Return to Oz: A 2025 Oscars-Night Diary

Not long ago, I asked The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, whether he’d ever return to the Academy Awards, having attended exactly once. He quoted a saying often attributed to Voltaire, declining a repeat visit to an orgy: “Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.”

That left me a lot to think about, as someone who’d been to the Oscars six times. And on Sunday, I made my seventh trip to the orgy. One thing I love about going to the Oscars is that they’re always the same: the controlled frenzy of the red carpet; the “Jesus Saves” protesters who picket the limos on Highland Avenue; the breathless starlet thanking her “team”; the chocolate lollipops shaped like statuettes they serve at the Governors Ball. Another thing I love is that they’re always different. New people come, in awe of the fact that life has brought them to the Academy Awards. New movies are written into Oscar history. Every once in a while, something truly unhinged happens: a mixed-up envelope, a slap. And if you squint, you can see the subtler shifts, the ones that remind you that Hollywood, like the world, keeps spinning forward.

The ninety-seventh Academy Awards lay at the end of a road filled with scandal and chaos, thanks to the tweets of one Karla Sofía Gascón and other foibles along the way. Los Angeles was reeling from devastating wildfires. But the night itself, when it finally came, was a drama-free lovefest for “Anora,” Sean Baker’s dark-comic caper about a tenacious Brighton Beach lap dancer. It was a triumph for indie cinema, while the major Hollywood studios contented themselves with design wins for having dreamed up Oz and Arrakis. The Academy has become far more international in the past decade, and at times this year’s Oscars felt more like the World Cup, with winners representing Brazil and Latvia and Iran. Outside the Dolby Theatre, the world order was busy falling apart; inside, people in kilts and kimonos and keffiyehs were waiting to see who’d win Best Actress. What better reason to return to the orgy?

My Oscar adventure began with someone whose road to the red carpet may have been the unlikeliest. Clarence (Divine Eye) Maclin served seventeen years in a maximum-security prison, for robbery. He wound up joining a prison theatre program run by Rehabilitation Through the Arts, then played a version of himself in “Sing Sing,” a movie about his experience. He was one of four collaborators nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.

“I’ve been on the Oscar trail eighteen months,” he said, when I met him at his room at the Beverly Wilshire. Maclin was in tuxedo pants, a cummerbund around his waist, and a bow tie—a clip-on, he confessed. (“I’m not ambidextrous.”) His girlfriend, Lisa Evans, whom he’d met at a juice-bar opening in White Plains, was adjusting her bustier in the mirror.

Maclin grew up in Mount Vernon, New York. “I was into the arts. I liked to draw, paint, create things with my hands. However, you know, that don’t sit well with the cool kids,” he said, putting on dress shoes. “So I shut the artist in me down to fit in. I didn’t really get back into the arts until I got into prison.” He was twenty-nine when he entered Sing Sing, “a typical street dude,” he said. Through the theatre program, he acted in around a dozen plays. “I did ‘Oedipus Rex.’ I did ‘Jitney.’ I did ‘Twelve Angry Men.’ And some that we wrote,” he said. He got out in 2012, but stayed involved in R.T.A. The filmmakers Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley approached him and his troupe-mates, including John (Divine G) Whitfield, about making a movie, and they wrote the screenplay in the course of six years. In the movie, Whitfield is played by Colman Domingo, who was nominated for Best Actor.

The awards trail had been exciting for Maclin. At a star-studded event at the Academy Museum, Sheryl Lee Ralph told him, “Close your mouth. You belong here.” Then she introduced him to Tyler Perry and Kim Kardashian. Attending events, he’d bonded with Jeff Goldblum, who was on the trail for “Wicked,” and talked with Jude Law. They’d both played Hamlet: Maclin in Sing Sing, Law on Broadway. “We’re all together on this road,” he said. “I don’t feel like I’m in competition with anyone.” He smiled wide, exposing a joyful snaggle tooth. Was there any overlap between prison and awards season? “Same shark tank, except these sharks got tuxedos and gowns on,” he said.

At noon, Maclin and Evans were picked up in a hulking black S.U.V. “I feel like Cinderella,” Evans said; she’d been studying a “posing-tips expert” on Instagram and had practiced how to position her leg like Taylor Swift. Crossing Sunset Boulevard, we passed a woman holding a sign that read “HOLLYWOOD IS SODOM AND GOMORRAH.” At the checkpoint, a bomb-sniffing dog inspected the car; Maclin had seen worse, security-wise. He gazed out the window and noticed some tents behind a chain-link fence. “There’s still homeless tents, in the midst of all of this glory,” he marvelled. Moments later, they got out, and a greeter in a red suit said, “Welcome to the Oscars.” They’d arrived.

