With apologies to Tracee Ellis Ross and Leslie Jordan, Tuesday morning’s Oscar nominations show was a ridiculous, self-defensive mess and, as it turns out, completely unnecessary.
Running 32 minutes, the announcement of the nominees for the 94th Academy Awards played as a painfully obvious attempt to convince everyone that Movies Still Matter. In addition to the predawn effervescence of the bantering Ross and Jordan, the “show” dragged in the all the usual suspects from the nonroaring ’20s — health care workers, firefighters, a film guy from TikTok — in an effort to prove the motion picture academy’s relevance.
They needn’t have bothered: The nominations spoke for themselves.
