Most Gravity Defying Opener: ‘Wicked’
When it was announced that Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo would perform at the Oscars, it was assumed they would sing something from “Wicked,” the film for which they were both nominated. They did, of course. It would be silly to pass up that opportunity. But the women also paid tribute to previous cinematic versions of Oz, showing how Hollywood had imagined L. Frank Baum’s world through the years.
Grande emerged first, wearing a sparkling red gown with an actual ruby slipper affixed to its back, channeling Judy Garland to sing “Over the Rainbow” from “The Wizard of Oz.” She then ceded the stage to Erivo, who performed “Home,” Dorothy’s ballad from “The Wiz,” famously sung onscreen by Diana Ross. And, yes, then they closed with “Defying Gravity,” the signature song from “Wicked,” with Erivo bringing everything home with her shiver-inducing war cry. (Later, we returned to Oz to honor Quincy Jones when Queen Latifah performed a rousing rendition of “Ease on Down the Road.”)
— Esther Zuckerman
Most Dominant Night: Sean Baker
The “Anora” director has hovered around the outer edges of the Academy’s sensibility with his previous films “The Florida Project,” which earned Willem Dafoe a supporting-actor nomination, and “Red Rocket,” which had some Oscar buzz but was ultimately snubbed. Now Baker appears to have hit a sweet spot: He earned four separate Oscars tonight — in the editing, directing, original-screenplay and best-picture categories — which tied the record set by Walt Disney. Don’t expect Baker’s R-rated films to get the same amusement-park treatment, though.
— Kyle Buchanan
Best Host for the Moment: Conan O’Brien
Going into the night, O’Brien was at least as nervous as he was excited. But from the filmed opening — in which he fished around in Demi Moore’s back, in a spoof of “The Substance” — to his monologue, O’Brien seemed to have a joyful glint, even (or maybe especially) when he was razzing the industry. (The sandworm from “Dune” earned its residuals.)
But O’Brien was most deft in explaining — both overtly and more subtly — why the Oscars mattered. He delightedly pointed out notable victors, like “Flow,” the first Latvian Oscar winner. (“Your move, Estonia,” he joked.) And he gave an impassioned monologue about recognizing the artisans, not just the A-listers, who make movies — “a craft that can, in moments, bring us all a little closer together.”
Against the backdrop of wildfires and political upheaval, he suggested that communal effort and institutions mattered: “Through trauma and joy, this seemingly absurd ritual” — the Oscars — “is going to be here.”
He largely kept his promise to be apolitical. That made one zinger, a veiled rejoinder to the Trump administration, stand out all the more. Referencing the success of “Anora,” in which a Brooklyn sex worker battles her Moscow oligarch in-laws, O’Brien said: “I guess Americans are excited to see someone finally stand up to a powerful Russian.”
— Melena Ryzik
Most On-Brand Acceptance Speech: Kieran Culkin
This is our second award show season filled with Kieran Culkin’s signature acceptance speeches — a rambling but charming stream of consciousness that is interspersed with not-safe-for-TV language. Last year, he picked up multiple awards for his role as Roman Roy in “Succession,” and this year, he swept through awards season, racking up trophy after trophy for his role as Benji in “A Real Pain.”
Much of the first 30 seconds of his speech on Sunday, accepting his award for best supporting actor, was bleeped out on the telecast but seemed to include some sort of kind words toward his former “Succession” co-star Jeremy Strong, who was nominated in the same category. He ended the speech in a similar way to his Emmys speech: announcing to the crowd that his wife, Jazz Charton, had promised that they could have two (!) more kids (up one from the Emmy promise last year) if he took home an Oscar. “Let’s get cracking on those kids,” he said.
— Shivani Gonzalez
Biggest Audible Gasp: Mikey Madison’s Win
By the time Mikey Madison won best actress for playing the title role in “Anora,” it was already clear that the Academy loved the film. But when Emma Stone read her name it was still a shock. Though the 25-year-old Madison had won some trophies over the course of awards season, including at the BAFTAs, Demi Moore had looked like the clear front-runner for the prize for her career-revitalizing turn in the body horror spectacle “The Substance.”
Even Madison seemed surprised when the announcement happened. The camera caught her clasping her hands to her mouth, her eyelids fluttering. After embracing her co-stars and grabbing a piece of paper containing her speech from her twin brother, she took the stage, and called the moment “very surreal.”
“This is a dream come true,” she said. “I’m probably going to wake up tomorrow.”
