Oscars 2023: 'A slap in the face for Hollywood'
Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesWhile this year's Academy Awards ceremony was largely controversy-free, it was 'radical in its own quiet way', writes Nicholas Barber, with the absence of some of Hollywood's biggest names a sign that 'the US film industry's certainties are crumbling'.
At the end of the Oscars, the ceremony's host, Jimmy Kimmel, strode into the wings and flipped a number one on to a board that read: "Number of Oscar Telecasts Without Incident". It was only natural that Kimmel should make so many jokes about last year's Incident, but even if you had somehow forgotten about Will Smith slapping and swearing at Chris Rock, that closing gag would have made sense. In recent years, the Oscars have often been debacles, whether that was because of the envelope mix-up in 2017 or the socially distanced gloom in 2021, but this time the event was slick and competent enough to convince you that the producers and directors actually knew what they were doing.
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Kimmel was relaxed and in control: he even finished by mentioning that he would be back on his talk show the following night, as if to suggest that this was just another evening's work for him. No one made any embarrassing mispronunciations or gaffes. The introductory speeches weren't too painful, and the jokes weren't bad. The In Memoriam round-up was touching, with a well-judged, tearful introduction by John Travolta and a piano ballad performed by Lenny Kravitz. The dresses were sparkly, and the gold and silver art-deco stage decorations evoked the glamorous hotels and ocean liners of Hollywood's golden age. Everything lulled you into imagining that the screw-ups of the past few years were just a bad dream.
It's true that long stretches of the three-and-a-half-hour bash were boring and repetitive, but that's almost always the case with awards ceremonies, and there were only a couple of obvious flaws. (The practice of starting the music before recipients have finished their acceptance speeches is as infuriating and insulting as ever.) And the winners in each category seemed to have been picked according to which one would provide the most warm and cosy feelings. They all seemed to be decent human beings who were grateful for their prizes while emphasising that film-making, like life, is a team effort. None of them appeared to be at risk of being cancelled. The director of An Irish Goodbye, which won best live action short film, used his allotted time to ask the audience to sing "Happy Birthday" to the film's star, James Martin. And nobody slapped anyone. Even if you didn't think the best man or woman won in every category, there weren't many results that would have had a reasonable person throwing a shoe at the TV screen and yelling, "How dare they">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });