Five Takeaways from the 2023 Oscars
Including hints of a Stunt Oscar, the Tom Cruise-shaped hole, and more
As soon as the Oscars telecast began, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. How nice it was to see a normal stage, a single host, and actual rows of seats. It’s the little things, ya know? After the last two years of strange ceremonies—the first upended by Covid, the second by some truly god awful staging ideas by Will Packer, the film’s producer—the aesthetics of last night’s Oscars matched those of my childhood. Is there stuff to complain about? Sure! But let’s take a stab at positivity: the acceptance speeches were warm and human, the monologue jokes were mostly sharp, and nobody punched anyone. In 2023, this qualifies as an enormous success.
Here are a few things I’m thinking about the day after:
The stunt Oscar is coming
For the first time ever, I feel a sense of momentum towards the introduction of an Oscar for Best Stunt. Advocates have long argued that an Oscar for Hollywood’s hard-working stunt performers would not only be the right thing to do, but that it would be a way for the Academy to honor popular films without resorting to a Best Popular Film Oscar or a stupid “Cheer Moment.” So, you ask, if it’s such a good idea, why hasn’t it already happened? The prevailing theory is that movie stars don’t want to draw attention to the fact that they don’t do their own stunts. Imagine if Tom Cruise’s stunt man won an Oscar? Hollywood might collapse!
But every good idea has its moment, and while I wouldn’t place any bets on it yet, I just feel like it’s coming. Maybe it was that big Vulture feature last week. Maybe it was the Volvo commercial during the first commercial break last night that seemed to be saying, “If you won’t honor stunt people, we will!” Or maybe it was the presence on the telecast of Donnie Yen, martial artist and fight scene choreographer, who makes the kind of films that never win Oscars but could potentially find their way into a Best Stunt category.
Or maybe it’s the win for Everything Everywhere All at Once, the first kung fu movie to win Best Picture, and also a sign that things are changing, and that what we once thought was impossible could be just around the corner.
Where was Cruise?
Look, I’ve written a lot of words on Tom Cruise in the past 12 months. I sang the praises of Top Gun: Maverick in three different outlets, and I devoted a considerable word count in this space to the idea of Cruise returning to the Oscars for the first time in a decade. So I was a bit disappointed when it was announced, just hours before the telecast, that Cruise was skipping the ceremony to go make more Mission: Impossible movies. Kinda flies in the face of my whole narrative, but what can ya do? Still, it was a surprise because Cruise has been out and about this awards season. He went on Kimmel. He showed up at the Oscars luncheon and the PGA Awards. I really thought he’d be there in the front row, smiling, over-laughing, and generally reminding us of what it was like when Hollywood still had movie stars.
So why didn’t he show up? I think it’s simple: He had nothing to gain from being there. He knew Top Gun: Maverick wasn’t going to win much (it picked up just one award for Best Sound). Last night was a coronation for Everything Everywhere All at Once. If EEAAO is the present, what would that make Tom Cruise look like, sitting in the front row, winning nothing, and looking not-quite-as-young as he used to look? He’d look like the past. I don’t think that’s what Tom Cruise wants to look like. He was better off staying away and maintaining the narrative that he doesn’t need the Oscars. It was a smart move for Cruise, albeit a disappointing one for a guy like me who was irrationally invested in his presence there.
The Academy’s Race Problem Persists
There was no slap last night, but when Angela Bassett lost Best Supporting Actress to Jamie Lee Curtis, it looked like there had been. She didn’t smile or clap. She didn’t pretend to be happy for her fellow nominee. She was devastated, and why not? Early this awards season, it was widely understood that Bassett would win this award as a sort of career achievement Oscar (and ya know what, she was really good in Wakanda Forever). Then Jamie Lee Curtis wins for Everything Everywhere All at Once in what is widely understood as a…career achievement Oscar? You can’t discount the fact that EEAAO was a juggernaut this awards season, but anyone with eyes will tell you Stephanie Hsu was better than Curtis in this movie, so it’s clear that Curtis’s win was more about her career in film than this single performance.
Of course, this isn’t just about Bassett. It’s about the fact that the Academy has never nominated a Black woman for Best Director, and it has only once awarded Best Actress to a Black woman, and that this year, they left two two exemplary performances from Black women out of the Best Actress race. And we can’t forget about Bassett herself, who has spoken publicly about the lack of opportunities she received early in her career, even after being nominated for What’s Love Got to Do with It. Kudos to Jamie Lee Curtis, who has had a great career, ran a perfect campaign (blech), and gave a lovely and memorable speech. But I won’t soon forget the look on Bassett’s face when she lost. I could feel the entire history there of the Academy lifting up and then swatting down Black women. It hurt me. I can only imagine how it felt to her.
