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The Oscars (2023)
An... Actual good ceremony? What?
The 2023 Oscar ceremony was... actually good? What? Yeah, I'm shocked too. Especially after last year's disaster (even if the slap did not happen, the 2022 ceremony was awful!).
Jimmy Kimmel surprisingly did a half-decent job at hosting with minimal filler and a pretty solid opener, even if there still was some cringe jokes in the ceremony, especially the cringeworthy "Malala" moment, but there was a lot less bad jokes than usual.
Not a fan of them presenting a trailer for The Little Mermaid in the middle of the ceremony.
As for the winners, most of them were fantastic! I'm so happy with most of the wins. Especially all but one of Everything Everywhere All at Once's wins, Brendan Fraser (The Whale) winning Actor, Top Gun winning Sound, and Avatar: The Way of Water winning VFX, and Naatu Naatu (from RRR) winning Song. These wins were all phenomenal and monumental!
The wins I'm not happy with are Jamie Lee Curtis' winning Supporting Actress over Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin), Pinocchio winning Animated Feature over Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Navalny winning Documentary Feature over... any of the other nominees, and All Quiet on the Western Front winning Production Deisgn and Score over Babylon.
The rest of the wins, including Black Panther: Wakanda Forever winning Costume Design, All Quiet on the Western Front winning Cinematography and International Feature, and The Whale winning Makeup/Hairstyling, were all good wins.
Most of the speeches were great too! Ke Huy Quan, Brendan Fraser, and Michelle Yeoh's speeches were especially fantastic and legitimately uplifting!
Honestly, a good ceremony. One of the very few I've seen. The only one I've seen on par with this is the 2020 ceremony where Parasite swept, and that one did have more cringe in the ceremony (especially the Cats reference... yuck).
The Oscars (2020)
The Best Oscars Ceremony in the Past 10 Years
Honestly, some of the best winners in all of the Oscars history were in this ceremony.
Parasite sweeping was absolutely deserved, and even to this day, monumental. There was no need for any competition in the categories it won. It also should have won Film Editing over Ford v. Ferrari, in my opinion.
Joaquin Phoenix (Joker) winning Actor, as well as the film winning Score, was absolutely deserved too.
Renee Zellweger (Judy) gave a great performance, but it absolutely should have been Scarlett Jóhannsson (Marriage Story).
Brad Pitt (OUATIH) winning Supporting Actor was a great win, and the film absolutely EARNED that Production Design win.
Laura Dern (Marriage Story) was an okay win, but I would have given it to Florence Pugh (Little Women).
Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi) winning Adapted Screenplay was very exciting! Granted, any of the nominees (except the Oscar bait that was The Two Popes) could have won, but still.
Toy Story 4 for Animated Feature is kind of a dumb win, although it is a great film, the winner should have easily been Klaus. Hair Love for Animated Short is actually exciting, though!
American Factory for Documentary Feature is completely undeserved (I don't even think it deserved the nomination), it should have been Honeyland or For Sama.
1917's three wins; Cinematography, Sound Mixing, and Visual Effects were absolutely deserved.
Ford v Ferrari and 1917 splitting the Sound categories was a great choice.
Little Women winning Costume Design was somewhat deserved, but only because the other nominees weren't all that great. If Rocketman wasn't completely snubbed for Costume Design, that should have won over Little Women.
Speaking of Rocketman (which was severely snubbed for several other categories), the Song win was deserved.
Bombshell winning makeup was well-deserved too, even if I dislike the movie.
Still, what keeps this from being a truly great ceremony, besides a few undeserved wins, is the comedy. The academy did their damndest to have the presenters make horrendously unfunny, cringeworthy jokes. Wiig and Rudolph trying too hard to be funny and failing miserably was especially egregious, and so was the entire "Cats" segment. It was embarrassing! Otherwise, this was the best Oscar ceremony in the past 10 years.
94th Oscars (2022)
Abysmal, REGARDLESS of Will Smith
Regardless of Will Smith, this was a disaster. Seriously. Even if what happened with Will Smith didn't happen, this was a disaster of a ceremony.
They cut eight categories for time but added in so much filler it ended up much longer than last year's ceremony anyway.
They pretended they'd perform the popular "We Don't Talk About Bruno" only to turn it into a terrible, obnoxious self-celebratory song parody that disrespected the original cast and the song itself.
The "Top 5" moments, which were so obviously rigged and hijacked, should not have happened, and should never be considered again.
Amy Schumer and Regina Hall gave some of the worst comedy I've seen at the Oscars, ever. Some of the most unfunny and uninteresting comedy I've seen, ever even. Wanda Sykes was okay but she wasn't funny either.
Some of the presenters said some things that bothered me, especially that speech before Animated Feature which was incredibly disrespectful.
CODA winning Best Picture was not a terrible thing, honestly; it was a good movie in my opinion, even if I disagree with the win. That said, it was odd to me since it was the first time in well over 70 years that a film with less than five nominations, no Director nom, and no Film Editing nom, won Best Picture. Of all the movies to break that record, why CODA? Seems like an odd choice. The winner, in my opinion, should have been Dune.
