An Oscars Night Divided Against Itself

Although Oscar night’s clear victor, Sean Baker’s “Anora,” received awards in five categories, all major—Best Picture, Actress, Directing, Editing, and Original Screenplay—its producers were the biggest winners, because the underlying subject of the evening’s festivities was production. All three of the film’s producers—Baker, Samantha Quan (his partner), and Alex Coco—made acceptance speeches, and they all emphasized that theirs was an independent production ( a budget of six million dollars and a crew of about forty, according to Coco) and a labor of love and devotion. In this, it was far from alone. “The Brutalist,” made independently for about ten million dollars, won three awards; its lead, Adrien Brody, won Best Actor, and the movie also took home the prizes for Original Score and Cinematography. “A Real Pain,” shot for about three million dollars, brought Kieran Culkin the statuette for Best Supporting Actor. Even the mighty Pixar fell to an independent animated feature, “Flow,” made for about four million dollars by the Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis with what he has called a core crew of “two or three.”

A good night for independent film is not at all unprecedented; indeed, it has been a notable trend of the past decade, as evidenced by three awards out of eight nominations for “Moonlight,” in 2017, and three out of six for “Nomadland,” in 2021. But, in the context of the ceremony itself, these apparent triumphs actually highlight the paradoxes and conflicts that are threatening the economic foundations of independent filmmaking, and which pose a painful conundrum to the producers and other movie people, in Hollywood and around the world, who constitute the Academy’s voting membership. Conan O’Brien, as spontaneous and energetic a host as the ceremony has had in years, emphasized that the broadcast was being watched by a billion people around the world. Yet the only Best Picture nominees this year with box-office returns of such imposing scale, “Wicked” and “Dune: Part Two” (each over seven hundred million dollars to date), went home with only design and technical awards, respectively—recognition for the elements that cost conspicuous money.

In other words, the most important Oscars went to movies that few viewers of the broadcast had seen. But, while the awards steered clear of glitz, the Oscar ceremony is nothing if not glitzy. Like the franchise films and crowd-pleasing I.P. that the Academy largely spurns, the show is a big-budget production so gaudy and overblown, so calculating in its precise doses of emotion and glamour, that it is by now

borderline unwatchable. Just as tentpole movies are tested and managed to death, the Oscars have bent themselves into contortions to meet what executives have determined that audiences at home want. The ceremony’s running too long? O.K., speed it up: keep the presenters’ shticks short, cut off acceptance speeches with draconian force, and keep the (usually elderly) winners of honorary Oscars offstage altogether, shunting them to a rump ceremony held out of public view before the New Year. But don’t go so fast that there’s no room to put on a show (because how much fun are talking heads, however famous?). So, make sure to perform the songs and then find excuses for more and more bombastic production numbers. In one such, O’Brien sang emphatically and repeatedly, “I won’t waste time,” and it was a complete waste of time.

The result is that the heart of the evening—that is, the chance to see big-time movie people be something like themselves for more than the length of a sound bite or a thank-you list—feels ever more rushed and perfunctory, as if the show were apologizing for what it fundamentally is. And with every tweak, the ceremony becomes more denatured, more synthetic, less jovial, less personable, less truly celebratory. With the forced cheer of its hectic pace, it has all the warmth and charm of an urgent-care visit. There’s little humanity to a statuette handed over nervously in the stern face of a ticking clock, producers tapping their feet in the wings.

When Sean Baker accepted his Best Directing award, from Quentin Tarantino, he exhorted filmmakers, distributors, and viewers to embrace movie theatres, for the sake of “a communal experience you simply don’t get at home.” In one bit of filmed comedy, O’Brien introduced a handful of streaming customers to the novel concept of CinemaStreams, a building in which the streaming is done for them, live and large scale—of course, a movie theatre. Yet the movies that are winning Oscars aren’t drawing large audiences to theatres. I, too, love going to the movies, but the effort to reach wide audiences with niche movies is akin to exhorting readers to buy printed newspapers and magazines; it’s an appeal to nostalgia.

