I wanted to talk about the Oscars somehow and I remembered I haven’t made one of these lists in a while. So here we go, everybody! I’m gonna rant a bit about some things that happened at the Oscars! Some were good. Some were bad. I’m definitely going to complain a bit. Oscars talk time! If you didn’t watch or don’t care, I’m sorry.

10. Demi Moore is robbed.
This is weird to talk about because I don’t think she ultimately cares, but Demi’s a really good actress and I should watch more of her movies. It’s not that she didn’t win Best Actress but the way it happened. The Substance is a wonderful movie. Her performance is the centerpiece. Mikey Madison was fine, but nowhere near the revelation that people laud her as. That’s my opinion. They have theirs. I know I’m in the minority. I have the same thoughts about Anora in general. The plot of The Substance centers around a woman who was abandoned by Hollywood for younger and hotter actresses because she aged naturally. So she does something terrible and ruins her life and goes to war with herself just to recapture an outer adoration that is unnecessary. It’s a beautiful story.
And the fact that they LITERALLY GAVE THE OSCAR TO A YOUNG HOT WOMAN INSTEAD OF HER. THEY COULD HAVE GIVEN IT TO ANY OF THE OTHER NOMINEES AND THE NARRATIVE WOULD’VE BEEN COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. But they gave it to someone who (Is not at fault for getting the award and seems nice and gave a good performance, this is about the voters, not Mikey.) symbolized the inherent misogyny in the Hollywood system that movie is calling out. This is as tone death a decision as when every Academy voter voted for Anthony Hopkins to have another damn Oscar rather than giving Chadwick Boseman his dues post mortem because they all “thought someone else would vote for Chadwick”.
Again. These shows don’t matter. It’s celebrities patting each other on the back, and stupid decisions are made all the time. But sometimes people who genuinely deserve recognition get it. Like Zoe Saldaña who gave a great performance in a middling movie and has always been awesome. None of this means anything. But the old farts who vote for these awards are famously stupid and they don’t realize the decisions they make should have fuck-all to do with their opinions, it’s about making the objectively right choice that follows the narrative that is deserved. Brendan Fraser won an Oscar two years ago for a performance people say wasn’t very good in a movie that wasn’t very good, but he won it because he’d been fucked over by Hollywood and he deserved recognition for all the good work he’d done. We got an excellent narrative built around him, Ke Huy Quan, and Michelle Yeoh.
It felt like a good story. One that rings false if you read into it, but it’s deserved. Demi deserved that narrative. And even if you don’t want to follow a narrative, you put those performances side by side and that decision is fucking ridiculous. I guess it’s impossible to use objectivity in a system that is inherently subjective but does often have objective answers. Okay. I’m done ranting. Thank you.

9. Anora wins Best Picture, several more awards.
More ranting! Alright. I want to clarify. I’m glad that a $6 million indy movie is getting this much recognition, when placed against massive budget CGI movies that dominate our screens. I also want to say that both Wicked and Dune: Part Two were beautifully crafted and wonderful in execution, I’m not crapping on them. I’m glad Sean Baker is getting awards. He’s a good writer. I like The Florida Project, which is the only other movie of his I’ve seen. It’s also nice to see a movie about a sex worker just living her life, doing her job, and being a human being get this much buzz. It’s a story about the kind of character we don’t often see starring in an Oscar winning film.
That said, no. I didn’t want to watch this movie. It was pitched to me as the best movie ever, I couldn’t see why, but I begrudgingly sat through it. It feels so long. There’s a fifty minute sequence in the middle that goes on way longer than it should, where Anora screams and attacks Russian people and they try to find her husband who ran away and we watch people yell the same things and do the same things and ask the same things over and over and over. There’s a lot of improv in this sequence, which frustrates me because this movie won Best Original Screenplay. None of this feels like dialogue, it feels like actors spinning their wheels. Which is fine, but that’s not a lot of screenplay for your award. It also won Best Editing, which Sean Baker also did. Again. There are no special techniques used. It’s mostly long one shots. And much of it is not edited down. I’m gonna shut up because I’ve never made a movie, or one of that scale.

8. The Brutalist wins Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Score, and nothing else.
My thinking is if you want to give Best Picture to a movie made by a small studio with a small budget, The Brutalist was the clear winner. I loved The Brutalist. I can’t wait to watch it again. It’s a monumental film at three hours and twenty minutes about the life of an architect who wants to design beautiful structures and the way he’s degraded by American ideals and the horrors he endured to get there. It is an undeniably but deservedly pretentious film about the treatment of immigrants in this country, the way we attempt to homogenize art and creativity, and whether something can just be allowed to be beautiful without us analyzing why it is or what it means. It’s a fascinating film. It was deserving of the three awards it was given, but I really would have liked to see it get more. I may be wrong, but I really don’t think people will still talk about Anora two to five years from now. It wasn’t Baker’s best movie, it would’ve been fine to get a nomination nod and become a small indy favorite people loved. Best Picture should have gone to this or Conclave, a movie with fascinating dialogue and plot structure that is saying something deeper about larger things that constantly trouble us as a society.