On the red carpet, I bid farewell to Maclin and huddled in a pathway hidden from the photographers. On one side were people from the documentary “No Other Land,” in Palestinian-flag scarves. On the other was Chief Willie Sellars, of the Williams Lake First Nation, who appears in the documentary “Sugarcane.” He was wearing a suit the color of sage, because “back home, that’s what we burn to cleanse the mind, body, spirit.” Around his neck was a medallion made of porcupine quill and buckskin. “This is crazy,” he said.

In the bleachers, I spotted a group of men in military garb. When I asked who they were, they deferred to their top-ranking officer, Lieutenant Colonel Audrey Gboney, a small woman in pinned-back dreadlocks. “We tell the Army’s story to America,” she said. “Today we were invited to be part of the experience of the Oscars, and also the Army is celebrating its two hundredth and fiftieth year.” She reminded me that the Army won an Oscar in 1943, for Frank Capra’s propaganda documentary “Prelude to War”; it’s kept at the Pentagon, another officer told me, after the Army found it for sale on eBay. Brady Corbet, the director of “The Brutalist,” walked by, and an official with a camera yelled out, “Can you give a shout-out to the Army’s birthday?”

“Happy birthday, Army,” Corbet said, perplexed.

I pressed on, past the Glambot, which looks like a deadly robot arm from a “Terminator” movie. Alessandro Nivola, of “The Brutalist,” who was there with his wife, Emily Mortimer, asked me how to find the bar. We walked through a hall swathed in champagne-colored curtains—if you looked behind them, you’d see that this is usually a shopping complex, with a Victoria’s Secret and a Dave & Buster’s. In the lobby, I saw a pair of captains from the Los Angeles Fire Department. They’d achieved V.I.P. status this awards season. “We’ve been making the rounds,” one said. “I went to the Critics Choice and the SAG Awards, and we went to the Grammys after-party.”

I took my seat in the mezzanine. My seatmate was Stuart Walker, who works at National CineMedia, a company that displays pre-show advertisements at movie theatres. He and his wife, Margaret, had come from Chicago, and it was their second time at the Oscars.“It’s nice to see a venue where pomp and circumstance have value still,” Stuart said. Margaret reported that she had seen Mindy Kaling in the bathroom.

The first half an hour of the ceremony was the best: Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, singing from “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Wiz” against a glittering recreation of the L.A. skyline; Conan O’Brien nailing his opening monologue; Kieran Culkin, the Best Supporting Actor winner, dropping an F-bomb in his attempt to compliment his fellow-nominee and “Succession” co-star Jeremy Strong. At one point, Stuart leaned over and whispered, “Somebody’s lit up. I can smell weed.” Wherever it was, someone was really enjoying the tribute to James Bond.

After Zoe Saldaña won Best Supporting Actress—a rare bright moment for “Emilia Pérez,” this year’s problem child—I got restless and slipped out to the downstairs lobby. At an elliptical-shaped bar, Rita Wilson noticed me scribbling in my notebook and told me, “My husband—Tom—has a whole shelf of those from around the world.” She was wearing a pink dress and sipping a pink cocktail called the Clear Winner. She looked up at a monitor and saw Mick Jagger presenting an award. “They couldn’t get Bob Dylan,” she cracked, then admitted, “The Clear Winner is taking a toll on me.” Wilson has met Dylan, and demonstrated his limp handshake. Then she introduced me to Sebastian Stan’s mother.

At the end of the night came a shock: Mikey Madison won Best Actress, for “Anora,” over Demi Moore, who had given the race some old-school Hollywood glamour as she campaigned for “The Substance.” It was the jolt in the arm the show needed, and confirmation that “Anora” was about to win Best Picture, which it did. After all the melodrama, “Emilia Pérez” had all but disappeared from the ceremony, save for some light ribbing from Conan O’Brien and an awkward speech by the Best Original Song winners. Sean Baker had definitively taken over as this year’s main character, making it out with four Oscars, a record for the most awards won by one person for a single film. I said goodbye to Stuart Walker, who still thought he smelled weed.

The crowd filed to the Governors Ball, the Academy’s on-site after-party. I spotted Jesse Eisenberg, who was nominated for writing “A Real Pain,” looking discombobulated. Felicity Jones came by to greet him, and he told her, “We’re going to go back to real life now.” As he headed up the escalators, an usher told him, “I loved the movie! Sorry!”

“Thank you so much—you don’t have to apologize,” Eisenberg said, but he was already ascending and out of earshot. “For other sins,” he muttered under his breath.