Critic’s Notebook: Busy and Eclectic Oscars 2024 Telecast Delivers Many Highlights (and a Few Lowlights)

Daniel Fienberg
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I’m going to begin with a confession: I like to think of myself as both a decent son — Hi, Mom! — and an Anglophile, but before tonight, I’d gone 40-something years of my life without realizing that the British had a different Mother’s Day.

Or maybe I’ve known and forgotten? Either way, it was impossible to forget during Sunday (March 10) night’s telecast of the 96th Academy Awards, in which U.K. Mother’s Day got more onstage references than Gaza, Ukraine and Donald Trump combined.

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It wasn’t that politics were wholly absent in the telecast, but a decree seemed to have gone around that the two highest-profile international tragedies of the moment could be addressed once apiece, both effectively.

Jonathan Glazer used his Zone of Interest international feature win to echo the film’s message on dehumanization in declaring, “Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Then, in accepting the documentary prize for 20 Days in Mariupol, Mstyslav Chernov described this as Ukraine’s first Oscar win and expressed his willingness to trade the award and the general adulation for Russia never to have invaded his homeland. Thanking Hollywood and moviemaking for ensuring that Ukraine isn’t forgotten, he closed with, “Cinema forms memories and memories form histories.”

There were other emotional moments in the telecast, but those were perhaps the two most powerful (unless you really, really liked Jimmy Kimmel’s “Isn’t it past your jail time?” response to Emmy loser Donald Trump’s Truth Social post criticizing his hosting).

The telecast was, overall … Varied? Eclectic? Manic? All over the place? Busy? A kaleidoscopic tribute to celebrity, Hollywood and the dream-making apparatus that is show business? Honestly, choose the description you prefer, because it’s very much a sliding scale depending on whether the bits and bobs that make you laugh or filled you with nostalgia outweighed the bits and bobs that fell flat or bordered on disastrous.

There were plenty of each, because producers Raj Kapoor, Molly McNearney and Katy Mullan threw a decade’s worth of awards show ideas at the screen and didn’t even wait long enough to see what stuck, because it was on to the next thing. This winter’s strike-delayed Emmys were successful, in my mind, because they had a clear and cohesive theme that was intended to carry viewers through the entire telecast. These Oscars had a similar love for the medium they were honoring, but without anything resembling coherence.

I’m guessing that most people, when they think back on the show, will probably remember the highlights. And the lowlights? Well, it’s not like the Oscar producers can be blamed, because the Academy membership nominated “The Fire Inside” for original song. Ugh. The show gave people lots of elements to be entertained and distracted by, even though nearly every single award winner was close to a foregone conclusion. How do you make a show with NEARLY no suspense remain interesting? Keep things happening!

That, incidentally, is where Kimmel works best as host. He’s a guy you can trust to do a monologue and then he’ll hold together the disparate components and fill dead air and generally keep the mood light. He’s a juggler, and no matter what Razzie winner Trump might say, a good awards show host.

Now that doesn’t mean he was always in top form. If I had to title the opening monologue, it would be “Embracing the Hackiness.” You had jokes about Robert De Niro’s age and the length of Killers of the Flower Moon. Sorry, Jimmy, but if it was bad enough for Jo Koy, you probably needed to go a different way. There was a riff on Robert Downey Jr.’s troubled past that seemed to go on forever as if Kimmel were trying to say, “Look, after tonight he’s going to be Oscar Winner Robert Downey Jr. so we need to get this out of our system,” except most people already had. Downey looked like he probably had, even if he made similar jokes in his own speech.

But hacky isn’t always bad. I laughed at his pondering the multiple nominees named Yorgos with, “Will they both win? Yorgos is as good as mine.” And sometimes Kimmel had a sharper blade, like when he referred to the summer of solidarity among the industry unions before adding, “Well, not the directors. You guys folded immediately.” Plus, the moment he thanked the Teamsters and other crafts unions for their solidarity, brought the entire crew out onto the stage and promised everybody in the room would stand with them on their negotiation was exceptional.

Kimmel never got phased out of the telecast and some of his material within the show — a gag with a naked John Cena most obviously — was really funny. Maybe Cena and Kimmel host together next year?

How about some of the structural stuff within the show?