— Esther Zuckerman
Worst ‘You Had One Job’: Hulu
In a night filled with streaming woes, the Hulu live feed cut out just before the award for best actress was announced, leaving viewers screaming into the void. A message appeared onscreen that read, “Thank you for watching! This live event has now ended. You may exit playback and select something else to watch.” This followed incidents earlier in the evening when subscribers had reported problems, and Hulu said in a social media post that it was “investigating this with a high priority, and we hope to have a fix in place soon.”
The best-actress disturbance came shortly after the “Anora” director Sean Baker encouraged the audience to watch movies in cinemas instead of from home, adding to the pile-on of shade thrown at streaming services throughout the evening.
It all made for an unsatisfying end to a long night. Viewers on the edge of their seats in the tight race for best actress and picture — and ready to go to bed after a ceremony that had dragged on — were left scrambling to find acceptance speech clips on X and YouTube. The reliability of cable television never looked better.
— Rachel Sherman
Worst Insult: No Clips for Supporting Actors
In a year filled with largely little-seen movies — the quiet Brazilian drama “I’m Still Here,” a film that only hit theaters in the U.S. a few weeks ago, won best international feature, for instance; and “Anora” became the lowest-grossing best picture winner ever — the Academy decided to forgo showing clips from the nominated films in the supporting acting categories, opting instead for compliments on each performance from last year’s winners, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Robert Downey Jr.
Sure, O’Brien’s “I Won’t Waste Time” musical number, complete with a dancing Deadpool and the sandworm from “Dune: Part Two” playing “Chopsticks” on a piano, was cute. But clips! Give us clips!
— Sarah Bahr
Most Political Speech
It was not surprising that “No Other Land” took home the Oscar for best documentary feature. Nor was it surprising that, upon accepting the award, the filmmakers would discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the demolition of homes in the West Bank.
But the acceptance speeches by two of the film’s four credited directors, the Palestinian activist Basel Adra and the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, notably did not hold back from a kind of rhetoric not ordinarily heard in mainstream American discourse. Adra called on the world to “stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.”
Abraham condemned “the atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people” (he also characterized Israeli hostages in Gaza as victims of “the crime of Oct. 7” who were “brutally taken”). The remarks were delivered eloquently by filmmakers who have lived, seen and documented some of the events they sought to describe. They also entered a political maelstrom, with a presidential administration that has sought to transfer Gaza’s Palestinian population and a film industry rived by charges that its pro-Palestinian voices have been insensitive to Israeli suffering and antisemitism generally.
— Marc Tracy
That’s Why the Orchestra Is There
This year, the Academy had a mostly good sense of when to usher winners offstage and when to let them keep talking. It was a plus in a ceremony with heartwarming speeches from the actress Zoe Saldaña, the costume designer Paul Tazewell and impassioned comments from the “No Other Land” filmmakers.
Thankfully, they did play music in an attempt to cut short the winners for best original song for “El Mal” from “Emilia Pérez.” It was an acceptance speech that began to drag even before they started singing an entirely different song from the musical. Even the film’s director, Jacques Audiard, was getting tired of the singing, mouthing a barely audible, “Wrap it up,” under their serenading.
But when Adrien Brody won best actor for his role as an architect and Holocaust survivor in “The Brutalist,” he started to be played off, before making a direct appeal for the music to stop and to let him finish his remarks. They did, but the orchestra did kick back in as his speech wound down. “OK, I’ll get out of here,” he acquiesced.
— Annie Aguiar
Best Sign of Creative Change: Animation Draws New Borders
In a United States that can feel more insular by the day, the Oscars telecast offered many reminders of the breadth and depth of creativity in the world, including in both animated film categories.
“Flow” — a dialogue-free tale of surviving and thriving that was made in Latvia and created in open-source software — triumphed in the best animated feature category, delivering the Baltic nation its first Oscar. It impressively beat out two American big-budget heavy hitters: “The Wild Robot” and “Inside Out 2,” the highest-grossing film of 2024. “We’re all in the same boat, we must overcome our differences and find ways to work together,” the director of “Flow,” Gints Zilbalodis, said, nodding to his film’s plot about a band of animals who unite amid disaster.
“In the Shadow of the Cypress,” a minimalist fable from Iran about the emotional and psychological trauma of war, prevailed in the animated short category. Its directors, Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani, landed in Los Angeles just three hours before the ceremony, having barely secured visas. The emotional duo drew applause and cheers from the crowd. “Just the fact that we managed to make this film under the extraordinary circumstances of our country is a miracle,” Sohani said.