All in all, a disaster of a broadcast. I'm most likely not watching next year's ceremony without a fundamental re-evaluation from the people behind the ceremony.
The extra star is for some of the wins being very well-deserved. Here is what I think of each win:
The six Oscars that went to Dune; Score, Sound, Production Design, Cinematography, Film Editing, and Visual Effects, all of which were absolutely deserved. This was a highlight of the night,
As said before, Dune should have won Best Picture.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car) should have won Director.
Benedict Cumberbatch (The Power of the Dog) should have won Actor.
Kristen Stewart (Spencer) should have won Actress.
Troy Kotsur (CODA) deserved his win for sure.
Ariana DeBose (West Side Story) absolutely earned that win. Also my favorite acceptance speech of the night!
The Worst Person in the World (Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier) should have won Original Screenplay.
Dune (Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, and Eric Roth) should have won Adapted Screenplay.
The Mitchells vs the Machines should have won Animated Feature. Also, the presenters gave an extremely disrespectful jab at the medium of animation!
Drive My Car (Japan) EARNED the obvious win for International Feature.
Flee should have won Documentary Feature.
No comment on the three short film categories, I didn't watch any of the nominees.
"No Time to Die" (from No Time to Die) was a very well-deserved win.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye arguably deserved Makeup and Hairstyling, but Dune could have won as well and I would have been happy.
Cruella was an okay win for Costume Design, but Dune also would have been a good win.
Overall, a terrible ceremony; a disastrous presentation, and even the wins were a mixed bag!
The 93rd Oscars (2021)
I at least appreciate the wins?
So... the Oscars were quite the complicated mess this year.
First, I'll be positive.
Honestly, this batch of Oscars actually had a lot of really great and well-deserved wins, in my opinion, and I hold this opinion because... well, I actually SAW a lot of the movies nominated and actually paid attention to the performance. If you actually put the effort into watching the movies, you would see just about all of the nominations this year were well deserved, "woke" or not.
Case of point, Anthony Hopkins (The Father), without exaggeration, gave his best performance since The Silence of the Lambs, and deserved winning Actor over Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom) any day of the week, the latter's tragic passing aside.
Category fraud aside, Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah) was easily the best of the Supporting Actor nominees. I mean, yeah, he was arguably the lead in that movie, but whatever.
Youn Yuh-Jung (Minari) deserved her Supporting Actress win wholeheartedly (you anti-woke losers can die mad, I cannot care that she's Asian, she deserved it. Plus, it was an actual supporting role).
The Father winning Adapted Screenplay was also very exciting.
For the first time in years, a Disney/Pixar film actually deserved to win Animated Feature with Soul. That was also a well deserved win for Score.
Sound of Metal winning Sound was predictable yet inspired. Also for the first time in years, the correct winner won Film Editing! That's a rarity.
That said, here are my only big win disagreements (NOTE: I'm leaving the short film wins out of this because... I really don't care about those categories, to be honest):
Promising Young Woman winning Original Screenplay was my biggest disappointment. I saw it coming, no doubt, but the winner should have gone to Minari. Sound of Metal and Judas and the Black Messiah would have also been a much better win than Promising Young Woman. A good movie for sure, but not nearly as well-written script-wise as the three aforementioned movies.
Cinematography going to Mank was also a huge disappointment. NOMADLAND WAS RIGHT THERE! Mank's cinematography doesn't even look authentic to me, honestly. I do 100% agree with Mank winning Production Design, however.
The Oscar for Song going to that end credits song from Judas and the Black Messiah (I forgot the song's name) was also not well-deserved at all. Definitely should have been Husavik from Eurovision Song Contest.
Finally, while I'm not surprised at this, Best Picture going to Nomadland was not well deserved. Director for Chloe Zhao? 100% well-deserved. Actress for Frances McDormand? Yeah, sure, why not. But, The Father definitely should have won this, that was not only my favorite film of the nominees, but it was easily my favorite film of 2020. Nomadland deserved to be nominated, but it should not have won.
Otherwise, I completely agree with, or at the very least, completely understand the wins in every other category (barring the short film categories since I didn't watch any of those nominees).
ALL THIS BEING SAID: Let me explain why my score is low, despite giving all this amount of credit to the well-deserved wins.
Simply put, the ceremony was EXCRUCIATINGLY BORING! The way everything was presented was extremely stale, awkward, poorly staged, and unprofessional.
None of the acceptance speeches were good. Some of the speeches were outright terrible, honestly.
The decision to not show clips or play the score of the film that won or announce whether it was the first Oscar to a winner or not was IDIOTIC and made the ceremony unbearable. Sure, there wasn't a lot of cringey comedy, but it didn't make a difference.
Whoever thought to re-arrange the presenting of Actor and Actress... just to cut the ceremony short, and, to make matters worse, not honor Anthony Hopkins because he was not Chadwick Boseman, is an idiot.
I'll be blunt, I WANTED to love the Oscars this year. If I were rating it based on the winners alone, it would be a solid 8/10. The ceremony alone? A 1/10. So let's compromise and give it a 4/10.
So yeah, despite a lot of well-deserved wins, this year was a bust.