The March 2, 2025 presentation of the 97th Academy Awards will be one for the ages. And possibly the last before America goes down the totalitarian tubes. Don’t mess it up! (Also, brush your teeth.)
Before tuning in, set aside the usual expectations. Here’s how NOT to watch the Oscars this year.
Don’t forget to set your Conan forward!
The biggest fail this year would be not to watch the Oscars. That’s because Conan O’Brien is the Oscars host we should have had all along.
In the past decade, the most frequent Oscars host has been a tie between Jimmy Kimmel and “No Host,” each helming the show three times. Kimmel was better than “No Host,” but many others were not. The 2022 threesome of Regina Hall, Amy Schumer, and Wanda Sykes was a bust, though that probably had as much to do with the show’s mishandling of Slappy Spatchy. Other hosts, such as Neil Patrick Harris and Chris Rock, were okay though unmemorable.
This year’s host, Conan O’Forehead Hairsprig, is the underdog getting his due. The comedian and writer has gone from the Guy Whose TV Hosting Gig Was Stolen by Jay Leno to an elder statesman of grace and good humor and Irish Springiness.
Enjoy the last chance to see a free country’s entertainment industry congratulate itself
Politically speaking, the United States is about to become FUBAR.
Our malignant-narcissist, confirmed-rapist president, pulled by two sets of marionette strings (serial-drug-abusing, bloat-faced, progressivly less-competent, hair-plugged Elon Musk and the murderous, power-grubbing, freedom-resenting, country invading, KGB creep Vladimir Putin), just appointed a half-ruptured human testicle (Dan Bongino) as deputy director of the FBI, alongside DUI hire Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary, which is like firing Clarice Starling’s bosses to replace them with Buffalo Bill and Hannibal Lecter. What’s happened in the United States is the equivalent of George Orwell re-writing Big Brother as a game-show host with autocracy-powered splatterpaint incontinence.
Along come the Academy Awards. Will the hosts and honorees pretend any of this is normal?
Please, Oscars writers and producers: Let people talk about our FUBAR reality, without musically shooing them off-stage or cutting to Aflac commercials. If movies have any relevance at all outside of escapism, then show us you’re plugged in to the moment. Or don’t bother.
Don’t complain about speeches veering political
I’ve often heard people complain about Oscars speeches being too political. They are wrong. If anything, the problem is when the speeches are too restrained.
If you have the world’s biggest bullhorn and you can’t think of anything to say, the problem is you.
Ever notice the people complaining about celebrity opinions only complain when the opinions are ones they disagree with?
In spite of accusations of elitist liberalism, Hollywood is not a monolithic hive-mind. One of 2024’s most-talked-about movies, The Substance, stars Dennis Quaid, who recently went on Fox News to declare his fondness for Trump by saying, “Sure he’s an asshole, but he’s my asshole.” Ew. Plenty of big-name celebrities and producers are all-in when it comes to claiming the Emperor Is Wearing Clothes. [Narrator: He isn’t.]
Americans used to be tough. When did some among us become so soft they need to say “Na, na, I’m not listening!” in response to factual statements? (Most hilarious are the chip-on-shoulder types who, over the past several years, seem to have been hurt at a deep, self-emasculating level by a young woman, Greta Thunberg, clearly stating the scientific reality of global warming.)
If a comforting soma bath is your preference, though, you should turn off the Oscars and scroll through a streaming service until you find Red Notice II: The 3-Body Problem of Bridgerton’s Squid Game Acolyte — now with more buttocks.
Let the speeches rip, whether they’re about the Los Angeles fires, Russia invading Ukraine, Israel and the Palestinians and Gaza, the destruction of the U.S. Constitution’s checks-and-balances structure by Project 2025, DOGE destroying USAID and critical infrastructure, global warming, white-nationalist brainrot, and anti-vaxxer dillweeds worshipping Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s husky larynx while pining for children to die of the measles.
“I’d also like to thank my family. And my mom.”
