jumping out of his seat to pull focus.
And this dog gave us the most perfect ending to the night. Outside, alone, on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he lifted his leg and peed on Matt Damon’s star. Perfection.