The Academy Awards

The Daniels managed to keep each of their three visits to the stage fresh and exciting, closing out the night with a message about how stories up on the big screen can shelter us from the chaos around us. It marked a fitting end to the unlikely awards run the Academy Awards has gifted us. ... Ultimately, it’s the winners and their teary-eyed speeches you remember; may those tasteless jokes be forgotten by next week.

It was safe, it was familiar, it was tasteful, it was reassuring. It didn’t rock the boat, it didn’t overstay its welcome (actually, that marks sort of a break from Oscar Classic), and it left you feeling that the world’s preeminent awards show, all doom-saying punditry to the contrary, is still, on balance, a very good thing. ... [“EEAAO” wins] lent the evening a rare emotional unity.

That was this Oscars in a nutshell: surprising warmth and sincere, unpolished emotions that blossomed in a stultifying format.

Sunday’s telecast left me generally elated. ... If my biggest complaints about an Oscars telecast are one bad piece of comic business, a soft monologue, an icky piece of Disney/ABC synergy and the sort of overrun that’s close to inevitable in the award show space? That’s a good show.

In 2023, the Oscars just had to save face. As the absent Tom Cruise once said — a bit preemptively, sure, but still true: “Mission accomplished.”

Kimmel, in his opening monologue, made several wisecracks in regard to “the slap,” but from his tone, one got the sense that his remarks weren’t meant only to be funny. He was establishing that 2023 would not be a repeat of 2022 — and it wasn’t. It was such a relief to see something, anything, actually get better.

Kimmel wasn’t long-winded—no doubt part of the effort to keep things under four hours—but his monologue didn’t feel thin. That’s a great return to form for the broadcast. ... That doesn’t mean the broadcast didn’t irksomely tinker. ... The show’s dedication to brevity also began to grate as the evening went on.

There was a crisis team in place to handle the fallout from any unexpected catastrophes like Will Smith’s attack on Chris Rock at last year’s show, but there was nothing it could do about the ordinariness and sameness of the ABC broadcast.

Perhaps I'm expecting too much from the Oscars, but it feels dissonant to award best picture to a timely, incisive film like "Everything Everywhere All at Once" with one hand and wave away the problems of the world with the other. It all led to a broadcast that was bland, uncontroversial and mildly entertaining, sure, but also felt terribly fake.

It was a mostly safe, by-the-numbers affair that was woefully short on buzzy watercooler moments.

Few wins were egregious enough to get upset about, and those acceptance speeches were so moving as to absolve any ill feelings anyway. And yet, after all that, the night felt hollow and, at times, even cheap. This year, the Oscars failed to rise to its own beautiful moment. ... n Academy Awards telecast that was simultaneously remarkable and lifeless.