The Oscars are not horse races; don’t ‘should’ all over yourself
In terms of the competitive categories, this is good advice for any year: Don’t treat the Academy Awards votes as if it matters beyond the level of watching people in a bar play darts.
People have a long memory for upsets. But upsets are part of the game. It’s supposed to be fun.
On movie forums, I still see people angry that Taxi Driver lost to Rocky in 1976. Or lamenting that Star Wars lost to Annie Hall the following year. Then there’s the debate over the three-way upset that had both Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption losing to Forrest Gump. Worst was the Paul Haggis “Shrug, we’re all moral shades of gray!” movie Crash, which in 2006 defeated Brokeback Mountain.
It. Is. Weird. To. Care. About. This. (Unless you’re Annie Proulx. Then, yeah, I get it.)
Remember when The Shape of Water beat Dunkirk, Get Out, and The Post for Best Picture in 2017? If only Get Out had won the statue, then I might watch it for the 7th time instead of just the 6th.
Not only do nominees get all the free marketing that comes with the Oscars show, they also get “underdog” status when they lose. The winners, especially of the top categories, are subject to resentment and sniping.
Poor Cuba Gooding Jr. never overcame the “winner curse” for his Best Supporting Actor win in 1997, surpassing the amazing William H. Macy in Fargo and brilliant Ed Norton in Primal Fear due mainly to his exuberant “Show me the money!” scene in Jerry Maguire. (On the plus side, Gooding Jr. was brilliant in 2001’s Rat Race.) Sometimes it’s better if you’re the “should”-er instead of the “should”-ee.
Don’t hold back from rooting for Anora
Just an opinion. Root for whatever you like. That being said…
Anora tells a believable, unpredictable story centering on a flawed character whose situation, within its moment-by-moment twists, contains unstated but universal themes about power, economic class, self-delusion, moral despair, and empathy (or as MAGA “Christians” are fond of saying lately, “the sin of empathy“).
Anora’s directing is smoothly linear and progressive, without clunky flashbacks or perspective switches, and from start to finish the movie feels like it has a beating pulse, taking risks, mixing humor and sadness effortlessly, and… Anyway, I liked Anora. (So did the review on this site — have a look.)
Don’t root for The Brutalist (unless you really want to)
Again, just an opinion, and there are many (including the fair-minded review on this site) who found much in the film to admire, but:
I think The Brutalist is a piece of wet-concrete crud.
The Brutalist feels like a movie devised to tick boxes of what somebody thought other people would consider artistically impressive for purposes of a modern-day, epic, edgy, Oscar-bait drama. I experienced the film as a series of half-baked, cynical attempts to simulate cultural, philosophical, psychological, and historical depth — without ever really doing so.
The movie looks great, has some strong performances (particularly by Felicity Jones), and touches on worthy issues including architectural style, antisemitism, religious identity, sexual self-denial, psychological masks, the exertion of power being a form of rape, and much more. But it all seems schematic: As if the filmmaker, Brady Corbet, felt that hinting at themes was the same as fully shaping and expressing them.
The Brutalist also has ongoing logistical and narrative problems, beginning when the main character, a Jewish WWII émigré played by Adrien Brody, is hired to rebuild a mansion’s reading room — with only a week to complete the project. What major construction project is completed in a week?
Soon after, the Brody character’s cousin drunkenly tries to get Brody to closely slow-dance with his wife, as if initiating a threesome; later, the wife falsely accuses Brody of making an overt pass at her, and he’s booted from his job and backroom residence. The whats and whys of the sequence are so vague, it seems like she’s angry he peed in a washtub.
Then Brody’s character becomes the live-in project manager of Guy Pearce’s wealthy Pennsylvania WASP, a character whose inconsistent behavior seems like a paper-thin exercise in playing out Maya Angelou’s “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time” quote. Pearce’s dream of building an ambitious cultural center, entrusted to Brody, feels like a combination of The Fountainhead mixed with the spirit of Fitzcarraldo, told with the old-timey, intermission-ized length of a George Cukor drama like Giant, throwing in gratuitous sex scenes as if emulating the interrogation sex from Oppenheimer, with a little Munich-style spousal coitus for emphasis (peppered with 9 1/2 Weeks kink because why not), and finally a physical betrayal suggestive of There Will Be Blood if Daniel Day Lewis’s character had been a closeted homosexual who “likes to watch.”