7. Random popular singers do weird renditions of Bond songs.
This has happened a few times now, I feel like the Oscars has a break glass in case of emergency montage of Bond movies they can play if they can’t think of something else to do. The Oscars went over time by like 20 minutes and part of that is because we were treated to a fully unnecessary sequence of Doja Cat and some other singers I couldn’t give a fuck about singing Bond songs in honor of Barbara Broccoli, longtime Bond producer. It’s weird enough to do that now because she just relinquished control of Bond to Amazon, so all those movies will suck now and we’ll get thousands of TV shows. I created an Oscars Bingo card for my friend and I when we watched and one of the squares was “There’s a joke or segment that attempts to appeal to younger audiences even though they won’t watch this anyway” and that was it. Young people don’t care about Bond and fucking Doja Cat won’t change that. This whole post may very well ruin my reputation as a hip young dude, because it all reads as “Crabby 22 year old yells at young people for liking their Doja Cat and sex worker movie”.

6. People are played off stage undeservedly.
I mean it happens literally every year but so many winners of technical awards got played off mid-speech. There should be a rule in place that says if there are multiple people accepting an award in a group, you let them all speak rather than playing the music as they start to talk. Also a lot of these people have beautiful or poignant things to say about their lives and the atrocities people are going through outside this country. Let them talk. Don’t let Adrien Brody blatantly avoid the music and talk for like seven minutes. I loved his performance, but still. Really this should be below the Bond thing and my opinions but it’s my list.

5. Andrew Garfield and Goldie Hawn present awards together.
Goldie Hawn is awesome. She was having a hard time reading the nominees, I guess she has cataracts. That sucks. But you know who else is awesome, and has chemistry with everyone? My man Andrew Garfield. They looked like they were about to kiss at one point and Andrew Garfield was going to steal her from Kurt Russell. Well not steal. She’s her own person. He talked about his late mom and how she was a massive Goldie Hawn fan and it meant so much to him to be up there with her. You cannot meet a more sincere man than Andrew Garfield. Anyway, my point in bringing this up is I want a Goldie Hawn/Andrew Garfield buddy cop movie right this second!!!

4. Zoe Saldaña! Wins Best Supporting Actress!!!
Good for her, man. Her speech was really beautiful. I know people hate that movie. I thought it was alright. I didn’t like the songs. But even if you don’t like the movie, you can’t deny her performance was really good and she put everything into it. I’m glad she won. She’s a great actress. She’s also in the top three highest grossing movies of all time, and in four overall. So good for her a second time. She seems like a really cool fun person and I want to see more stuff with her in it. Great stuff.

3. Kieran Culkin wins Best Supporting Actor.
I love this guy. A Real Pain was a great movie and he was great in it. I’m still kind of surprised he won, it did feel a bit like the Mikey/Demi thing seeing as how he won over Guy Pearce, who’s never won an Oscar. His acceptance speech was incredible. It’s an all-timer. People love this guy for a reason. He’s so funny. He tells it like it is. Kind of like his character, but it doesn’t make you as uncomfortable. He addressed most of his speech to his wife to remind her that she said they could have more kids if he won an Oscar. That’s so damn funny. The only thing is I don’t think he mentioned his brother or if Macauley was there. Where’s Macauley’s Oscar? Actually he has many siblings so that’s fair.

2. Nick Offerman is the Oscars announcer.
What a great choice. I’ve never genuinely cared about the guy who says “Presenting the award for this movie is these fucking actors…” It fades into the background. They always do a good job. But this was the best choice I’ve ever seen. Bring him back every year until he dies. Obviously I’m biased but his voice is so smooth and buttery and wonderful. I’m being weird. I’ll finish up. I loved listening to him announce the awards and segue into the commercials. I loved that they acknowledged it was him and had him and Conan do a bit together where we see him in the recording studio booth or whatever. I always forget that they’re very good friends. And he’s got that massive beard back. I want to see him be in even more things after this and Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning that aren’t Smurfs. Long live Nick Offerman.

1. Conan O’Brien hosts the Oscars!
I’m a huge Conan fan. His sense of humor lines up with the weird idiotic person I am. I also love him because he seems to be a genuinely good person who cares above anything about the people around him, the people who work for him, and his fans. So how did he do as a host? I think he was solid. If I’m honest I kind of wanted more? Like a bigger splash, as a host. Which is odd, because he did everything I expected he would do. He did a musical number. He made dozens of self deprecative jokes. He had a fun little cut-away bit where he presented some lazy people with the idea of glueing 800 smartphones together and putting it in a room where you can watch a giant smartphone and get snacks. He also entered the Oscars via a filmed bit of him climbing out of a Demi Moore body à la The Substance and losing his shoe. These are all good things. He also acknowledged the fires and what people have lost and brought several brave fire fighters on stage to pay tribute to what they’ve done. So good job, Conan.
But it still felt like a normal Oscars host gig, because he had to do that bit at the start where we get weird stilted standup about all the movies that were nominated. He even joked about the Emilia Pérez backlash, which I didn’t expect. I say bring him back. He can be our host going forward. He has more energy and joy for this gig than Kimmel does. Kimmel barely showed up the last few times. He doesn’t want to be there. I want to see Conan keep doing it. Anyway. That was the Oscars.

I know this was rambly and insane. I apologize. I’ll have more normal Top 10 Lists next time. Hopefully. Thank you for reading.