The 92nd Academy Awards Was Inspired, Brazen, and Baffling

The shortest movie awards season in history wrapped up tonight with an entertaining show that featured fabulously deserving upsets in the top categories, some genuinely hilarious and heartfelt moments, and some truly bizarre musical numbers.

The Winners

My Personal Take

• The biggest story of the night by far was the astonishing, historic, and richly deserving upset of Parasite in Best Picture and Best Director over 1917. Not only was 1917 heavily favored because it is a more traditional choice (a blockbuster war epic helmed by a previous winner for Best Director) but it won nearly every major Best Picture award during the season, including the BAFTA, the Producers Guild of America award, and the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture — Drama. Parasite’s sole top win prior tonight came during its surprise (and also historic) win for Best Ensemble at the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards last month. It is the first film not in the English language to win Best Picture and the first Korean film to win an Oscar of any kind. Although I sincerely hoped it would win — it was by far my favorite film of last year — I did not predict it to, opting to go for the safe choice after my heart was a little bit broken by Roma losing to Green Book last year. (Although admittedly, 1917 was a far, far better film than Green Book and if it had won it would not have been a travesty of any sort.)

• Although it would have been nice to see an upset in the acting categories, there was no denying these enormous locks. I found three of them to be very deserving winners, as Renee Zellweger, Brad Pitt, and Laura Dern gave three of my favorite performances of the year in the roles that won them their Oscars tonight. I was not a fan of Phoenix’s work in Joker (or the film as a whole), but it was definitely a committed and commanding performance that is admired by many people. Also, he gave two of my favorite performances of the 2000s in Gladiator and Walk the Line, so I can’t begrudge him a win as an actor. Next year, though, it would be nice to see a little more heat in the acting races (like last year when Olivia Colman and Regina King were far from sure things come Oscar night).
• The remainder of the awards were all fairly predictable, but quite deserving. Even though I didn’t like Joker, I loved its winning score. Little Women did brilliantly detailed work with its period costumes. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood meticulously recreated LA in the late 1960s. The group that turned Charlize Theron so convincingly into Megyn Kelly definitely deserved their makeup Oscar. And it’s hard to begrudge the technically marvelous 1917 or Ford v. Ferrari any of their wins. As for Best Original Song, Sir Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s winning ditty was far, far from their best work but it was a fairly weak lineup to begin with.
• Despite missing the top two categories (I predicted 1917 to narrowly edge out Parasite in both) I correctly guessed 19 out of the 24 categories (79%). This was a nice improvement over the 17 I correctly predicted last year.

Click here to read my preview of the ceremony and my predictions in all 24 categories.

12 Interesting Facts and Figures about the Winners (and non-winners)

1. As mentioned above, Parasite became the first film not in the English language to win Best Picture.
2. Bong Joon-ho tied Walt Disney’s record of winning four Oscars in one night.
3. Parasite co-producer Kwak Sin-ae became the first woman of color ever to win the Best Picture Oscar.
4. Since the advent of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards and Critics’ Choice Awards in the mid-1990s, only twice have all five major film acting awards granting bodies (Oscars, BAFTA, Golden Globes, SAG, and Critics’ Choice) made identical decisions. It happened in 2017 with Gary Oldman, Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, and Allison Janney and it happened tonight with Phoenix, Zellweger, Pitt, and Dern.
5. Brad Pitt joins George Clooney and Michael Douglas on the very short list of people who have won Oscars for both acting and producing. Pitt won Best Supporting Actor this year and Best Picture for 12 Years a Slave; George Clooney won Best Supporting Actor for Syriana and Best Picture for Argo; Michael Douglas won Best Actor for Wall Street and Best Picture for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
6. Laura Dern managed to accomplish what neither of her parents have (at least yet) by winning an Oscar. She is now 1-for-3 while her mother Diane Ladd (who was her date to the ceremony) is 0-for-3 and her father Bruce Dern (who appeared in Best Picture nominee Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood) is 0-for-2.
7. Renee Zellweger became the 13th actor to win both a lead and supporting acting Oscar. She joins Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, Ingrid Bergman, Jack Lemmon, Cate Blanchett, Denzel Washington, Jessica Lange, Robert DeNiro, Gene Hackman, Maggie Smith, Helen Hayes, and Kevin Spacey.
8. Joaquin Phoenix became the second actor to win an Oscar for playing the role of the Joker (after The Dark Knight’s Heath Ledger). Thus, the Joker joins Vito Corleone as the only character in cinema history to win two different actors an Oscar (Marlon Brando won for playing the elder Vito in The Godfather, while Robert DeNiro won for playing Vito earlier in his life in The Godfather Part II).
9. Taika Waititi became the first indigenous person to win a writing Oscar (and I would guess, but am not sure, the first indigenous person to win an Oscar in any of the top 8 categories).
10. With his 15th loss tonight, composer Thomas Newman is now in a three-way tie for second place as the most nominated person in Oscar history without a win. The only person with more losses? Sound mixer Greg P. Russell, with 16. (But he has an Emmy for his work on Muppet Babies, so that’s something.)
11. With Greta Gerwig and Krysty Wilson-Cairns losses in the screenplay categories tonight, the 2010s becomes the first decade since the 1960s (!!!!) where not a single woman won a writing Oscar.
12. Of the 9 Best Picture nominees, 8 won at least 1 Oscar — Parasite won 4, 1917 won 3, Once Upon a Time… won 2, Joker won 2, Ford v. Ferrari won 2, and Little Women, Jojo Rabbit, Marriage Story each one 1. Only The Irishman was completely shut out, going 0-for-10. The Academy has definitely trended toward spreading the wealth versus the clean sweeps that dominated in the 80s, 90s, and 00s.