That may be why the success of independent films at this year’s Oscars is, for the most part, only a semblance of progress. The big winners may have been made on stringent budgets and under stressful conditions, but they’re aesthetically conservative—not an advance in cinematic form but a throwback to the earnest realism and the sentimental humanism that was long the domain of Hollywood rather than of the most advanced art-house cinema. There’s no guarantee that a small-scale and realistic film, made by an artist who’s passionately devoted to the project, will be better—more imaginative, more inspired, more original, even more personal—than one made on a big budget with a high level of artifice. That prejudice cost one of the most distinctive films of recent years, “Barbie,” the acclaim it deserved, whereas the dutifully dramatic “Oppenheimer” scored big.

There’s not much style of note in “Anora,” “The Brutalist,” or “A Real Pain,” but such films have the advantage of not needing one: to satisfy their intended audience, all they need is a good script and good actors that can be filmed delivering it. A film of spectacle, by contrast, requires style, and style isn’t a matter of intention—it’s much more closely tied to the personality and the very being of a filmmaker than is the story or the theme. That’s why it’s so hard to direct an original and enduringly outstanding musical, comedy, or fantasy, and why it’s much harder to create a satisfyingly showy Oscar ceremony than it would be to offer a more substantive, human-level, leisurely, talky, authentically spontaneous one. Just like a big-budget cinematic spectacle, when the Oscar ceremony fails, as it did last night, it fails big.

My biggest surprise was Mikey Madison’s win for Best Actress, which I’d expected Demi Moore to win, for her performance in the French director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance.” The result cruelly reflects the subject of Fargeat’s film, a science-fiction fantasy about the ageism that actresses face in Hollywood. Moore stars as an award-winning actress in her fifties, who, no longer getting movie roles, works as the host of a TV exercise show, and, after losing even that gig because of her age, takes the substance of the movie’s title—a rejuvenating drug with, um, potential side effects. Moore’s performance and Madison’s are both admirable; neither is given all that much substantive character to express, but Moore brings far more force of personality to her role and flings herself thrillingly into her movie’s far wilder physical action. I consider Moore to be an actress in the melodramatic mode of Joan Crawford, but in a new Hollywood era that has been comparatively poor in female-centered melodramas. That’s why she has hardly had the acclaim or the roles she deserves. I was sure that she’d win on the basis of the accurate industrial and social criticism built into “The Substance,” and I hoped that such a win would help her get cast in a far wider range of films. But, last night, life didn’t follow art: youth was served.

As for the exaltation of independence at the Oscars, I found it far less vivid in the major awards than in a single moment, when the nominees for Best Cinematography were announced, and the camera briefly showed one of them, the venerable Ed Lachman, nominated for “Maria.” It’s not a very good film, but Lachman is the very exemplar of modern independent filmmaking—not just because of his skill at working wonders on low budgets but because he has advanced the vision of such filmmakers as Paul Schrader, Steven Soderbergh, Sofia Coppola, Todd Haynes, Shirley Clarke, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Robert Altman, Todd Solondz, and Jean-Luc Godard. He has been nominated three times before, but I found his presence at the ceremony last night, at a time when the very movement to which his career has been devoted came away with honors, especially moving—as if he were watching younger members of his own artistic family thrive.

The successes of “Anora,” “The Brutalist,” and “A Real Pain” open the door a bit wider to filmmakers of comparably bold ambition on thin budgets. Even if they don’t mark advances in the art of cinema, they represent a higher profile, a larger scope of action, for the domain that has indeed long been the main engine of cinematic progress, namely, independent filmmaking. The Academy’s readiness to uphold it as the avatar of the industry’s ambitions and ideals, despite its modest commercial prospects, does represent a degree of progress, albeit one that’s nearly smothered, in style and substance, by the stiflingly contrived ceremony itself. ♦