It made no sense that the Pennsylvania dream project would need to shut down after a train crash, or that a mute niece would abruptly gain the power of speech after an assault (was it an assault?) by a drunken party host, or that Felicity Jones would recover the ability to walk only to hobble into a dinner party to make an accusation so potent it causes the guilty to disappear mysteriously in wet, murky darkness (“Harrison? Harrison? Harrison?”).
The Brutalist‘s ongoing themes of religious conversions and coerced three-ways felt more like The Writer’s Barely Disguised Fetish than a commentary on American and Jewish progression through the 20th Century. The epilogue felt both tacked on and tacky, like the end of Chaplin — only the Lifetime Achievement is going to a fictionalized architect whose contribution to the Bauhaus movement is ignored for the bulk of the movie’s runtime.
Maybe I just didn’t get it, and need to spend more time searching the film’s metaphorical “underground passage.”
If The Brutalist wins anything, I’m going to throw a block of pure marble at my television.
Do not feel bad because you haven’t seen everything
You don’t suck. Most of us can’t realistically see all of the major nominees prior to the Oscars show.
Long ago, somebody figured out that the Academy Awards could pull double-duty as both inside-industry recognition and outside-world marketing and publicity, and they started scheduling prestige pictures during the busy holiday season. Year after year, audiences dutifully chase the Oscar buzz. That whole “FOMO” thing was exploited long before anybody devised the Fear of Missing Out abbreviation.
It’s okay to be late to the party.
Don’t expect the following movies to win
Wicked: Part 1 (see our review) won’t win because it’s a Part 1. When has a Part 1 ever won anything? (Yeah, yeah, The Godfather, etc. Shut up, smarty.)
Same with Dune: Part Two. It won’t win for the same reason you don’t adopt half a kitten. That would be gross. Plus if you saw it in the theater, Dune: Part Two was way too loud. I still can’t hear anything unless it’s riding a giant sandworm.
The Substance won’t win because it’s basically gorenography. I found it both amusing and assaultive, like if a TV commercial director remade The Elephant Man Meets Magic Mike by way of David Cronenberg’s The Fly and The Picture of Gore-ian Gray, but was side-tracked into shooting a cooking show and an exercise program fixated on close-ups of the aerobics instructor’s shiny gyrating crotch. Convincing the whole Academy to vote for The Substance would be like….pulling teeth. (See review.)
Emilia Pérez won’t win because of some controversy and backlash and something about somebody’s old tweets and, you know, it’s one of those movies that really brings out the best in people. (See review.)
I’m Still Here won’t win because it’s also in the Best Foreign Language category (as is Emilia Pérez). They’ll give it the win in that category as a substitute for voting for it in this one.
A Complete Unknown won’t win because the times, they are a changin’, which means not enough people these days appreciate Bob Dylan. Plus that Timothée Chalamet kid is everywhere.
Conclave might win as a more conventional, old-Hollywood-style choice. (See review.)
Nickel Boys could win, as a true underdog vote. (See review.) Though it’s a longshot.
Don’t expect your favorite actors to win
They won’t win. That’s just the odds. I’m still angry that Michelle Williams did not win Best Actress for The Fabelmans. (Here’s a strong explanation for what made her so great.)
I am rooting for Sebastian Stan to win Best Actor for The Apprentice, for the simple reason that it would be an additional thorn in the eye of somebody who deserves double eye-thorns. (See related review here.) Sebastian Stan might get a vote boost from his other strong performance, in A Different Man. (See related review.)
If there’s any justice in the world, Mikey Madison will win Best Actress for everything she did in Anora, which was a lot.
