The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Oscars on Sunday evening, with “One Battle After Another” winning best picture. Stephen Stromberg, an editor in Opinion, convened the Opinion writer Michelle Cottle, the Opinion contributing writer Robin Givhan and the critic Naveen Kumar to talk about the winners, the losers, the fashions and the flubs.
The conversation has been edited for clarity.
Stephen Stromberg: Let’s jump right in. Which of the evening’s results are you happiest about, and which outraged you?
Robin Givhan: I was thrilled to see Michael B. Jordan win for best actor and his longtime collaboration with the filmmaker Ryan Coogler bear Oscar fruit. His work in “Sinners” was poetic and charismatic and perfect for the moment that we’re living through — when identity, diversity and history are under assault.
Michelle Cottle: Michael B. Jordan, baby!!! I didn’t think he had a prayer, despite the fact that he so deserved it. Playing twins well is almost impossible, and he nailed it. His win almost made up for Sean Penn getting best supporting actor for his performance in “One Battle After Another.” Almost.
Naveen Kumar: I was stoked to see Autumn Durald Arkapaw win for her stunning work on “Sinners,” becoming the first woman to win for cinematography, as well as the first Black winner in the category. She asked all the women in the house to stand up, as Frances McDormand memorably did in 2018, one of the few moments when the question of representation and who’s making stories in Hollywood was explicitly raised.
Givhan: I also loved seeing the history-making win for Arkapaw. Coogler didn’t take home the Oscar for directing, but in some ways I think these other wins were more important. Jordan and Coogler aren’t just creating films but building a legacy that’s connected to artists who have come before and who will, hopefully, come after.
Cottle: “Sinners” didn’t win as many of the big awards as I think it deserved — I pretty much thought it deserved all the things — but it had a good night. Yay, Ryan Coogler for best original screenplay! One of my fave things about the movie was that it felt, indeed, original. The key dance scene where they morph through different musical eras was the best thing I saw in a movie last year.
Kumar: I was also impressed with how carefully and almost poetically the academy introduced the award for casting directors. It’s the first new Oscar category in more than 20 years, for a dynamic, integral, behind-the-scenes job that many audiences have no idea about, so I love that the presenters really spelled it out so beautifully and individually for each film. It’s also one of the few fields in Hollywood where women are heavily represented.
Stromberg: Robin, I know you have thoughts on Jessie Buckley winning best actress. Care to share them?
Givhan: OK, let me preface this by saying I think she’s a wonderful actress. And I’m glad her gorgeous Chanel dress got a full-length viewing onstage. But I’m not a fan of “Hamnet.” I found it plodding and relentlessly grim. I was put off by the way Buckley’s character, Agnes, was portrayed as an almost feral woman who operated on animalistic instinct, while her husband, William, was the intellectual one. I also simply could not tolerate her reaction to seeing William’s play, where she stands in the audience wide-eyed and practically howling. The film intended to show her as a person. But I didn’t see an individual. I saw a caricature of suffering motherhood.
Cottle: Robin, I am right there with you. I love Buckley — despite not having loved anything that she has ever been in. (This includes “The Bride,” which I saw this weekend, despite all the warnings.) I also just couldn’t get into the ending of “Hamnet,” which boiled down to: Everything is horrible, life is a torture, I’m furious with my husband — but, wait! I had no idea he wrote great plays, and this one is named after our dead son, so all is forgiven.
Kumar: I’m Team Jessie. I did think that her character was limited as a typical grieving-mother type, but I appreciated how unflinching the film was about staring into the abyss of her grief and how rigorously it contended with the rawness of motherhood and loss. But the idea that she was slack-jawed at the Globe Theater, as though she’d never seen a play before, was absurd. I only wish I had seen Buckley play Sally Bowles in the West End cast of the recent “Cabaret” revival. Life regret.
Stromberg: I’m getting the sense that this group didn’t think “One Battle After Another” deserved to win best picture.
Givhan: I wouldn’t say it was undeserving. But “Sinners” was more deserving. There were tremendous performances in “One Battle After Another,” although I would not have put Sean Penn’s in that category. Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio Del Toro! Teyana Taylor! Chase Infiniti’s breakout role!
