The liveliest moment at the 96th Academy Awards came courtesy of Donald Trump. Host Jimmy Kimmel, perhaps sensing the lack of fireworks to light up Hollywood’s biggest night — no slapgate, not even a hectic ‘Naatu Naatu’ performance to feed a post-Oscars diversity debate — took his chance to slag off the former U.S. President after Mr. Trump had criticised Kimmel’s hostmanship. Reading out Mr. Trump’s post live on stage, minutes before the final award, Kimmel calmly clapped back with, “...I’m surprised, isn’t it past your jail time?” In fairness, Mr. Trump’s crotchety assessment of Oscar night was not entirely off the mark, which rolled out in drearily predictable fashion. Christopher Nolan’s frontrunning Second World War-era opus, Oppenheimer, won seven out of its 13 nominations including ‘Best Actor’ (for Cillian Murphy, who plays the progenitor of the atomic bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer). It was an undeniably glorious moment for Nolan, passed on for Oscar recognition on six prior occasions. In the run-up to the Oscars, there was nervousness that Oppenheimer might not meet the Academy’s new diversity standards. Perhaps the gloomy mushroom clouds of Oppenheimer held sway among Academy voters over the piercing pink of another global hit from last year. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which far outstripped Nolan’s film during their much-publicised theatrical face-off, won just one award (‘Best Original Song’). If a female-led, visually inventive comedy-drama with a subversive edge shone at the Oscars, it was not Barbie but Poor Things. Yorgos Lanthimos’ film, starring Emma Stone, won four out of its 11 nods, including ‘Best Actress’ for Stone. Her performance has been hailed yet it yielded one of the night’s biggest upsets: Lily Gladstone, the first Native American to be nominated for ‘Best Actress’ in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, was passed over for what could have been a landmark win.
Politics ruffled the smooth surface and cautious decorum of this year’s Academy Awards. The ‘Best Documentary’ feature film went to 20 Days in Mariupol, about life in the besieged Ukrainian city. Accepting the award, a first for Ukraine, director Mstyslav Chernov said that he wished he could ‘never make this film’, and would gladly trade it for Russia never occupying his homeland. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a chilling cinematic miniature of human indifference set in Nazi Germany, won ‘Best International Film’, with Glazer taking the opportunity to address the bombing of Gaza. His sentiments chimed with pro-Palestinian protesters who halted traffic before the Oscar ceremony, and the celebrities who wore red pins and signed a letter calling for a ceasefire. Clearly, the Oscars are no longer about an inward-looking, insulated group of celebrities who come to the spectacle to be seen.
