We said we wanted a faster, tighter Oscar ceremony. We got one.
And wow, was it boring.
With the exception of a few upsets — Mahershala Ali instead of the expected Richard E. Grant, Olivia Colman for Best Actress instead of favorite Glenn Close, Spike Lee’s Best Director loss — awards went largely to the expected winners. Speeches were tightly kept to mere seconds, which meant they were prepared, safe and largely classy. (Thank you, Spike Lee, for cursing and for bringing authentic passion to otherwise pat and perfunctory recitations. Lady Gaga’s breathless tears don’t count — hers were the kind of rehearsed histrionics not seen since Anne Hathaway’s stage-whispered, “It came true!”)
There was also the legendary Barbra Streisand introducing not Best Picture nominee “A Star Is Born” — a high-class snub, given her iteration preceded Bradley Cooper’s — but instead fellow Brooklynite Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman.”
Otherwise, these Oscars were clean, orderly and classy. Politics was kept to a minimum, and when addressed, was through allusions rather than recriminations.
“I am the son of immigrants from Egypt. I’m a first-generation American,” said Best Actor winner Rami Malek, as he remarked upon the progress in playing a gay man who was distinctly, courageously himself. One of the directors of “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” said, “When we hear that somebody’s kid … said, ‘He looks like me,’ or, ‘They speak Spanish like us,’ we feel like we already won.”
Presenter Javier Bardem spoke of art having no borders.
There were a few overt political moments, to be sure — Congressman John Lewis a presenter for Best Picture nominee “BlacKkKlansman,” Maya Rudolph’s crack about Mexico not paying for the wall, and Lee’s plea to vote President Trump out in 2020 — but the ceremony was remarkably restrained. The only real laugh of the night came from presenter Melissa McCarthy in epic drag as Colman’s Queen Anne, festooned in stuffed bunny rabbits.
Even the unprecedented diversity on stage, the most female winners and African-American winners ever, in stark contrast to the recent #OscarsSoWhite controversy, went unremarked upon. A cynic could say this was a true feat in a room full of people there to congratulate themselves — but really, if there was ever a thing to boast about, this was it.
Sedate, serious, sensitive: Are these the Oscars we really want?
That’s to say nothing of a ceremony without a host, which at first seemed a bonus.
But can you imagine what a comedian could have done with the wealth of material at hand?
We know Ricky Gervais is persona non grata, but how weird to see Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Rudolph, who opened the show post-Queen, defanged. No jokes about Jussie Smollett or Les Moonves or even Harvey Weinstein. No jokes about Jeff Bezos. No jabs about Netflix attempting to buy an Oscar for “Roma,” a movie in which absolutely nothing happens and which almost no one has seen. Woody Allen just got funding for another movie! Give us something!
As it turns out, this is not the Oscars we want. Bring back awkward moments, speeches that run on too long and veer off in all the wrong directions, spacey presenters who don’t seem to know where they are or whom they’re introducing. Adele Dazeem became a meme for a reason. This Oscars has no meme.
And if there’s no long tail to a three-hour-plus ceremony — nothing for the rest of us at home to laugh at or root for — where’s the fun in that?