“Sinners” was just more original, layered and surprising. It managed to be a dissertation on cultural appropriation, ownership, Jim Crow and American identity wrapped in a vampire popcorn tale — with a little history of the blues thrown in. And it was all conceived in the mind of Ryan Coogler. It was also a stunning film.
Cottle: “One Battle After Another” was totally meh. The only performance that really stuck with me was Chase Infiniti’s. Everyone else in the film felt too much like a caricature, or at least something I’d seen too much of. I get that it was supposed to be a sendup, but still. If I want to watch a stoner in a bathrobe, I’m going for the Dude in “The Big Lebowski.” That said, the scene where DiCaprio is on the phone and cannot remember the password he needs to get help from his old revolutionary buddies gave me a giggle.
Givhan: The DiCaprio password scene — What time is it?! — was wonderful. As was the scene when Del Toro is arrested and admits to having had “a few small beers.” “One Battle” was full of great scenes. I thought “Sinners” was a great movie.
Kumar: I am a “One Battle” fan. It’s a big, actiony, funny, crowd-pleasing film and one that got people excited to actually go to the movies and talk about it afterward. There was a sense when it came out that we finally had a film that addressed our political moment and gave progressives a sort of hybrid popular-prestige revenge fantasy.
Stromberg: Only to a degree, right? “One Battle” feels as though it has politics, but the “politics” are mostly context for a story.
Kumar: I agree. It paints in broad strokes — deportation bad, revolution good — and doesn’t feel galvanizing. “Sinners” is more allegorical, addressing race and power dynamics in America in an imaginative, sophisticated way (with vampires). I thought its audaciousness might win out in the end, but alas.
Stromberg: The Oscars broadcast contained some references to politics and world affairs — sending in Jimmy Kimmel pretty much guaranteed that. Did you want to hear more from the winners? Less?
Kumar: I would like to imagine that everyone in that room felt at least a bit silly doing all of this, considering what’s going on in the world. The Oscars are an enormous platform for these influential celebrities, and there seemed to be a lack of conviction to say anything more broadly meaningful than thanking agents and family. We needed someone like Jane Fonda to slap everyone awake with some perspective and integrity. Javier Bardem quickly saying “No to war and free Palestine” wasn’t much, but at least it was something.
Givhan: I think the winners in the documentary category — both short and long — showed that you can gracefully accept an award and also accept your responsibility to speak difficult truths as a kind of down payment on creative freedom.
The host, Conan O’Brien, opened the show with an earnest reference to movies connecting the world and the importance of being optimistic. But it felt perfunctory. I didn’t want the winners to get up on a soapbox, but I would have expected more from the “One Battle After Another” director, Paul Thomas Anderson, for example. His film was about revolutionaries, after all.
Cottle: I don’t need big stars mouthing empty slogans or trolling a certain president, but I appreciated some of the heartfelt efforts to speak to these unsettling times. The most moving was when a mother whose child had been killed in the Uvalde school massacre spoke as part of the group accepting the award for the documentary short “All the Empty Rooms.” It was real, and it was heartbreaking. Things also got real when David Borenstein, accepting the award for best documentary feature for “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” started talking about how the way you lose your country is “through countless small, little acts of complicity.” I hope people were listening.
Stromberg: The ceremony was filled with worry about the future of film a dig about A.I. replacing animators, a gag about shrinking screen sizes narrowing movies’ field of view, another about screenwriters writing scripts that explain key points over and over again to cater to distracted, multitasking viewers. How did you feel about Hollywood processing its existential angst on live TV?
Kumar: Conan also made a crack about Ted Sarandos, quipping that the Netflix chief executive probably wished everyone in the theater had been at home, where he could make money off them. It follows with Hollywood’s navel-gazing tendencies that the Oscars broadcast seemed more fixated on the problems inside the industry than the crises everywhere else.
Cottle: This year’s “In Memoriam” seemed extra poignant. Not just because so many legends left us last year — Rob Reiner, Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton — but also because the whole show seemed to have an elegiac vibe, as though the industry is saying goodbye to an era. When Barbra Streisand came out and sang her little tribute to Redford, her slightly reedy voice captured the feel of the whole night.
