Obviously, this year’s Academy Awards were never going to match last year’s utter disaster. But did the ceremony have to be so utterly boring? By the end of the nearly four-hour ordeal, it was a challenge to stay awake. Can’t wait to see how far the ratings plummeted from last year’s 32.9 million. Still, a few moments stood out.
Best
Frances McDormand’s acceptance speech
Shortly after thanking her family for their support while she filmed “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” Best Actress winner Frances McDormand asked all the female nominees to stand up. Nobody knew what was going on.
McDormand leaned forward toward the first row and told America’s Greatest Actress, “Meryl, if you do it, everybody will.” Streep popped out of her seat and many others followed suit.
McDormand called the attention of the men in the room to the standing women and encouraged them to listen to the women’s stories for their next movies. The beaming smiles of McDormand’s peers Laurie Metcalf and Saoirse Ronan were proof that this gesture of solidarity was felt and appreciated.
Jet ski bribery
As an incentive to encourage the winners to shorten their acceptance speeches, host Jimmy Kimmel introduced a cash prize for the winner with the shortest speech: a jet ski worth $17,999.
When the winners failed to rise to the the occasion by the middle of the show, he sweetened the pot by throwing in a second prize: an all-expenses vacation to Lake Havasu, complete with a stay at the Days Inn.
Kimmel injected just the right note of cheesy irreverence to a show that always takes itself too seriously. No announcement has yet been made as to which winner will be riding on Lake Havasu in that jet ski.
Guillermo del Toro checking the Best Picture envelope
When Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway gave the Best Picture prize to “The Shape of Water,” winner Guillermo del Toro accepted his statuette — then fact-checked the envelope and smiled at the audience, waving it at them. After last year’s “La La Land”/”Moonlight” mix-up, he wanted proof — and so did we.
Snack break
Down the street at the Chinese Theater, an audience watching “A Wrinkle in Time” got a big surprise. Jimmy Kimmel sent a host of stars — including Emily Blunt, Lupita Nyong’o, Mark Hamill, Margot Robbie and others — to deliver snacks to the theatergoers. It was his way of having celebs show appreciation to movie lovers in person.
Is Kimmel the new Johnny Carson? A class act all the way.
Presenters were class acts
Some of film’s greatest figures returned to the stage tonight as presenters. Eva Marie Saint, who presented Best Costume Design and talked briefly about working with eight-time winner Edith Head, and Rita Moreno, who gave out the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, won Oscars long ago for two of the best movies ever made: “On the Waterfront” and “West Side Story.”
Worst
Pitchy performance
Please let the Best Song category go. The Academy can’t ever come up with five decent nominees. Last year, there was one passable song: the winning “La La Land” number. This category is an obvious holdover from the days of filmed musicals, but it feels like an anachronism. This year, the producers of “Coco” underscored that feeling by letting Gael Garcia Bernal sing the opening bars. He was off key and he knew it. The number picked up when the cast’s professional singers took over, but Bernal was a bad choice.
Mommy issues
Best Original Song winners Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, who picked up the prize for “Remember Me,” thanked their two daughters, seated in the audience. Then Mr. Lopez said, “This [award] is not for you. This is for my mom who died.” It was a supremely uncomfortable moment for everyone in the audience and mystified viewers at home, who did not know Mr. Lopez’s mother.
Pacing problems
After kicking off the show with a major award (Best Supporting Actor, Sam Rockwell), the show slid into a major slough of despond with prizes for the categories no one cares about: Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Makeup, Documentary, etc.
We know that the academy membership is comprised of various guilds and everyone deserves their due. But producers could trim a good half-hour off an already long night by distributing these prizes before the live broadcast begins, as they do on the Tony Awards.
Dark ages
Sandra Bullock came off like a complete airhead when she presented the award for Best Lighting Design. Intending to make a joke about how good lighting can make an actor look younger, she kept telling the techies to dim the lights and counting her age backward until she felt the lighting made her look 35. With her female peers such as Mira Sorvino and Annabella Sciorra giving heartfelt remarks about sexual harassment in Hollywood, Bullock came off like she missed the memo.
Awkward shot
When Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o and “Big Sick” star Kumail Nanjiani gave her speech about the Dreamers, the cameraman cut, perhaps unintentionally, to Mexican actress Salma Hayek’s face. Did someone in the control room tell him to do that? Poor choice.