For all the hype and confusion surrounding the 97th Academy Awards, the actual ceremony was ultimately rather timid. The weeks leading up to Sunday’s show saw Hollywood’s Biggest Night shaping up to be Hollywood’s Biggest Mess, after a string of controversies big and small tarnished some of the ceremony’s glitzy sheen. Two best actress nominees were embroiled in racist scandals, a best picture frontrunner was shuffled around pundit scorecards after some use of technical AI, and the conversation around intimacy coordinators became far more complicated than it ever needed to be. And that’s not even mentioning the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles for weeks at the beginning of 2025, making the Oscars seem like an inauspicious and even tone-deaf tradition persisting in the face of tragedy.
But the show gently yet cleverly pushed back against any detractors, opening with “Wicked” stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande singing a medley of three songs from the “Wizard of Oz” musical universe about persevering. After a brief montage of clips from Los Angeles-set films, Grande serenaded audiences with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” before handing the spotlight to Erivo, who performed a beautiful rendition of “Home” from “The Wiz.” For their final song, Grande joined Erivo for “Defying Gravity,” recreating one of the biggest blockbuster sequences in any film from 2024. That malleable song — which has taken on its own life to mean many different things to many different people — was the perfect choice to open a show that, by and large, avoided any clear-cut statements about America’s political climate or roiling tensions worldwide. Instead, the Oscars kept things tame, using its opening medley to push for unity and celebrate the tenacity of the Los Angeles people and the city’s most famous industry.
