kevdonahue

As I mentioned last week, there were two big contenders this year — “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another” – and I didn’t resonate a whole lot with either of them.

That said, I thought the Academy did a pretty good job of balancing its awards this year.

“One Battle” served as career recognition for Paul Thomas Anderson, a certifiably brilliant director who hasn’t won an Oscar in nearly three decades as a moviemaker. Anderson won best director, best adapted screenplay (he cribbed from Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland”) and best movie. His very salty casting director accepting the first-ever casting Oscar and taunting PTA that she had an Oscar before him was worth a good laugh.

“Sinners” didn’t win best picture or best director, but it hardly walked away empty-handed. Michael B. Jordan won best (and maybe “most liked,” judging by the response in the room) actor. Director Ryan Coogler was honored for writing the best original screenplay. (If you want to know more about what influenced and how he conceived of the movie, this New Yorker podcast interview is essential.)  The movie also won for best score and best cinematography, which went to a woman for the first time ever (a Black woman was icing on the cake). I thought it was obvious that Coogler was being presented as an emerging super-talent. And he seems like a thoughtful, brilliant, kind and loyal person. We’ll see much more of him in the years to come, and that’s a great thing. 

(Editor’s note: I did watch “Sinners” again since first writing this, while recovering from the flu last week, and it is better than I remember. The final hour is really propulsive, I totally missed the very good epilogue after the first set of credits — movie people, no epilogues/postludes on 3-hour-long movies. Enough already! — and not sure what it means that the two biggest events that undermined the club’s integrity were committed by two non-black women, one white, one Asian. And Wunmi Mosaku does some very heavy acting in that last hour. She would have been a deserving Oscar winner for supporting actress.)

Beyond that, the “in memoriam” segment was a little clunky, but what are you supposed to do when Robert Redford, Rob Reiner, Diane Keaton and Robert Duvall all die in the same year? The Barbra Streisand set piece on Redford showed her age, I thought, but she made some important points about how Redford’s biggest contributions to cinema may be the Sundance Festival (where many of this year’s best directors first showed their wares and many of the year’s independent documentaries were first shown) and not his roles in “All the President’s Men” or “Love Story.” I thought Duvall got short shrift, but it was inevitable someone would. Again, not perfect, but resonant.

What else:

• “Frankenstein” was a pretty bad movie, friends who saw it tell me, but it walked away with three Oscars for how it looked. Well done!
• “KPop Demon Hunters” earned two as well, for best animated feature and song of the year.
• Jessie Buckley was the lockiest of locks for best actress, and it got “Hamnet” in the winner’s circle too. Her acceptance speech was a bit of a trippy ride. That said, “Hamnet” was a rocky ride till the last 40 minutes, when — surprise! — “Hamlet” is really compelling. Watching Jessie watch “Hamlet” was very, very moving.
• “Frankenstein” and “KPop” got way more Oscars love than my two fave movies of the year combined, “Train Dreams” and “Sentimental Value.” (“SV” was best foreign feature). I hoped that Stellan Skarsgard would nip Sean Penn at the wire for best supporting actor, but no dice. That Penn skipped the whole thing only made me feel better about my choice (he was in Ukraine, apparently, so I’ll shush myself). Give “Train Dreams” the cinematography award and I would pretty much had no complaints. And that’s not a normal Oscars night around here.
• Conan was good. He had a lot of good lines about the changing face of cinema (last human Oscars host, vertical format shop, Netflix as Oscar host sooner than anyone seems to acknowledge) and the overall national craziness (including the naming of public buildings by the president). His opener was pretty inspired.
• I very much appreciated this conversation between the NYT’s Wesley Morris and scholar Daphne A. Brooks about the complexities of the Black feminist-led revolution that sets the stage for “One Battle After Another.” They put context to my unease, which I had simply labeled “icky,” and made me feel better and informed me. You can listen here.
• I don’t need the pitter-patter between presenters. It’s forced and rarely all that amusing. I’d be happy to get to bed 20 minutes earlier if they simply announced and presented the awards. That’s my crabby, “get off my lawn” take for 2026.