The Oscars’ Most Pressing Cause This Year Was the Movies Themselves

When Daryl Hannah let fly with a “Slava Ukraini” before presenting the Academy Award for Best Editing, it felt like an attempt to burst the comfortable bubble the Oscars had been erecting around the Dolby Theatre all evening up to that point. What Hannah said wasn’t more than an off-the-cuff reference to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, but it was the first moment, 100 minutes into the ceremony’s run time, when the tumult of the reality outside was acknowledged in more than vague terms. Host Conan O’Brien mentioned “divisive politics” in his opening monologue; the director of Flow closed out his acceptance speech by saying that, like the animals in his films, “we’re all on the same boat”; and Emilia Pérez songwriter Camille expressed the hope that her winning song “speaks to the role music and art can play and continue to play as a force of the good and progress in the world.” (In neither of the speeches for Emilia Pérez’s two wins were trans rights mentioned.) But as though by previous agreement, or maybe just because the sheer enormity of current stressors made it daunting to do justice to any particular one, this year’s Oscars ceremony was an inward-looking affair that found the industry foremost concerned with itself.

The result was the most solid Oscar broadcast in years, though that had less to do with the relative lack of recognition of what’s going on in the world than with providing reassurance that Hollywood is still good at putting on a show. The Academy Awards have had a storied, complicated relationship with politics that hinges on the myth, repeated by O’Brien tonight, that a billion people watch the telecast. With that kind of audience, participants really have no choice but to use their platform for higher purposes, even if the result sometimes feels like a forced marriage with questionable effectiveness. But that number has never been real, and if it was ever a little bit close, it certainly isn’t now that cinema, awards shows, and live TV have all slipped from cultural dominance. We’re long past the era when the Oscars could position themselves as the irresistible sugar that helps more serious messaging go down. And this year, still limping from the pandemic and the strikes, and destabilized by contractions due to streaming, the film industry was hit by the Los Angeles wildfires that laid waste to the homes of so many of its workers and called into question the very assumption that it would continue to have a geographical center. Hollywood needed to put on a show, to put itself in the spotlight, to self-mythologize, and to use the wattage of its stars to draw attention to its less famous craftsmen.

This year’s awards turned toward the past, with red-carpet outfits that aimed for throwback glamour and a recurring Oz motif that linked Wicked and the late Quincy Jones’s work on The Wiz to the 1939 classic but also seemed to speak to the desire to disappear, however temporarily, to a beautiful fantasy kingdom. That kingdom exists onscreen, sure, but it’s also in the idea of Hollywood, a place where people go to chase dreams of a life of creative work as well as fame and fortune. There were the usual chummy showbiz cracks, including a callback to Nikki Glaser’s Golden Globes bit about how Adam Sandler says Timothée Chalamet’s name, as though awards season really were just one continuous show. But in bringing up firefighting professionals and having them make jokes at the expense of Joker: Folie à Deux, the ceremony effectively extended in-group privileges to everyone in the city. The movie business may be exclusive, biased, and brutal, but this year’s Oscars — which, for once, were not in a hurry and hardly played anyone off — spun out the illusion that everyone could be an insider, all of us in it together, even those of us watching at home. After all, there could be no industry without an audience.

This cozy feeling was only really ruptured by the deserved triumph of No Other Land, which won the award for Best Documentary, leading to Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, two of the film’s four directors, to give a speech that was urgent and bracingly direct in describing what has been happening to Palestinians as ethnic cleansing and blaming U.S. foreign policy for helping block the path to an equitable political solution. It was a remarkable moment, one that served as a retort to the generalizations about chaos and rebuilding offered elsewhere. But it was also an outlier in a night that soon returned its attention to issues closer to home. When Sean Baker won Best Director on the road toward Anora cleaning up and ultimately taking home the final prize of the night for Best Picture, he spoke not about anything related to the content of his movie, which is about a sex worker who gets swept up into impulsive nuptials to the immature son of a Russian oligarch, but about the business of movies themselves and the importance of their continuing distribution in theaters. “We lost 1,000 screens,” he said of the bruised and battered theatrical business, before urging that “filmmakers keep making films for the big screen.” It may not have been a grand statement about Trump, or the tech oligarchs, or Gaza, or Putin, but it was nevertheless heartfelt. If the Oscars felt more limited in their scope this year, it wasn’t because they didn’t have a cause — it was because that cause had become the movies themselves.

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