The Show

I found the show to to be significantly more enjoyable than last year’s telecast. Certainly the fact that I had the exact opposite reaction to the top wins as I did last year biased me, but I also think the show was just more fun. (I don’t know if that’s a common consensus or not as I refused to look at social media or reviews on news outlets before posting my thoughts.) The opening was bold, the presenters were well-selected, there were actual moments of spontaneity, and even the most bizarre musical moments were at least … surprising. Here I break down what worked and what didn’t.

The electrifying opening. I’m intrigued by how the pitch for the opening number went… “What if we had a famously outspoken queer black woman (Janelle Monae) dress up as Mr. Rogers on a recreation of his set and then break into an electrifying funk-rock number featuring back up dancers dressed in costumes representing the years films that involves lying in the aisles and some assistance from an equally fabulous queer black man (Billy Porter)?” Perhaps they went a bit bolder than usual out of their desire to grab headlines and young viewers amidst continual ratings declines. Perhaps it was because they were so desperate not to be continually criticized for the lack of diversity among their honorees. Regardless of the reason, the Academy certainly gets points from me for risk-taking. However, it must be said that it only worked because of Janelle Monae’s consummate skill as an actress, singer, and all-around performer. When does she get her Oscar nomination?

The musical number was followed by a brief monologue from “non-hosts” Steve Martin and Chris Rock, two remarkably gifted comedians who each have hosted the Oscars in the past. They got some sharp jabs in and some big laughs, but they ran out of steam quickly and spent a bit too long belaboring the same themes of the Oscars ignoring black people and women filmmakers that Janelle Monae already did more skillfully in her opening. Also, there was a lot to celebrate in film this year, including that it was a landmark year for foreign cinema and representation of Asians on screen. To reduce the whole thing to “There was only one black acting nominee!” is a bit reductionistic and disappointing (even though the lack of racial diversity in the acting nominees is still very much a problem.)

The well-chosen presenters. A large part of the reason that the show worked much better for me this year is because of what a good job they did with the presenters. Sure I could have done without them bringing people out on stage to present the people who were then going to present awards (a colossal waste of time and supremely awkward), but for the most part the producers reduced awkward banter by either having a well-selected pair with some pre-arranged shtick or solo presenters. Among the highlights were Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph (who were easily the night’s comic MVPs), Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell (who knocked it out of the park as you would expect), Rebel Wilson and James Corden (who got the second biggest jaw drop of the night when they came on stage in character from their much-maligned box office disaster Cats to present Best Visual Effects), and Diane Keaton and Keanu Reeves (who did an endearing but baffling — and presumably unrehearsed — bit where they talked over each other reminiscing about their Oscar nominated 2003 film Something’s Gotta Give). The other presenter combinations — Ray Romano and Sandra Oh; Oscar Isaac and Salma Hayek; Natalie Portman and Timothee Chalamet; Shia LaBeouf and Zack Gottsagen; and Sigourney Weaver, Gal Gadot, and Brie Larson — all worked fine and mostly managed to avoid cringe inducing banter. Meanwhile, the lone presenters kept it mercifully brief and included legends like Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee, and Jane Fonda (who was selected to present Best Picture). The only presenter moments I struggled with were Josh Gad’s flat jokes and Utkarsh Ambudkar’s unnecessary rap. Oh, and as always, Olivia Colman proved why she should be on every awards show.

