Oscar Ceremony: The Greatest Oscar Presentation

by Murtada Elfadl

Remember the Oscar ceremony in February 2009. Hugh Jackman was the host, he brought the house down with his charming opening number. Then it was time for the first award of the evening, best supporting actress. Five former winners came out and what transpired was without doubt the best Oscar presentation in the history of the Academy.

The gasps. How? What? Who? They repeated the same scenario 3 more times that night with the other acting awards. Nothing beat the surprise of that first one though. As someone who loves acting and actors, it was valhalla. A long stretch of time spent on celebrating each nominated performance by previous Oscar winners. No one was in a rush, the jokes were minimal, it was sincerne, it was earnest, it worked. 

The winner from the year before Tilda Swinton talked about Marisa Tomei. Whoopi Goldberg got Amy Adams, Goldie Hawn waxed poetic about Taraji P Henson. Eva Marie Saint paid tribute to Viola Davis and the eventual winner Penelope Cruz was congratulated in Spanish by Anjelica Huston. Bring this back Academy. I don't care how long it is or how too earnest it could get, this is why we tune to the ceremony and why we talk about it all year.

What is your favorite Oscar presentation of all time?

Defending The Irishman's costumes

by Cláudio Alves

While we may love to criticize the Academy, sometimes we're also a little bit to blame for the perpetuation of their prejudices. For instance, Oscar watchers love to deride the way voters confuse "Best" with "Most". This is especially true in Best Costume Design, where period work rules and contemporary styles are locked out. Still, when a movie is nominated for a wardrobe that's not very glamorous or showy, that prioritizes male attire instead of women's fashion, the grumblings take on another color. Suddenly, it's as if such design work is lesser because it isn't showy.

It's not erroneous to criticize the costume branch for being so myopic this year, having only singled out Best Picture nominees. However, to look at the costumes of The Irishman and say they're unworthy of praise is utter nonsense…

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1999 with Nick: Best Documentary Feature and "realness"

This week, in advance of the Oscars, Nick Davis is looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now.

The Blair Witch Project

When I taught my Winter 2017 seminar about the movies of 1999, to a classroom of first-year college students who were all born in the last two years of the millennium, one of the trickiest ideas to historicize was how decisively the visibility and cultural stature of documentary cinema has shifted over the last 20 years. Compared to the decades when I grew up, nonfiction cinema has reached much further outside a relatively niche audience who tracked that filmmaking tradition. The explanations are too numerous to get into here, though they include all of the following: cheaper and more numerous technologies for recording and assembling footage; proliferating platforms for distributing and watching nonfiction films, especially in the era of the internet and of exploding cable-TV offerings; and some epochal, admittedly eclectic success stories in the commercial market, from The Thin Blue Line to Hoop Dreams to Fahrenheit 9/11 to March of the Penguins, that inspired more students and artist to pursue documentary tracks and more institutions to finance, release, and program the work.

More abstractly, I would add to that list a specifically millennial, post-postmodernist erosion of all faith in objective “reality,” differently crystallized in such landmark films of 1999 as The Matrix, eXistenZ, Eyes Wide Shut, and Fight Club. That erosion produces both a resistant hunger for whatever “real” images and stories might yet survive and its dialectical opposite: a contagious discovery, dismaying but darkly energizing, that even vérité images are subjective, manipulated, and at some level “fake”...

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Oscar Ceremony: How to Present Costume Design

by Murtada Elfadl

The presentation of the Costume Design category at the Oscars has always perplexed whoever is chosen to produce the show. It feels like there’s something inherently visual about the costumes that calls for doing more with that presentation than other categories. Yet they rarely get it right! Last year’s was actually one of the times it worked because of the brilliant comic timing of Melissa McCarthy and Brian Tyree Henry. Plus they wore ALL the costumes and that was such a funny visual gag...

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The Beautiful Dryness of "1917"

by Lynn Lee

[This article contains spoilers]

“One of the best war films ever made.”

That’s not a critic’s blurb – that’s how my father described 1917 to me the other day. The fact that he and my mother loved the film didn’t surprise me, given that I was the one who recommended it to them.  What did surprise me was how much they loved it.  It’s not that they haven’t seen many war movies – to the contrary, my childhood and adolescence included a healthy dose of them, from early black and white greats like Grand Illusion to sweeping Hollywood epics like Lawrence of Arabia.  Over the years my parents have continued to add films as varied as Das Boot, Gallipoli, Saving Private Ryan, and Master and Commander to their favorites.

So what was it about 1917 they deemed worthy to stand with the classics? My dad cited the cinematography, of course, and the vivid realization of the WWI battlefields and trenches, but he also extolled the “delicacy” and “dryness” of the story.  And I think he was on to something there...

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