Everyone knew Jessie Buckley was going to win the Oscar for Best Actress. She has been the darling of this awards season, she has campaigned tirelessly for months, she has won everything going – and rightly so: her Agnes Shakespeare in Hamnet is the performance of a lifetime. Even if – like me – you didn’t love Chloé Zhao’s film, and struggled with how desperately it wants you to break down with the Shakespeares’ grief, the raw, wild, snotty Buckley was faultless.
There was nothing remotely shocking about the moment her name was announced – and at 36 she became the first Irish winner of the award – nor about how charming her speech was.
She thanked her fellow nominees: “I am inspired by your art and your heart, and I want to work with every single one of you.” Her parents: “for teaching us to dream and to never be defined by expectation to carry from your own passion”. Her partner: “I love you, man. I love you. You’re the most incredible dad. You’re my best friend and I want to have 20,000 more babies with you.” Her eight-month-old daughter Isla, “with absolutely no idea what’s going on…and probably dreaming of milk. I love you and I love being your mum and I can’t wait to discover life beside you.” And finally Zhao and Hamnet author and screenwriter Maggie O’Farrell: “To get to know this incandescent woman and the journey to understand the capacity of a mother of love is the greatest collision of my life.”
She concluded, “It’s Mother’s Day in the UK today. So I would like to dedicate this to the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart.”
Caption: Jessie Buckley accepts the Oscar for Best Actress at the 98th Academy Awards (Photographer: Mike Blake/REUTERS)It was not an especially remarkable speech. Not a political one, not a deeply personal one, not grand and pompous and written to be remembered for decades to come – yet because it was sincere, and not totally bland or sycophantic, it ended up the highlight of the night.
This year’s Oscars were a washout. Yes, the right people probably won – Paul Thomas Anderson won Best Director (he’s been nominated for Oscars 14 times before and never won) for the sprawling, genre-flouting One Battle After Another, which also won Best Picture; Michael B Jordan won Best Actor for the underdog horror Sinners. Casting was recognised for the first time, Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman to win the Oscar for best cinematography, and I was pleased to see KPop Demon Hunters clean up.
But there were no controversies, no big surprises, no major snubs (unless you count Best Supporting Actor Sean Penn just not showing up), no silly celebrity nonsense and no memorable or spicy jokes. There wasn’t even much po-faced chat about the state of cinema, the state of America, the state of the planet, or even the significance of the films themselves – what these stories tell us about ourselves and the world. Everyone was just going through the motions and playing it safe – the exception being Javier Bardem’s call of “Free Palestine”.
Paul Thomas Anderson and Sara Murphy accept the Oscar for Best Picture for One Battle After Another (Photo: Frank Micelotta/Disney via Getty Images)Conan O’Brien was an excruciating host (but Britain never has understood his appeal), with an interminable monologue (featuring one weak Prince Andrew gag), a handful of bizarre skits trying to riff on AI, streamers, and TikTok dumbing us down, and a failure to grasp when the camera was on him.
The microphones were broken for the first 90 minutes so it was extremely challenging to hear what anybody was talking about (though given everyone was getting cut off after about 20 seconds for speaking too long, they barely needed them). Unfortunately they were then fixed and the full extent of the backslapping, chummy love-in was unleashed.
Every other award was presented with some celebrity reunion – Avengers, Bridesmaids, Moulin Rouge – which detracted attention from the film or recipient in question, especially when (like Ewan McGregor) they burst into song. The In Memoriam section was naturally very personal, with Billy Crystal, Rachel McAdams and Barbra Streisand all delivering tributes to their deceased friends and colleagues. But this was more protracted than any other I can remember and only added to the impression that this ceremony was insular, “industry”, intended for “film world” insiders detached from the average film lover. Hollywood’s biggest night was a night for Hollywood alone.
Buckley is the antidote to all that. She is more starstruck than starry: a normal-seeming, exceptionally talented woman who seems like a good laugh, does not indulge in celebrity bullshit, has grafted for years since her first appearance on British reality TV and has crafted one of the finest careers of any actor of her generation. Her victory – and simple humility, so heartfelt it had her fellow nominee Emma Stone in tears – just about rescued the 98th Academy Awards from being joyless, tension-free and unwatchable.
The Oscars can’t afford another tiresome, box-ticking mess like this: its prestige already feels on the wane. Just like its films, it needs drama, high stakes, glamour, stories and characters with integrity. Jessie Buckley is one of them and proved tonight that even in showbusiness, where everything runs on fantasy, the greatest connections are always with people and stories that feel real.
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