Oscar Show Catches Hollywood in Transition

Leonard DiCaprio as the drug-hazed revolutionary searching for his daughter in ‘One Battle After Another.’

Still the grandmaster of movie award shows, with some 20 million U.S. viewers and perhaps more in the many countries broadcasting the show, the Academy Awards unfolded on ABC Sunday much as predicted by insiders. But there was a dangerous undertone about the future.

While presenters and winners spoke lovingly about the camaraderie of storytelling and the communal feelings created in movie theaters, they were talking about something departing — the movie theaters themselves. The future appeal of Oscar may well be tied to how the movies are actually seen, where and by whom.

Only a portion of the winning films were seen in movie theaters or multiplex theaters as opposed to home viewing and streaming services. The best jokes of host Conan O’Brien were about skinny movie images on your phone, bizarro scanning techniques and how viewers needed plots explained to them one scene at a time, like children.

Only those who had seen Amy Madigan in her fright wig (long admired in Hollywood, she also won best supporting actress for a horror film, Weapons) would even have gotten O’Brien’s opening joke montage, though it did sneak in an echo of the best picture winner, One Battle After Another, reviewed by Urban Milwaukee.

Indeed, explaining the plots of the winning films was difficult for the artists, even as their financiers were hustling the alternative products.

The Oscars (the annual awards from the now 11,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) have always danced between box office value and artistry. Since I became a film critic in the 1960s, I have been fascinated by the mind meld, guessing which of the two tracks would dominate the wins.

It made my annual guessing game in columns much the same as what the public was doing— there was always technical excellence in both camps, but there were also disappointments as box office fever ruled over clearly better pictures. Looking back— even at some I liked – how can you explain best picture wins for Argo, Green Book, Gladiator, The Artist and others whose reputations have declined with time?

It’s an even stranger game today. The public itself has been diversified by technological changes. So has Oscar itself, in membership, location, studio pull and international spirit. Witness that by 2029, ABC, NBC or CBS will not be battling to show the Oscars. The academy has committed to YouTube.

Summarizing the plots of the two big winners – best picture for One Battle After Another and best actor and other awards for Sinners – doesn’t fit on an index card. Where would you put the former, a clever slapdash adventure about current politics and military power, vs. Sinners, a vampire film pitting Black culture against zombie whites?

Meanwhile, Guillermo del Toro‘s Frankenstein cleaned up in the design categories, but those who caught it probably did so on Netflix.

I never expected the nominated film I thought best of the year would win, because it was not flashy and misadvertised as the secret life of William Shakespeare. It is actually about the role of domestic grief in shaping human tragedy and how those basics are saying something real, but missed by historical scholars, about Shakespeare’s era and impulses.

Still, I would have thrown something at my TV screen if Jessie Buckley had not won for best actress, but beyond that I didn’t expect much ado about Hamnet.

Interestingly, Buckley’s only real Oscar challenge for best actress was Kate Hudson in a familiar but nice showbiz melodrama, Song Sung Blue set in Milwaukee. 

Though the voting took place before Timothée Chalamet put his foot in his mouth with a sideswipe at dance and opera, his campaign for an Oscar for the uneven Marty Supreme was so naked as to turn off voters.

There were several better performances nominated — Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon and the likable Brazilian heartthrob Wagner Moura in Secret Agent. Neither film was strong enough elsewhere to review. And winner Michael B. Jordan did do fine acting in Sinners.

Still, the best actor category was notable for its omissions, including Jesse Plemons‘ strong performance in Bugonia and Paul Mescal in Hamnet.

Bugonia was actually shut out at the Oscars, though Emma Stone was nominated for best actress. Also shut out was Marty Supreme and some fine films I didn’t review — including Train Dreams. Not even nominated, to my surprise, was South Korea’s No Other Choice, a fine film that comically took on the plight of the displaced worker.

On a personal level, I was pleased that after nearly 30 years Oscar went out of its way to recognize director Paul Thomas Anderson, though One Battle After Another, while enjoyable, is not as good as such past offerings as There Will Be Blood or Phantom Thread.

But it was a good year to recognize his talent and how Oscar in the future will have to rely on directors like him who, whatever the genre, create vision and continuity. He is emerging in a world of technology hard to predict, as is the future of the movie business in this new media world.

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find all of his reviews for Urban Milwaukee on this page.