The 97th Academy Awards, held Sunday to honor films released in 2024, was a fairly unremarkable, quiet ceremony. Compared to the past few years, one would be forgiven if they called it unexciting. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems this awards cycle has been a bit of a slower one, and the event itself reflected that. It wasn’t bad, of course — I actually quite enjoyed the show, I was, for the most part, happy with the winners.
Like any Academy Awards ceremony however, there were ups and downs. There were winners that deserved to win, losers that didn’t deserve to lose and great films that deserved recognition. This is just the nature of the game; it’s never going to be completely perfect. Wouldn’t it be incredibly uninteresting if it were?
With all that being said, here are my four biggest takeaways — two good, two bad — from this year’s Oscars.
“Anora,” and Sean Baker, won big. Good.
If it were entirely up to me, I think I would’ve given the Academy Award for Best Picture to Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” a film that really just feels like a great American epic in so many ways. But the moment “Anora” won the award for Best Film Editing, and then Best Original Screenplay, I knew it had the biggest prize in the bag, and I was completely okay with that.
Baker’s picture won the Palme d’Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, a prestigious enough award that doesn’t always translate over to Oscars night. In fact, there’s very little about “Anora” that qualifies it as your typical Academy favorite: an independent film about the volatile marriage between a stripper and the son of a Russian oligarch is hardly the sort of project you’d usually associate with Hollywood’s biggest night. It’s a film with a non-conventional, low-budget, tenacious aesthetic that rejects mainstream filmmaking approaches.
The fact it won Best Picture and Sean Baker went home with four awards, signifies the increasing importance and power of independent cinema in a time when the mainstream is becoming ever more homogeneous. “Anora” is a film that speaks to the artistic, cultural and political anxieties of the moment. In my opinion, it might be the best film to have won the award for Best Picture since “Parasite,” another truly progressive choice which dominated the show in 2019.
The Academy still hates the first half of the year.
For what it’s worth, my favorite film of last year was Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers” which didn’t receive a single Oscar nomination. Now, to be fair, I understand that a film being my personal favorite doesn’t necessarily make it the best of the year — in no world would I have expected “Challengers” to take home Best Picture or for Guadagnino to take home Best Director. But the fact it didn’t even get a nomination for any of the technical categories — cinematography, editing, original score for crying out loud — was and still is disappointing.
The Oscars ceremony is essentially one celebrating the last few months of the previous calendar year, the time when all the prestige films worth anything come out. The major exception to this was “Dune: Part Two,” which was originally released in March. I was very happy with the recognition Denis Villeneuve’s sequel received — it even garnered a couple of awards! — but, still, I wish this same enthusiasm would’ve been levied at other deserving films which just so happened to come out earlier in the year.
Conan O’Brien, as expected, was a fantastic host.
For the past two years, Jimmy Kimmel has hosted the ceremony and, even ignoring my personal thoughts on his humor, the same schtick multiple years in a row is tiring. Conan O’Brien, an already very funny guy as it is, had an advantage already. But he really just nailed it with his particular brand of total absurdity that seemed simultaneously out of the ordinary for the Oscars stage and right at home.
O’Brien is the sort of comedian who’s successful just by being himself: his current jokes are really just a natural evolution of the intellectually idiotic jokes he was writing for “The Simpsons” back in the early ‘90s. He hasn’t changed, and God bless him for it.
The Academy, as always, also really hates genre films.
I’ve already mentioned how “Dune: Part Two” was an anomaly in the Academy’s usual preference for late-year fare, but it’s also an outlier in the fact that it’s a science-fiction film. It’s been acknowledged for quite some time that the Academy rarely awards genre films — specifically, films that are science fiction, horror or otherwise defined almost entirely by their genre — in any meaningful sense. That rings true this year too.
“Nosferatu” received plenty of nominations, including for Best Makeup and Hairstyling and Best Production Design, and went home with zero awards, though I’d argue it more than deserved either of the ones I just mentioned. Other great genre films from last year, including “I Saw the TV Glow” or “Longlegs,” got no acknowledgement at all from the Academy. Of course, this isn’t to say these films are better than, say, “Anora” or “The Brutalist” or any of the others nominated for the top awards. But there are 23 awards given out every year and some of them, like Best Visual Effects or Best Makeup and Hairstyling, are prime categories for films like these.
This year was just less exciting than last year, but that’s fine.
The 96th Academy Awards, honoring films from 2023, was insanely packed. Each of the Best Picture nominees — especially, but not limited to, “Oppenheimer,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Poor Things” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” — were some of the best films of the past decade, if not the entire 21st century. The race was genuinely tight, and I remember actually being on the edge of my seat watching the ceremony. It was just a fantastic year for the movies.
There was little of that this year. Other than a few movies here and there, there were very few awards I was excited for or even particularly passionate about. And while I would’ve, of course, rather have been as thrilled as I was last year, I’m not particularly upset that I wasn’t. There was no shortage of good films last year, even if they weren’t all nominated for an award. The Oscars isn’t the be-all-end-all of film discourse and it shouldn’t be treated as such. Nevertheless, it’s also okay to have a slower year every so often: quality and quantity aren’t always going to line up like they did in 2023, and as long as there’s quality movies at all I’m going to be happy.