I’d like to see Isabella Rossellini (from Conclave) win Best Supporting Actress both because she’s wonderful, and sentimentally due to her past association with the late David Lynch. If Felicity Jones wins for The Brutalist, that would be well-earned, though it’s the only award that movie deserves.
Do not ignore documentary and foreign-language movies
Though I’m all for giving credit to the Best Adapted Screenplay, or the Best Sound Editing, or the Best Key Grip Gripping, none of these mean a great deal to the average viewer, beyond momentary curiosity.
But the Best Documentary category is often a list of must-see movies. So are the Foreign-Language movies.
All the documentaries sound worthwhile, including Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Black Box Diaries, No Other Land, Sugarcane, and Porcelain War.
All the foreign contenders also sound intriguing, including I’m Still Here (Brazil), The Girl With the Needle (Denmark), The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Germany), and Flow (Latvia) — the latter perhaps being a contender in the Animated Feature category as well.
When playing filmgoing catch-up, put these in the mix.
Don’t skip the In Memoriam segment
This year is going to hurt. Especially right after losing Gene Hackman, whose presence in a movie always made it better.
Although it’s an open question how much to care about celebrities’ lives, their passing is nonetheless sobering.
In many cases, they are linked to pivotal memories in one’s own life. I’ve spend countless hours talking to friends about David Lynch movies, Shelley Duvall’s scenes in The Shining, and Gene Hackman’s wonderful Lex Luthor in the first Superman movies.
Some of the major losses: Donald Sutherland, Teri Garr (see our tribute), James Earl Jones (see our tribute), Michelle Trachtenberg, Maggie Smith, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Newhart, Shannon Doherty (the meanest of all “Heathers”), Carl Weathers, Gena Rowlands, Dabney Coleman, Louis Gossett Jr., Anouk Aimee, Martin Mull, Glynis Johns, David Soul, Quincy Jones, Olivia Hussey, Tony Todd, John Ashton, Ángel Salazar, and M. Emmet Walsh — the character actor whose presence always signaled a movie could not be bad, according to critic Roger Ebert.
Producers and directors such as Norman Jewison, Roger Corman, Lynda Obst, and Jim Abrahams also departed last year.
Of all the behind-the-scenes losses, the most missed will be David Lynch. His turn at the end of The Fabelmans (playing cranky director John Ford) continues to resonate: “At the top, it’s interesting! At the bottom, it’s interesting! In the middle, it’s boring as shit!“
Heck, I might as well mention O.J. Simpson, if only for his hilarious ongoing injuries in the Naked Gun comedies. Though he certainly won’t be in the Oscars presentation.
Don’t mind those left behind. Forget it, Jake. It’s Oscartown.
The show has a timeline. People complain if it goes on too long. So they’ll limit the In Memoriam and have a “see more” notation somewhere.
I’m always curious to know what commercial will play right afterward. Seems like an incredibly awkward ad slot.
One person I hope will get a moment of In Memoriam is Joe Flaherty.
You might remember him from Adam Sandler’s comedy Happy Gilmore, as the goofball hired to heckle the golfing hero from the sidelines by shouting, “Jackass!” just before a shot.
Or you might remember him as the mysterious man who walks up to Marty McFly at the end of Back to the Future Part Two, to deliver a letter that sets up the final film in the trilogy.
Of personal-obsession significance, I remember Joe Flaherty as the heart of the Toronto-based sketch-comedy show, SCTV, which also launched the careers of Eugene Levy, John Candy, Martin Short, Rick Moranis, and Catherine O’Hara (seen just last year in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — reviewed here). Among others.
Flaherty was hilarious as recurring SCTV characters like Guy Caballero, Billy Sol Hurok (“That blowed up good — real good!”), and Count Floyd. The rock band Rush liked him so much, they hired him — as Count Floyd — to film an introduction to songs during their concerts.
It’s fitting that Flaherty died last year on April first. He was a wonderful fool — the soul of the best comedy show ever.
Don’t be ashamed to care about the fashion, pageantry, music, and triviality of it all
We all deserve to enjoy something frivolous from time to time. Especially these days.
