Oscar Night's Top Five Presenters

by Camila Henriques

One of the challenges of a hostless Oscar ceremony is having a presenter list capable of holding the show together. For film fanatics even that isn't enough. We crave the legendary movie stars as presenters (fewer and fewer each year) and moments like Julie Andrews following Lady Gaga’s tribute to “The Sound of Music” back in 2015 or Olivia de Havilland introducing the Family Album back in 2003. Those two still give us chills. Unfortunately, the Academy Awards this year were lacking in the legendary star department. Nevertheless, the show had truly memorable bits, and a couple of future host possibilities that the Board of Governors should take note of. With that in mind, here’s a top 5 presenters/duos list for the 92nd Oscars:

Honorable mentions: Steve Martin and Chris Rock reminding us that hey, there’s still former hosts the Academy could call, Salma Hayek holding the best Oscar in the house (Oscar Isaac, that is), and Diane Keaton and Keanu Reeves giving us Something’s Gotta Give nostalgia...

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Natalie Portman and Waad al-Kateab Make Fashion Statements

 by Murtada Elfadl

The Oscars global stage is always good for bold statements and some chose to convey their messages by what they wore. Natalie Portman continued her side eye to Hollywood for not recognizing female directors by wearing them on her dress...

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The 92nd Oscars Afterthoughts and the Complete Winners List

by Nathaniel R

You know how we do at The Film Experience. We'll have a few days of post-mortem on the 92nd Academy Awards, honoring the films of 2019. So it's not quite over yet but the rest is the after-party if you will. And we think you will feel like partying. We sure do. Parasite won 55% of your votes in our readers poll for who SHOULD win (with Hollywood and 1917 fighting for a distant second place on the Best Picture chart) and it also took the top prize at both the Team Experience Awards and my own prizes right here. And then it actually went and won Hollywood's top honor, too, defying all odds (again) to become the first Foreign Language picture ever to triumph at the Oscars. It will go down as history as one of the best choices the Academy ever made in the top category along with films like Moonlight, Silence of the Lambs, Amadeus, All About Eve, and other classics...

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Cinema as the theatre of memory

by Cláudio Alves

Cinema is the ephemeral crystalized. The camera transforms the now into a remembrance like the petrified bodies of Pompeii, those monuments of frozen life that frightened Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini's Journey to Italy. I still recall when I first watched that classic and felt as if I was witnessing a film reacting to its own limited existence. When Bergman cries we see a star realizing she's no more than a shadow of yester, like those burnt cadavers her image is an unwitting memento mori. Since then, cinema's relationship to time has fascinated me, especially when it comes to the portrayal of memory. Rossellini showed me cinema remembering itself and Resnais shattered the recollection of personal history, Chris Marker paralyzed the days long gone and Varda made them abstract.

While these are names of the European vanguards, cinema as theatre of memory isn't a phenomenon exclusive to the art house. We need only look at this year's Oscar contenders to find ways of picturing memory on the big screen…

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Final Oscar Predictions!

Hello beloved readers and fellow cinephiles. Sorry for this ultra-last-minute prediction post (which is cross-posted at Towleroad) but let it serve a dual purpose. It's to be read now and/or laughed at after the Oscars once I've shown that my crystal ball is totally defective.

One of these three films will win Best Picture

If you've been living under a rock the Best Picture field looks like so...

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