Some Post-Oscars Takeaways

Tyler Coates' final Considerations column before tapping out for the season.

It only took 10 movies, but Paul Thomas Anderson is now, finally, an Oscar winner—a three-time winner in one night no less, with One Battle After Another picking up a total of six Academy Awards including best picture, director, supporting actor, adapted screenplay, editing, and casting.

Anderson accepted the top prize with producer Sara Murphy. In his speech, Anderson invoked the five best picture nominees from 50 years ago: Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “There is no best among them,” said Anderson. “There is just what that mood might be that day.” One can see remnants of those five films in the 10 that competed for the prize tonight.

While it was a big night for Anderson and One Battle After Another, Sinners went into the event with the record 16 nominations, of which it won four—most notably for original score (three-time winner Ludwig Goransson), original screenplay (Coogler) and cinematography (Autumn Durald Arkapaw). That third win also made history, with Arkapaw being the first woman to win in the category.

Sinners star Michael B. Jordan, a first-time nominee, won best actor just weeks after collecting the same prize at the Actor Awards. It was one of the tightest races of the season (for weeks I’ve run scenarios in my head in which the Oscar could go to Timothee Chalamet, Leonardo Dicaprio, or Wagner Moura). Perhaps Jordan’s SAG victory propelled him to the top of the group, and the standing ovation he received proves there’s a lot of goodwill for Jordan, a former child actor who has been in the industry long enough to make him a veteran at 39.

More predictable was Jessie Buckley’s best actress win for Hamnet, which the Irish actress collected at the end of a long season that saw her collect countless trophies for the film. While it was the only win for Hamnet, it’s an impressive follow-up for Chloe Zhao, who already has two Oscars for Nomadland and has now directed two women to the Oscar for best actress.

The first big win of the night was Amy Madigan’s for Weapons, the kind of exciting moment we hope for at the Oscars. The best supporting actress prize going to an industry legend with a surprising turn in a horror film recalls Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby, and she gave a delightfully wacky speech that loosened up the expectations for the night. “I was in the shower last night trying to think of something to say as I was shaving my legs,” Madigan said about her speech prep. “And I went, ‘[I’ll] have pants on, I don’t have to worry about that.”

Supporting actor went to Sean Penn for One Battle After Another—his third Oscar after winning two best actor prizes for Milk and Mystic River. He gifted the latter to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and didn’t make it to tonight’s ceremony, which gives the impression that he cares little for the awards. (And the fact that he won the Oscar after doing very little campaigning probably means more stars of his stature might not play along with the awards strategists’ plans in the future.)

While it was a big night for Warner Bros., which won a total of 11 Oscars between its three contenders, Netflix still managed to pull a trio of crafts wins for Frankenstein (costume design, makeup and hairstyling, and production design) and two for KPop Demon Hunters (animated feature and original song). The streamer also won prizes for live-action short (The Singers, which tied with Two People Exchanging Saliva and upended Oscar pools across the world) and documentary short. But I’m imagining there are some bad feelings about the outcome of best documentary feature, which went to Mr. Nobody Against Putin instead of The Perfect Neighbor as many expected.

When asked by my editor on Friday what might be the biggest upset of the night, I landed on a possible win for Mr. Nobody Against Putin. My argument: “Against Putin” does more work than any tech giant-backed Oscar campaign can ever do; as a friend and doc branch member told me recently, anything anti-Russia will dominate among European voters—or voters who, well, vote based on the title alone because they’re too busy to actually watch these nominees. But the win did produce one of the more outwardly political speeches of the evening (until Javier Bardem, before reading the scripted remarks about the international feature nominees, announced “No to war, and free Palestine” followed by cheers from the audience).

Among the other single-Oscar winners are F1 for best sound, Avatar: Fire and Ash for best visual effects (which was coincidentally presented by the franchise’s star Sigourney Weaver in a very sweet moment), and The Girl Who Cried Pearls for best animated short. Sentimental Value nabbed the international feature Oscar, an extremely tight race that featured four NEON contenders that all received multiple noms.

As for the show itself? It started with a bang as host Conan O’Brien donned Aunt Gladys drag and was chased through various parody clips of best picture nominees by an army of kids. A spotty monologue with a few bits that didn’t land gave way to an overall messy awards show filled with technical mishaps, rudely cut-short speeches, and bizarre camera angles from the audience. The emotional In Memoriam segment featured Billy Crystal, Rachel McAdams, and Barbra Streisand honoring, respectively, Rob and Michelle Reiner, Diane Keaton, and Robert Redford, with Streisand culminating the package with a performance of the Oscar-winning “The Way We Were.” But it was undercut entirely by sound problems. I don’t expect the show to earn an Emmy nomination this year.

My other gripe is that the show only featured performances from two nominated songs: KPop Demon Hunters’ “Golden” and Sinners’ “I Lied to You.” Both performances were excellent. But despite instructions to scan a QR code to listen to the full five nominated songs (during the commercial break?), not including the other three made it clear that the show’s producers decided that only two were worth presenting to the full audience.

But what’s an Oscars without some complaining afterward? There’s plenty of discourse ahead of us if you didn’t get enough in the last few weeks, but it’s now time for me to tap out. It was a fun season, a long season, with a fairly good outcome. And while some of the big players in the awards space will party tonight and take tomorrow off, the next Oscar season is always looming around the corner.