The Academy is over New Hollywood
Two years ago, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman was the early Oscars frontrunner for Best Picture. It was nominated for 10 awards. It won none. This year, Spielberg’s The Fabelmans was considered a shoo-in back in September. It was nominated for seven Oscars. It won none. It’s time to face the facts that a segment of this Academy—maybe the younger voters or the international contingent—has no loyalty towards the filmmakers of New Hollywood and feels little urgency in giving any of them another Oscar. They are respected enough that they get the nominations, but they’re not widely beloved enough to win. Maybe they are seen as too much part of the establishment. After all, this is an Academy that likes to reward the upstarts.
Or ya know what? Maybe the Academy never fully embraced these filmmakers. I mean, Scorsese had to wait until 2006 to win an Oscar. Spielberg has won Best Director twice, but he had to make the most Oscary films ever to do it: a Holocaust drama and a World War II film. De Palma has never been nominated. Lucas has never won. Sure, Coppola got his Oscars for The Godfather, but when you make one of the greatest films of all time, that will happen. It’s just another reminder that the Academy doesn’t think like critics, or even like civilian cinephiles. We worship these filmmakers. The Academy tolerates them. Which is bad news for Scorsese’s The Killers of a Flower Moon, which will premiere at Cannes this year and is widely expected to be a frontrunner for Best Picture in 2024. If history holds, it’ll be nominated for a boat load of Oscars and win…none.
Want to win Best Picture? Flatter the voters.
I remember it like it was yesterday. I was watching the 2022 SAG Awards with my wife at home on our couch. When CODA won Best Ensemble, she said, “It’s winning Best Picture.” “How do you know?” I asked. She replied, “Because they love doing this.” She held up her hands and did the Deaf applause thing that everyone in the auditorium was doing. They were having a ball doing it. I joined in, and ya know what? It was fun.
Of course, it was not only fun. It was an action—voting for CODA, supporting disabled actors, and doing Deaf applause—that made Hollywood feel good about itself. It was a way for them to pat themselves on the back. The Oscars can be a sick, self-congratulatory affair, so if you give voters a way to feel like they’re actually doing something meaningful with their vote, they will jump at the chance.
If you don’t have a social or political cause in your film—and the Oscars stays away from hard politics these days—the best way to flatter voters is to be the underdog. To Oscar voters, that’s the same thing as a cause. The main reason Everything Everywhere All at Once won Best Picture is because it maintained its underdog status from its premiere at SXSW last March all the way through Oscar night this March. That’s incredibly hard to do, but it had the tools. It wasn’t made by either a studio or a streaming behemoth. It’s an A24 movie, which has clearly accrued some awards season power but is neither a major studio nor a streaming behemoth. It had great personal narratives. Ke Huy Quan was rejected by Hollywood after having success as a child actor, giving voters the chance to redeem both him and themselves by giving him an Oscar. Michelle Yeoh has been a global star for decades but was the wrong combination of race, gender, and age to become a Hollywood superstar—until now.
EEAAO had been the favorite to win Best Picture at least since early January. Of course, in recent years, we’ve seen films that are the early favorites overtaken by late-breaking underdogs: CODA over The Power of the Dog, Parasite over 1917, and Green Book over Roma. The Academy hates a favorite. They get bored of voting for it. And they’re very susceptible to a last-minute run by an unexpected contender. It’s fun to be part of a movement! It’s like a cause! But this year, there was no film that could claim the underdog mantle from EEAAO. It managed to be both the favorite and the underdog at once for several months, an exceedingly difficult feat but one it was uniquely suited to achieve.
Who knows if any film will be able to pull that off again? EEAAO may have been a unicorn, but it reinforces the lessons of the last few years. In this Academy, one with more women, more artists of color, and more international members, an establishment favorite is not going to get past the finish line. You’ve got to be an outsider to win over the insiders. Everything Everywhere All at Once showed everyone how it’s done.
If a "stunt" Oscar is coming, how about an Oscar for casting? Its importance to the critical and commercial success of a movie is undeniable. I don't care how good the text or the director is: choose the wrong cast and your picture is doomed.
Also, I enjoyed this ceremony. Unlike last year, which was ugly at best, this felt like a celebration again, even if I had to sit through an ad for "The Little Mermaid" in the middle of the ceremony.