Up (not quite) all night
The ball’s in your court, Estonia!
No, I didn’t find it funny either. Even less so when it was reprised as a non-sequitur quip.
I was kind of looking forward to Conan O’Brien hosting this year’s Oscar® ceremony. Sure, it meant we were back to the days when the host always had to be some white guy comedian. In fact, it was even further back than that. It was back to the white guy comedian who was funny to an earlier generation. Personally, I found some of his jokes quite funny. Others made me cringe which, if I remember O’Brien’s shtick correctly, was point of much of his humor. It’s funny because it makes you cringe.
The most cringe moment was when he presented Harry and Sally themselves and had to pay the obligatory compliment to Billy Crystal by introducing him as “the best Oscar host ever.” It was cringe because it was true. Having said that, O’Brien’s opening gambit for the ceremony—a reworking of a grotesque scene from The Substance in which he emerged from Demi Moore’s body—was a great start. Nearly too good because the rest of his performance couldn’t really live up to it. Still, there was at least nothing as terrible as David Letterman’s “Oprah-Uma” gag or Ellen DeGeneres making fun of Liza Minelli. No, we were back in the safe arms of Gen X’s Bob Hope.
At the risk of coming off like some kind of anglophile snob—an even worse offense here in Ireland than in America—I have to ask: why can’t we Yanks have awards show hosts like the British? If you happened to catch the BAFTAs a couple of weeks ago (I think BBC America carries it) with David Tennant running the show, then you know there is no comparison.
So, here I am talking about the Oscars telecast’s host rather than about the movies that were honored. If you’re interested in how I felt about the winners, you can probably get the gist from my post-morten of my annual Oscar predictions.
Mostly, I was quite happy with how the awards were doled out. I hadn’t dared to hope that Anora would do as well as it did. Sometimes the academy voters like to honor an insurgent who has found success bucking the old studio system, but I figured that would Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. I didn’t expect them to go the further step of Sean Baker’s more upbeat and life-affirming entertainment. In fact, the whole evening was a good one for independent and non-American movies.
Of the big awards, the only real clunker from my point of view was Best Actor. Adrien Brody’s performance in The Brutalist was decent enough, but it left me kind of cold because he was so visibly straining his Oscar muscles. Yet it was by no means as bad a turn-off as his acceptance speech. That came off to me as self-indulgent bordering on arrogant by the point he demanded for a second time that the play-off music cease. He should have taken notes from, well, basically absolutely any of the other winners. Even Cillian Murphy—last year’s Best Actor winner who presented him the award—seemed uncomfortable. Actually, Cillian often seems uncomfortable. When he handed the statuette to Brody, it just confirmed something I was already pretty sure of. I don’t think Cillian’s a hugger.
I think Cillian was the only Irish person to make it onto the stage during the evening. Unless you count Conan, who has reported that a DNA test declared him 100 percent Irish ethnically. Ireland has certainly welcomed him as one of their own. He visited much of the country last year while filming an episode of his Conan O’Brien Must Go travel series. He even took the time to perform a (really strange) walk-on role on an episode of a soap opera in which he had to interact with other actors in the Irish language.
I digress. Back to the Oscar evening. It was inevitably going to be awkward because of the traumatic fires that so recently ravaged the movie world’s capital. Did the show’s production manage to avoid the appearance of shallowness and obliviousness, given the perfunctory ostentatious display of fashion, wealth, privilege, and separation from the concerns of the real world? Not a chance. The producers’ solution was to bring a bunch of firefighters on stage and have them recite teleprompter jokes that made light of the whole situation. As honored as those heroes may have felt, they also seemed to me to be kind of embarrassed. Even cringe-is-funny Conan looked a bit awkward over the whole thing.
On the positive side (at least for me personally) is that this was one of the least demanding Oscar telecasts I’ve watched in quite some time. Last year, since none of the channels in my satellite package was carrying the ceremony in real time, I had to manually tune in the UK’s ITV and watch without the benefit of pausing, rewinding or fast-forwarding. This time around, the Irish state broadcaster RTÉ actually carried the telecast, so I again had total control over my viewing. Even better, for some reason the powers that be decided to start the broadcast at four in the afternoon local time, which meant that I could begin watching at midnight instead of 1:30 a.m. It meant that I could actually get a decent tiny bit of sleep for once.
Once again I was joined by the Missus, who in the past hasn’t always attempted to stay up with me for the broadcast. So, it was just the three of us: her, me and Johnnie Walker. Sláinte!
Being the class operation that it is, RTÉ didn’t bother providing local talent to occupy its viewers during the numerous and sometimes lengthy commercial breaks. BBC, Sky and ITV would always at least have a panel of local film critics and/or other personalities to comment on what we’d seen or to make their own predictions. RTÉ just filled the gaps with their own advertisements—and not even very good ones. One featured Colm Meaney trading borderline offensive insults with English former footballer Peter Crouch on behalf of the Paddy Power betting web site. As the evening wore on, they eventually stopped bothering with the commercials, and the gaps were filled by a static Oscar logo and annoying Oscar music on a loop.
At least I had pause, rewind and fast-forward.
-S.L., 4 March 2025
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