— Maya Salam
Most Personal Oscars Presentation: Costume Design
One of the more memorable ways the Oscars ceremony has honored nominees over the years was in 2009, when the five previous Oscar-winning lead actors appeared onstage together, each one addressing a nominee personally from the stage. A similar kind of format returned to this year’s ceremony, but this time it was actors addressing the individual costume designers who dressed them for their films. (The same was done in the cinematography category.)
The moment included a little levity when Bowen Yang was the only one to come out dressed as his character from “Wicked.” But overall, it was a lovely and intimate way to pay tribute to crafts that don’t often receive much fanfare in their presentation. It was only enhanced when Paul Tazewell took the costume design prize, becoming the first Black man to win an Oscar in that category.
— Mekado Murphy
Best Shout-out to Mom: Zoe Saldaña’s Speech
We didn’t get to hear all of the speeches back in the interview room. Officials mute the telecast while winners are answering questions. But only one winner’s remarks drew murmurs of widespread approval in the room: Zoe Saldaña.
Saldaña’s remarks were earnest and deeply felt, as evidenced by the emotion she showed onstage as she delivered them. She opened with family (“Mami! My mom is here. My whole family is here. I am floored by this honor.”). She spoke of “the quiet heroism and the power in a woman like Rita,” the character she played. And then she returned to her family, but not in the dutiful way some winners rattle off their thanks.
“The biggest honor in my life is being your partner,” she told her husband. “You hung the moon in our beautiful perfect sons Cy, Bowie, and Zen. They fill our skies every night with stars.”
Finally, she labeled herself “a proud child of immigrant parents,” and gave a nod to her grandmother. “The fact that I’m getting an award for a role where I got to sing and speak in Spanish, my grandmother, if she were here, she would be so delighted,” she said. The award, she added, was for her.
— Matt Stevens
Tribute That Felt Like a Farewell: James Bond
An Oscars tribute to Barbara Broccoli, Michael G. Wilson and their famous cinematic ward might have been a welcome occasion. Broccoli and Wilson are the daughter and stepson of Albert R. Broccoli, the man who originally bought the screen rights to a fictional British spy by the name of Bond. (James Bond.) The two possessed something notably anachronistic in a Hollywood obsessed with squeezing so-called intellectual property for every last drop of financial juice: lockdown control over one of the most beloved and lucrative franchises in film history. They strictly limited spinoffs, regulated the number and quality of Bond movies and selected each new Bond, a task that has seemed urgent since Daniel Craig signed off in 2021 in “No Time To Die.”
Just last month, Broccoli and Wilson sold their inheritance to the company that recently purchased Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio with the right to release Bond movies — a little corporation called Amazon. It is widely expected that the scarcity of the franchise will become a thing of the past. In that light, the Oscars’ gaudy Bond theme medley felt less like an ode and more like a confused funeral wake. “Every generation has their Bond,” said the actress Halle Berry, the “Bond girl” from “Die Another Day” (2002), in her introduction. “The world evolves, and so does he.” Too true. But do we have to celebrate it?
— Marc Tracy
Best Common Cause: Seeing Movies in Theaters
There were two passionate pleas to keep the theatrical moviegoing experience intact over the course of the night: One very silly and one very earnest. The first came in the form of O’Brien’s fake commercial for what he called “CinemaStreams.” His pitch: Tired of watching a movie on your phone or tablet? Go to a place where there’s a screen that’s basically 800 iPhones all glued together. You can also get a bunch of junk food and there are even velvet red ropes. Wait, is this just a movie theater? Yes it is. O’Brien even got the endorsement of Martin Scorsese, who made a brief cameo.
When Sean Baker won the Oscar for directing a couple of hours later, he turned his speech into what he called his “battle cry.” Baker highlighted how movie theaters were struggling, pointing out that the United States lost nearly 1,000 screens during the pandemic. “Filmmakers keep making films for the big screen,” he said passionately. “I know I will.”
Making these statements at the Oscars might be preaching to already converted throngs of movie lovers, but the messages were heard loud and clear.
— Esther Zuckerman
Most Untimely Omission
Just a day before the announcement of Gene Hackman’s death, the news broke that Michelle Trachtenberg, known for her roles in films including “Harriet the Spy,” “Ice Princess” and “17 Again” had died at the age of 39. Despite how top of mind her death is for many, she was noticeably absent from the in memoriam segment. Though we lost lots of titans this year, including Hackman, David Lynch, Maggie Smith and James Earl Jones, to name a few, Trachtenberg’s death touched many millennials who grew with her. She may have been best known for TV roles such as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Gossip Girl,” but it felt strange not to see her remembered here.
— Shivani Gonzalez
