Naked Cena, Jonathan Glazer, and Assorted Oscars Thoughts.
Paul Giamatti was unfairly snubbed yet again, and also some other stuff happened.
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Yes, it’s Oscars morning-after, and since I took the time to watch them, I figured I might as well write about them (full list of winners here, I’m not going to muck this up by pasting all of that). Maybe we should jump right into the big controversies. People like that.
Out of all the major categories, the Vegas favorite won in nearly all of them. The only exceptions I can see were The Boy and the Heron winning best animated film over Spider-Verse, and Poor Things stealing make-up and hair-styling Oscars over Barbie and Maestro. Oh, and Emma Stone.
Only a mild underdog (it looks like she closed at +125), Stone “spoiled” the evening for favorite Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon, who was -175 and widely expected to become the first Native American to win an Oscar, after being the first Native American to get nominated for an Oscar.
Instead, Emma Stone won, and gave a very human-seeming speech shortly after the back of her dress popped open on the way to collect the award.
Emma Stone seems genuine and nice, though of course being a cool person who seems like they could be your friend is what actors do for a living (she gets more cool points for being in a weird show with Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie). It’s a bummer for Stone to have to be the face of the Native American not getting the award (and many have noted the irony of it coming after Stone appeared with Fielder and Safdie in The Curse, a show about gentrification and Native land rights) because she was genuinely fantastic in Poor Things. Emma Stone was absolutely one of the first two or three names I thought of if anyone asked “best female performances of 2023,” and it was a great movie.
Meanwhile, the camera kept cutting back to Lily Gladstone after she didn’t win, which just seemed cruel. Gladstone smiled and looked gracious as was required of her, but she had a right to be disappointed. She just gave the performance of a lifetime and became the first Native American Oscar nominee in the almost 100-year history of the Oscars; it would’ve been entirely fair for her to wonder when the next time she gets such an opportunity will be, if ever. Remember Samuel L. Jackson saying “shit” when he lost his Pulp Fiction Oscar? If a guy in as many movies as Samuel L. Jackson can be worried about the career impact of losing an Oscar, imagine how it feels for Lily Gladstone.
That there might be genuine career impacts from silly awards shows is probably hard for anyone outside of entertainment to fathom, but it happens. And if you’re a working actor, you’re always at the mercy of that kind of perception. Anyway, they were both wonderful, so hopefully they’ll go on to long and fruit-filled careers. Give them their fruits!
By the way, any year that includes movies as good as Oppenheimer (I might not have given it all those awards, but it was great), Killers of the Flower Moon, Poor Things, The Holdovers, and American Fiction (haven’t seen it yet, but seems very much like something I’d love) is a damn good year.
Oh yeah, and then there was Jonathan Glazer. The Zone of Interest director (winner of best international feature) was, as far as I can remember, the only winner to say anything political in his acceptance speech, which is kind of required when you’re winning for a movie about the Holocaust. In any case, Glazer did such a beautiful job of it that there almost wasn’t anything left to say for anyone else to say after his speech. That went, in part:
“Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all are victims of this dehumanization. How do we resist?”
Could he have gone further? Maybe, yet the fact that all the worst people online immediately attacked him for it seemed to prove that he’d done a great job — from the New York Post’s John Podhoretz saying Glazer could “stuff your Oscar up your ass” to Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon tweeting “I simply cannot fathom the moral rot in someone's soul that leads them to win an award for a movie about the Holocaust and with the platform given to them, to accept that award by saying, ‘We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness.’”
Well, I simply cannot fathom anyone having such poor reading comprehension as to think that saying “I reject my Jewishness being hijacked by…” is tantamount to saying “I reject my Jewishness.”
But of course I don’t believe that their reading/listening comprehension is that bad, which leads me to the next most obvious conclusion, which is that these are deliberate misreads of Glazer’s speech taken in bad faith. And to try to willfully mischaracterize and smear a guy for essentially saying “Hey, killing innocent people is bad” is the absolute dictionary definition of “showing your ass.”
Any speech that becomes a hard line between people who are on the right and wrong side of history is pretty good, imo. Host Jimmy Kimmel took the high road by not doing a “Glazer? I hardly know ‘er!” joke right after to break the tension.
Phew, what else? The rest of the evening sort of pales in comparison to that, doesn’t it? Jimmy Kimmel isn’t the boldest choice of host, but damned if he didn’t do a great job. The monologue was solid, with some good jokes about Robert Downey Jr. (he used to do drugs!) and Christopher Nolan (he doesn’t use cell phones!). For my money, the high point, even though Kimmel stumbled through the delivery a bit, was him talking about Messi, the dog who had to pretend he’d eaten poison in Anatomy of a Fall. “I haven’t seen a French actor eat vomit like that since Gerard Depardieu,” Kimmel joked.
God damn. That joke goes so hard. Considering Depardieu is a sex creep who fled to Russia (later moving to Dubai after criticizing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, to his slight credit) he makes a pretty safe target. But still. You don’t hear many “drunk who eats his own puke” jokes at the Oscars. Nothing but respect for that one.