Givhan: I share Hollywood’s angst about A.I. and distracted consumers of media. The gag about a tech firm working to crop films so that people can watch them on their phones was totally believable — at least for a few seconds. And sad. On a night when Hollywood is celebrating itself, I wasn’t surprised that some of its angst would pour out. What feels different with these particular fears is that I think they’re concerns that people outside Hollywood can relate to — maybe not in the same way but on some level. Worries about A.I. run through a lot of industries. People know what it’s like to see their local theaters close because people would rather stream a movie at home.
Stromberg: I’d love to get your thoughts on the show’s fashions. Do I need to invest in brooches?
Givhan: Good Lord, men and brooches! Stop the madness. They’ve become a cliché. I don’t know what that was affixed to Adrien Brody’s lapel, but a line has been crossed.
If there was a takeaway for me, it’s that Chanel has really moved into a new era with its designer Matthieu Blazy. The brand dressed Nicole Kidman, Teyana Taylor, Jessie Buckley and Pedro Pascal. That’s quite the range. What was striking was that it all looked like Chanel and yet was flattering on a range of ages. Kidman was corseted with feathers; Taylor was sultry in black and white. Buckley’s red and pink ensemble referred to a look that Grace Kelly wore to the Oscars in 1956. Chanel has spent years toying with men’s wear, and frankly, it always looked dreadful. But Pascal looked quite handsome and sensual in slim trousers and a white shirt with a giant floralish embellishment that was, thankfully, not a bedazzled brooch.
Cottle: Boo, bro brooches. But the big flowery thing on Pedro Pascal’s shirt was fun.
Kumar: Favorite accessory of the night. Or maybe it was technically a ruffle? Fun either way.
Cottle: Was it just me, or was there an extra dose of feathers and fringe? Teyana Taylor’s beaded, fringy black-and-white Chanel gown was one of my favorite looks. Va-va-voom sexy. Although, honestly, it doesn’t much matter what Taylor wears. Those eyes — that smoky gaze — will melt your butter regardless.
Kumar: Two women who delivered two of my favorite performances last year were also my two best dressed: Rose Byrne (in Dior) and Renate Reinsve (in Louis Vuitton). Theirs felt to me like classic Oscar looks: Striking, elegant, simple. They took me back to 1999, when my two faves that year, Gwyneth Paltrow (who won for “Shakespeare in Love”) and Cate Blanchett (who some say was robbed for “Elizabeth”) wore two iconic gowns, somehow both bold and understated.
Stromberg: On a scale from 1 (David Letterman in 1995) to 10 (anytime Billy Crystal hosted), how did Conan O’Brien do as host?
Cottle: It’s always a tough crowd, this was a hard year, and the Oscars seem perennially unable to resist a cheese-ball gag. (Michael B. Jordan seat fillers? Conan wins an Oscar? Oof.) Still, I can give Coco only a 4. His writers need to be better, and his delivery wasn’t picking up the slack.
Kumar: I loved the opening number so much. Those screaming children chasing Conan, in a wig, whiteface makeup and deranged red lipstick, à la Amy Madigan in “Weapons,” was inspired. Campy, yes, but also a smart, streamlined way of introducing a bunch of the nominees. It went fumbling downhill from there.
I think Conan tried to acknowledge the toughness of the moment and keep with his brand of goofy, nice-guy comedy. But do the times call for being nice? Ricky Gervais set the standard at the 2020 Golden Globes, when he eviscerated Hollywood for being complacent, out of touch and self-obsessed. None of that’s changed, and I might have liked a bit more reminding. I vote that Nikki Glaser, who M.C.’ed the Golden Globes, host every awards show from now on.
Givhan: Isn’t hosting the Oscars one of the hardest jobs in television? I’ll give Conan a 5. It seemed he didn’t want to ruffle any of the many-feathered actors in the audience. Kimmel’s brief appearance made me wish he had actually hosted and not just presented. Kimmel had more bite, and I think the moment called for that. I also found the reunion of the stars of “Bridesmaids” to be funnier. They were self-deprecating. They picked on their fellow actors a little bit. And it was a reminder that maybe the Oscars should broaden its list of hosts.
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Robin Givhan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic and a former senior critic at large for The Washington Post.
Naveen Kumar is a critic and journalist. He is the associate director of the National Critics Institute.
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