The Oscars are finally over. It was a fine ceremony, I won $100, and Conan O’Brien is quite the host. I don’t know why they didn’t ask him earlier, but I hope he becomes the next Billy Crystal, or… Jimmy Kimmel. How was such a repulsive and aggressively unfunny man allowed to host the Oscars as many times as Kimmel did? He’s a miserable and talentless son of a bitch who even managed to make the Moonlight/La La Land mix up even more awkward and confusing for everyone there that night. O’Brien, on the other hand, is charming, endearing, and, somehow, still funny. The bit with him being crowned King of the Oscars, with an angel ornament flying down towards him on wires, was straight out of his glorious years on Late Night. Everyone jerks off to David Letterman, but O’Brien has the advantage of NEVER grandstanding: he has no high horse, and throughout his time on Late Night, and these past two Oscar ceremonies, he’s been self-deprecating and entertaining in a broad way that most people in Hollywood simply don’t possess anymore.
There were few surprises—save Michael B. Jordan’s Best Actor win, made possible by the industry’s dislike of Timothée “Dead Eyes” Chalamet and liberal millionaires willfully misunderstanding Tourette’s syndrome. Delroy Lindo was on stage next to Jordan that night at the BAFTA’s when John Davidson screamed the N-word at them, and it looks like he expected a sympathy Oscar, as well. He was up against Sean Penn for Best Supporting Actor, and when Penn’s name was called (and the actor was nowhere to be found), Lindo looked miffed, and notably did not clap, another relative rarity as far as the Oscars goes. Do these guys really believe that “words are violence,” or are they just really, really stupid? Maybe it’s a bit of both.
One Battle After Another won Best Picture, but that was no surprise—everyone in Hollywood loves Paul Thomas Anderson, not just for his work, but for the auteur imprimatur he gives them and the dozens of rewrites and tinkering and script doctoring he’s done under the radar his entire career (decades before rewrote Napoleon and Killers of the Flower Moon, he helped Adam McKay and Will Ferrell develop Anchorman, when it was still set in a used car lot under the title August Blowout). It’s been his time ever since One Battle opened last September and only managed to lose Warner Brothers $100 million (an old joke in Hollywood: “Why the long face?” “It’s my turn to produce a Paul Thomas Anderson movie.”) Even if it was for his worst film, I enjoyed watching Anderson’s coronation, with three overdue Oscars awarded in one night.
Despite its poor craftsmanship and bewildering mis-en-scene, Sinners will endure longer than any of the 2020s Best Picture winners. Besides Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is already souring at the same pace as Garden State, there are recent winners that no one saw and no one remembers: Nomadland? CODA? Winners in the global coronavirus pandemic who slipped just as quickly back into the ether. Hamnet, another bad movie, only won Best Actress, but it’ll live on through osmosis and the simple fact that it played in hundreds, if not thousands, of theaters, instead of remaining a streaming exclusive—like Nomadland, Chloé Zhao’s previous film (didn’t remember that?)
Anora and Oppenheimer most resemble winners of the 2000s and 2010s, and, like Sinners, they made some money—in other words, people saw them. Sinners was a sleeper hit in the States, but it had a harder time overseas, like almost all films with largely black casts. In the end, it made $370 million compared to Oppenheimer’s $975 million and Anora’s $59 million. Sinners most resembles previous Best Picture winners like The Silence of the Lambs, Titanic, and The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King—pop hits with at least a scrim of respectability and “class.” Sinners doesn’t touch any of those movies, but, along with A Minecraft Movie, it was the people’s choice last year, and if the Oscars want to continue for another 98 years, maybe they should let the “prestige picture” genre die and allow for a broader slate of films that people actually saw and liked. It may be a lousy movie, but at least Sinners exists in the real world, in movie theaters, unlike CODA and Nomadland.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith