The night has finally come: the Oscars. It’s a night of beautiful outfits, star-studded dates, and of course, recognizing movies.
Only this year, it’s the afternoon?
The Academy Awards, more commonly known as the Oscars, are hosted in Los Angeles every year. Due to a new time change, the ceremony started at 4 p.m. Pacific Time, making it the earliest ceremony in recent years.
As always, the awards are filled with fun, surprise, and wonder. Every year I enjoy seeing which movies land on top and what surprises come about.
Here’s a recap of this year’s awards and its biggest moments.
The Host: Jimmy Kimmel
This is the fourth time that Jimmy Kimmel has hosted the Oscars, having previously hosted the ceremony in 2017, 2018 and 2023. At this point, Kimmel knows how to host a show. He knows the jokes to make and how to toe the line between funny and controversial, while also being able to step aside and let the award show carry-on without him.
That being said, it was well hosted, but also boring. I’d say that the jokes were particularly tame this year; other than a Trump prison joke near the end, there was little to talk about afterwards.
There’s a lot of things going on in the world, from two wars to American politics. The Oscars is usually a platform to talk about injustices at a larger level, but I was surprised to see that there was mostly silence about these subjects.
The Best Original Song Performances
This is something I usually dread while watching the Oscars, because it doesn’t make sense to me to have musical performances in an award show about movies. I thought this throughout most of the performances until Ryan Gosling performed “I’m Just Ken” from Barbie.
Though I may be slightly biased considering my love of Barbie and Ryan Gosling, I believe that this was the best song performance of Oscars history. The song was silly enough to justify lots of backup dancers and props, but it was also very well sung by Gosling and included a cool guitar solo from Slash. It also helps that this song was one of the biggest movie songs of the year; almost everyone is able to watch and sing along. I hope to see more songs performed like “I’m Just Ken” was; maybe Gosling should just perform every year regardless (I’m fine with that too).
John Cena?
Easily the weirdest bit of the ceremony this year was when they presented the award for Best Costume Design. Kimmel quickly prefaced the award presentation with an event that had happened 50 years ago: a streaker ran on stage. To recreate the moment, they brought on John Cena, who was completely naked save for the award envelope he was holding in front of him. They then discussed the importance of having good costumes in film, and announced the winner shortly after. It was odd and probably unnecessary, but also arguably the most-talked about moment of the night.
The Lack of Surprises
I had the best year of predictions this year, accurately predicting 15 out of 23 awards. I’m quite impressed with myself, but I also knew that my predictions weren’t just sheer luck: there have been predicted winners all season to a point that there was no way they weren’t going to win. This lack of surprises made the show slightly mundane, where nothing was truly up in the air.
Take Oppenheimer, for example. It came in with 13 nominations, and anyone who follows the movie season is able to look and guess exactly which awards it would win: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and so on. A great movie is going to win the biggest awards; it’s understandable, yet predictable.
I found myself more interested in the smaller awards of the night; Best Production Design, Screenplay and Short Film. They were able to recognize some other amazing movies that weren’t Oppenheimer. The only award that truly surprised me was Best Leading Actress, where the award was handed off to Emma Stone for Poor Things rather than Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon. Gladstone winning would’ve made Oscar history while Stone had already won recently, so there was a lot of anticipation around Gladstone’s prospective win. Unfortunately, she didn’t take the award home.
And my eyes see…
During the Oscars, I am always anticipating for something to go wrong. From a mixed envelope to a slap, I live to the drama that gets the ceremony spread across the news. Unfortunately for me and fortunately for the Oscar producers, there wasn’t much that went wrong.
Except for one little thing.
Al Pacino was in charge of presenting the big award of the night, Best Picture. With a no-care attitude, he went on stage, said a couple sentences about the award, then simply opened the envelope and said, “And my eyes see… Oppenheimer.”
If you don’t notice the problem, it was that Pacino didn’t allow any time for the other nominees to be recognized before the award was read. Usually there’s a montage with all 10 nominations, but it was completely skipped. I guess there’s nothing overtly wrong with the way he did it, but it was awkward and unexpected.
Overall
If I had to rate the ceremony objectively this year, it would be a 7/10. It was definitely better than other years, but there wasn’t anything specifically exciting about it. I enjoyed that they brought back previous Actor and Actress winners to present this year’s awards, and it mostly ran on schedule. I thought the jokes could’ve been punchier, but they were good enough.
As always, I’m looking forward to the ceremony next year. It gives reason to watch a bunch of movies that I otherwise wouldn’t have watched, and follow something for months until its eventual conclusion. Some people have fantasy sports; I have the Oscars.
Interested in seeing my Best Picture picks? Check them out here.