The Oscars ceremony on Sunday night was long and boring, as it has been for a few years, but this year its shortcomings landed differently. Hollywood’s waning influence, which registered most glaringly last month in the large number of American nominees who showed up in London for the Baftas – not something they were inclined to do in better times – gave the ceremony a sense of low-stakes irrelevance that was frankly a relief from the rest of the news cycle. Still, the question lingers as to why the actors and presenters largely, and mercifully in my view, stayed away from mention of Donald Trump.
After the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles in January, the classy thing to have done this year would’ve been to cancel or at least radically downsize the Oscars ceremony, but of course no one involved was going to vote for that. Instead, audiences were treated to a muted spectacle celebrating movies with record-breakingly small box-office returns, including The Brutalist, in which Adrien Brody relived the US postwar construction boom in real time, and Anora, one of the lowest-grossing best pictures of all time, about an exotic dancer who marries a rich Russian. (What could be behind the deep and abiding fascination of straight male directors – and novelists, and podcasters – with the “sex worker community”? That’s right, it’s altruism.)