I loved the “Returning acting winners introduce the nominees” thing when the Oscars tried it out 15 years ago, and I enjoyed it this time. Yes, the long segments made the show drag a tiny bit, but it was clearly built into the running time. Highlights included Rita Moreno making America Ferrera emotional, Nicolas Cage making Paul Giamatti guffaw and the parade of actress heavyweights who showed up for the only real mystery award of the night, with a shocked Emma Stone earning her second Oscar over the equally exceptional Lily Gladstone. (I loved both of those performances, and I’m not going to get wrapped up in disappointment or emotional conflict. Either would have been good and worthy. My cap is tipped.)

The returning actors thing isn’t something you can do every year, and it was evident that the producers had difficulties getting “classic” winners in several categories, especially supporting actor. But there was the ultimate available classic actor, Al Pacino, nearly blowing the best picture reveal entirely, which could have been awful if Oppenheimer hadn’t been a sure thing. Then again, La La Land felt like it was a sure thing, so I hope somebody checked Pacino’s envelope afterward just in case.

Since I’ve already made a joke about “The Fire Inside,” I’ve got praise for the rest of the musical performances. Ryan Gosling’s showstopping, Busby Berkeley-inspired, full-stage rendition of “I’m Just Ken” was a deliriously wild peak from its very first notes, with Gosling sitting between a giggling Margot Robbie and a giggling Billie Eilish. But Eilish and Finneas O’Connell’s more somber “What Was I Made For?” was great in its own way. The music in the telecast, with Rickey Minor’s band emanating from a glowing orb above the stage, was good throughout, even in that strange portion early in the show during which one below-the-line winner after another was getting played off early.

If this is feeling too positive, let me get to the In Memoriam segment, a rite of passage that every awards show producer attempts to fiddle with in an effort to find the best way to honor artists who died in the previous year.

Now we know the worst way to do it.

Let’s start with the thoroughly bizarre attempt to attribute the quote, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” to the late Alexei Navalny and go from there. The In Memoriam segment had purposeless dancers and purposeless opera singers, and the director was so busy trying to capture everything that was happening onstage that it was possible to completely lose track of the departed luminaries, who were appearing several at a time on multiple digital screens featuring text so small it was impossible to identify them. Then, to avoid the usual social media outrage about people who got left out, the segment concluded with a black screen full of tiny names that weren’t even slightly readable. I couldn’t tell you who was or wasn’t in the tribute. It was all very bad.

But what else worked? I liked Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger turning their Twins reunion into a reunion of Batman villains, both of them glowering at Michael Keaton, who, it MUST be mentioned, was not the Batman who thwarted Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze. Kate McKinnon and America Ferrera were very good in introducing the documentary winners with a bit in which the biggest laughs were earned by Steven Spielberg — though it MUST be pondered why, in a show where almost everybody got a standing ovation, Spielberg didn’t receive one when he presented best director. I laughed at John Mulaney summarizing the plot of Field of Dreams, though it MUST be emphasized that nothing in his intro had anything to do with what the sound award is given for (go Zone of Interest, a very worthy winner). And it was good to see the long clip package celebrating stunts and stunt people, but it MUST be said that it would have been more satisfying as a prelude to a stunt Oscar and not as a stealth commercial for presenters Gosling and Blunt’s upcoming Fall Guy movie.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph gave a great speech celebrating her publicist. American Fiction writer-director Cord Jefferson offered a great speech urging Hollywood to try making 20 $10 million movies instead of always making the $200 million movie. And Hoyte van Hoytema encouraged folks to shoot on film.

Oh, and there was one cutaway to Messi the dog from Anatomy of a Fall clapping that broke me a little. In a good way.

For everything that happened in the telecast, the show somehow came in ahead of the three hours and 30 minutes allotted by ABC, and that was even with a strange six-minute delay at the top. It helped that certain winners who probably would have received standing ovations — Hayao Miyazaki, Wes Anderson — weren’t there. All things considered, maybe the band didn’t need to play off the production design, costume, makeup and special effects winners? Maybe we could have gotten some of the better banter that very obviously was trimmed from the presentations in the second half of the show?

Yes, this review is all over the place. Yes, that’s probably fitting.

In conclusion, Happy British Mother’s Day!

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