The Show No One Wanted
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Sian Heder’s CODA, a modestly budgeted remake of the feel-good French hit La Famille Bélier (2014), premiered at Sundance last year, winning instant raves, four top awards, and the biggest distribution deal in the festival’s history. Half a year later, Apple TV+ released CODA in theaters and on its streaming service, and this time around, reviews were less enthusiastic. Awards season buzz shifted to Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, especially after it scored twelve Oscar nominations, four times as many as CODA. But on Sunday night, CODA won all three awards it was up for: best adapted screenplay for Heder; best supporting actor for Troy Kotsur, the first deaf man to win an acting award from the Academy; and best picture.
That’s a comeback story that could have made for a heartwarming narrative arc at the ninety-fourth Academy Awards. Over the next few days, we could have been talking about how uplifting it was to see Kotsur dedicate his Oscar “to the deaf community, the CODA [Child of Deaf Adult] community, and the disabled community. This is our moment.” We could have been celebrating Campion’s best director Oscar as a callout to young women aspiring to make movies. It’s been a long time coming—after Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) in 2010 and Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) last year, Campion is only the third woman to win the award—but the doors are opening.
We might have been watching clips of Questlove tearing up as he accepted the best documentary award for Summer of Soul or Ariana DeBose, who won best supporting actress for playing Anita in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, thanking Rita Moreno, the first Latina to win an acting Oscar—for playing the same role in Robert Wise’s 1961 adaptation. “Imagine this little girl,” said DeBose, “an openly queer woman of color who found her strength through art. Anyone who questioned your identity, found yourself living in the gray spaces, I promise you, there is a place for us.”
Accepting her best actress Oscar for her performance in Michael Showalter’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Jessica Chastain drew attention to the “violence and hate crimes being perpetuated on innocent civilians all over the world,” especially those in the LGBTQ community. She also indirectly called out lawmakers in several states drawing up and passing “discriminatory and bigoted legislation that is sweeping our country with the only goal of further dividing us.”
In Variety, Mark Schilling reports that the mood in Japan is, for the most part, jubilant following the presentation of the best international feature Oscar to Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car. The New York Times’ Motoko Rich suggests that the win is “something of a capstone to a slow-burn return of Japanese filmmakers to international acclaim.”
None of these triumphs are dominating today’s headlines. The Academy intended to put on a show that would have people falling in love with movies again—and heading back to theaters. But then Will Smith slapped Chris Rock. Since 2018, Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, has been openly discussing the loss of her hair caused by alopecia. Rock may or may not have been aware of that when he joked from the stage that he was looking forward to seeing her in a sequel to G.I. Jane, the 1997 film for which Demi Moore shaved her head.
At first, Will Smith laughed. A moment later, though, he rose from his chair, strode up onto the stage, and walloped Rock. Like many, the New Yorker’s Vinson Cunningham “first thought that the slap was fake, part of some daring, gonzo comedic bit, maybe playing on white expectations of hair-trigger Black violence. The emergent Black producer Will Packer was helming the show and, well, perhaps he’d decided, at Rock’s urging, to go big and get weird.”
It was not a bit. Minutes later, Smith was back onstage to accept his best actor Oscar for his performance as the father of Venus and Serena Williams in Reinaldo Marcus Green’s King Richard. Tears streaming down his face, he apologized to the Academy and to his fellow nominees, adding that “love will make you do crazy things.”
The slap was “horrible,” writes IndieWire’s Ben Travers, but “inadvertently, fatefully, some would argue inevitably, so was the rest of the show.” As the NYT’s Kyle Buchanan reports, there were several beautiful moments in Friday’s presentation of honorary Oscars to Danny Glover, Samuel L. Jackson, Elaine May, and Liv Ullmann—but none of them made it into Sunday’s show. Clips from the preshow awarding of eight Oscars—editing, production design, sound, original score, makeup and hair, and the three short film categories—“were inserted into the live show with a clunkiness that we can only hope was a form of protest on behalf of the film-editing category,” writes the NYT’s James Poniewozik.
The aim was a zippier, fleeter show, but it wound up running half an hour longer than last year’s, when the awards in all three categories were presented live. The producers instead made time for . . . what? “Fan-favorite awards decided by Twitter and appearances by celebrities who had nothing to do with movies, like DJ Khaled and Tony Hawk?” asks Time’s Judy Berman. “It reeked of futile pandering to an 18-34 demographic that’s never coming back to linear TV, much less awards shows.”
“This has been so rancid,” tweeted Mark Harris, the author and journalist who has been covering the Oscars since the mid-1980s. “The genuinely mean-spirited jokes about easy-target movies . . . The cruel insult, the confrontation that could not wait, the literal dance of death. Time for a real reckoning at the Academy.” When it was all over, the NYT’s Dave Itzkoff quipped on Twitter, “I hope everyone has enjoyed the last Oscars ever.”
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