Every year the immediate aftermath of the televised Oscars ceremony sees the enactment of a dispiriting ritual: lamentation from the film community at how viewing figures for the broadcast are once again continuing on their sharp downward trajectory. 2025 looks set to be no exception; when nervous-seeming host Conan O’Brien boasted of more than a billion people watching worldwide, one can only assume that this number referred to the beginning of the three-and-a-half hours of near complete tedium. By the time we reached Adrien Brody’s acceptance speech for Best Actor for The Brutalist, I would be willing to bet that several noughts had been knocked off the figure.
Hugely deserving as Brody’s win itself was, the speech that he went on to give as he picked up his statuette – after he had taken his chewing gum out of his mouth and thrown it to his girlfriend Georgina Chapman – neatly encapsulated everything that isn’t working about the Oscars now. Despite a supposed 45-second time limit – listening to a succession of often unknown winners thank their agents and their mums never makes for scintillating television – he went on and on, twice pleading for the orchestra’s winding-up music to stop so that he could continue talking.
An initially interesting point – he alluded to a choppy career path after his first Oscar win more than 20 years ago and thus his “awareness it can all go away” – swiftly fizzled out, leaving us instead with nothing but repetition and platitudes.
In what felt like the second hour of this oration, when we willed him to be building up to a big crescendo, he dallied with making a political point, then didn’t. Like so much of the ceremony, bedevilled as it was by tedious standing ovations for every single victor, Brody’s speech was a damp squib instead of the fizzing firework that was so desperately needed.
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Throughout the broadcast, which was strangely devoid of any of the expected Hollywood broadsides against Donald Trump, I kept asking myself the same question: who, exactly, watches the Oscars now? And why? Devoted film fans surely cringe at all the gushing and dreadful musical performances and random pairings of presenters and wait instead to pore over the complete list of winners. Lovers of frocks and flounce can tune in for frolics on the red carpet pre-show and then switch off as soon as the host takes to the stage for his opening monologue.
Strong edicts had obviously been issued when it came to making contentious geopolitical comments, a rule that was flouted only by the Israeli and Palestinian team behind No Other Land, winner of Best Documentary. They made a dig at US foreign policy, but aside from this, blandness ruled, even when Best Supporting Actor winner Kieran Culkin swore at the start of his speech.
The dull evening ground grimly on, O’Brien looked ever more desperate and Anora writer/director Sean Baker kept up his multi-award-winning trot to and from the stage. For those of us watching in the UK in the unforgiving small hours, ever larger doses of caffeine were required to get us through.
It gives me no pleasure to write so disparagingly about the Oscars; after all, a great and varied bunch of films were nominated and the right people took home the prizes, which is by no means a given. But seeing as this is the artform’s big night, when it gets to show itself off to a willing world, it offered a disappointing spectacle to those who were looking to be entertained. As for a pertinent reminder about the magic of the movies, there was nothing of the sort.
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