A month after the glitz and glamour of the 96th Academy Awards, John O’Connor reviews the night in all of its star-studded glory.
The curtain has been drawn and the statuettes have been carved. The 96th Academy Awards have come to a close after one of the most memorable award seasons of the last decade which gave birth to some of the best Oscar races in recent memory. The most anticipated was the conclusion of the Best Actress race, a two-horse race between Lily Gladstone and Emma Stone. Despite Gladstone’s historic Academy Award nomination and SAG win for her nuanced and subtle performance in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, it was Emma Stone’s captivating and masterfully crafted performance as Bella Baxter in Poor Things which took home the award. Since Gladstone’s decision to drop out of the supporting race and campaign for lead, despite her fifty-six minutes of screen time in the over three-hour Western epic, she had been the partial frontrunner. However, the Academy deemed Gladstone’s nomination as enough, choosing to carve Emma Stone’s name into the statuette and deciding to award craft over history.
The Academy deemed Gladstone’s nomination as enough, choosing to carve Emma Stone’s name into the statuette and deciding to award craft over history.
Unlike the Best Actress race, the Supporting Acting categories had been cemented for weeks before the ceremony, with Da'vine Joy Randolph winning Best Supporting Actress for her turn as a mourning widow in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers and Robert Downey Jr. receiving the statuette for Best Supporting Actor in Oppenheimer. Cillian Murphy’s Best Actor win was not as guaranteed as Randolph’s or Downey Jr’s, given that Paul Giamatti’s Golden Globe and Critic Choice award cemented him as a contender. Yet, there was very little doubt amongst his Irish fans that Murphy would not prevail as the winner. This win makes Murphy the first Irish-born actor to win Best Actor at the Academy Awards, a hopeful catalyst for future talent.
This win makes Murphy the first Irish-born actor to win Best Actor at the Academy Awards, a hopeful catalyst for future talent.
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer came to an atomic conclusion, winning seven of its historic thirteen nominations including Best Original Score for Ludwig Goransson, and Best Achievement in Cinematography for Hoyte Van Hoytema. After eight nominations spanning over three decades, Christopher Nolan has finally earned the title of “Academy Award Winner,” after winning Best Achievement in Directing and Best Picture along with lifelong collaborator and wife, Emma Thomas. Nolan thanked the Academy stating; “To the academy, just to say movies are a bit over a hundred years old, imagine being there a hundred years into painting or theatre we don’t know where this incredible journey is going from here. But to know that you think that I’m a meaningful part of it means the world to me.” The British director will be recognised again, along with Emma Thomas, for their contributions to British cinema as they will receive a knighthood and damehood respectively later this year.
The ceremony, as it often does, took a rather sombre turn during one of the night’s more memorable speeches. As Johnathan Glazer came to the stage to accept the award for Best International Feature Film for his cerebral and vital period drama The Zone of Interest, he took the opportunity to call for a ceasefire in Gaza; “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present – not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanisation leads at its worst. It shaped all our past and present.” The Jewish director continued, voicing his rejection of “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”
As Johnathan Glazer came to the stage to accept the award for Best International Feature Film for his cerebral and vital period drama The Zone of Interest, he took the opportunity to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Besides the awards themselves, one of the most highly anticipated moments of the night was Ryan Gosling’s speculated performance of “I’m Just Ken,” written by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt for Barbie. As is Academy Award tradition, all best Original Song nominees perform their work during the ceremony, but it was Gosling’s song and dance extravaganza which stole the show. The performance was an ode to Hollywood classics such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Gosling’s tribute to Marilyn Monroe’s “Diamonds” involved multiple A-list guests from the front rows including Greta Gerwig and Barbie herself, Margot Robbie. Nevertheless, it was Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell’s “What Was I Made For” which took home the Best Original Song statuette, Barbie’s only win and conclusion to a relatively disappointing awards run.
Although this year’s Academy Awards possessed a revived interest mostly due to the groundbreaking and figure-breaking films nominated, the awards only received a 4% increase in viewership, which will no doubt cause the Academy to rethink its future. Even though the awards gave way for some of the most watched moments in entertainment this year, it was still not enough and begs us to ask the question, do award shows have a place going forward in this forever changing media landscape?