The mostly overblown musical performances (and that absolutely bizarre appearance by Eminem). Whereas the presenters were great, the musical performances were decidedly less so. Of the five Best Original Song nominees, only one stood out. Cynthia Erivo’s gospel-fueled “Stand Up” from Harriet featured a roof-shattering vocal performance and was well-staged. The rest were middling with Idina Menzel’s “Into the Unknown,” Sir Elton John’s “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again,” Randy Newman’s “I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away,” and Chrissy Metz’s “I’m Standing With You” being nearly instantly forgettable. (Although the rendition of “Into the Unknown” does get bonus points for ambition given that it assembled nine women who have performed the role of Elsa in Frozen in foreign countries to join her.)

There were two additional musical performances, which along with the five Best Original Song nominees and Janelle’s opening number brings us to eight. My take is that eight musical numbers is far too many for a show that has very little to do with music. One was the annual “In Memoriam” segment, which featured Billie Eilish covering the Beatles’s “Yesterday.” The 18-year-old, who just a couple of weeks ago became only the second artist in history to win the top four Grammys in a single night, did a serviceable but unspectacular job. (On a side note, that segment was interesting for how it began and ended by highlighting two recently deceased icons with high profile sexual assault allegations against them — Kobe Bryant and Kirk Douglas.)

But no moment of the night was more baffling than when Antony Ramos introduced Lin Manuel Miranda who introduced a vaguely entertaining but pointless clip package of famous music moments in non-musical movies, only to end in an extended clip of Eminem’s 8 Mile leading into a full performance of the song “Lose Yourself” by Eminem himself on the Oscar stage. The mystery of why the Best Original Song Oscar winner from the 75th Academy Awards (which was not performed on stage that year as Eminem refused to attend the show) was performed at the 92nd Academy Awards with no remotely logical explanation will likely be one of the great Oscar mysteries of the 21st century. Also, Eminem is a highly problematic person with a history of extreme misogyny, homophobia, and violence-promotion. I rock out to “Lose Yourself” on the treadmill as much as anyone, but it doesn’t need an Oscar showcase.

The entertaining speeches. As for the speeches, none were all time classics, but only one was a cringe-inducing disaster for me. That would be Joaquin Phoenix’s long-winded, twitchy rant that combined his passionate anger about artificial bovine insemination (yes, you read that right) with a non-apology “apology” for being so difficult to work with and nary a single mention of any of his collaborators or loved ones. But Bong Joon-ho, Renee Zellweger, Brad Pitt, Laura Dern, Taika Waititi, Sir Elton John, and virtually all of the other winners seemed over the moon for their wins and gave truly heartfelt speeches.

My hopes for next year are that the Oscars stick with the format of brilliant comedian pairs and solo industry legends for awards presentations, significantly reduce the amount of musical numbers, and maintain the good taste that led to the year’s best film actually winning the top awards.

The Winners (in order of presentation):

Best Supporting Actor: Brad Pitt, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

Best Animated Feature: Toy Story 4

Best Animated Short: Hair Love

Best Original Screenplay: Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won, Parasite

Best Adapted Screenplay: Taika Waititi, Jojo Rabbit

Best Live Action Short: The Neighbor’s Window

Best Production Design: Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

Best Costume Design: Little Women

Best Documentary Feature: American Factory

Best Documentary Short Subject: Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl)

Best Supporting Actress: Laura Dern, Marriage Story

Best Sound Editing: Ford v. Ferrari

Best Sound Mixing: 1917

Best Cinematography: 1917

Best Film Editing: Ford v. Ferrari

Best Visual Effects: 1917

Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Bombshell

Best International Feature Film: Parasite

Best Original Score: Joker

Best Original Song: “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again,” Rocketman

Best Director: Bong Joon-ho, Parasite

Best Actor: Joaquin Phoenix, Joker

Best Actress: Renee Zellweger, Judy

Best Picture: Parasite

To find out who I thought SHOULD win check out my deep dive into the four acting races and the screenplay, directing, and Best Picture races.

Follow the author of this article on Medium and Twitter.

Check out my other awards show articles on last year’s Oscars and this year’s Golden Globe Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards, and Primetime Emmys.

Check out my reviews of the following winners: Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood and Marriage Story