MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY FILM INQUIRER

By Lachlan Gallagher

And so, the Oscars, that most important of unimportant nights (or days Australia time), are once again done for another year. With the little bronze covered in gold statues (if that’s not the perfect metaphor for the film industry, then I don’t know what is?) transported from the Academy’s vault, to the congratulatory hands of eclectic presenters, to the excitedly sweaty grip of winners’ palms, to sweatier afterparties, to coffee tables, cabinets, eBay and who knows where else across the world from there.

While there were no big surprises or overly objectionable outcomes this year, there’s still a lot to unpack. So, read on for a full list of all the winners, if you haven’t seen them already or have already forgotten them, followed by some facts and thoughts on those winners, the losers, and the presentation of the 95th Academy Awards ceremony itself. Speaking of which, if you’d like to watch or rewatch it, you can currently do so on 7Plus here.

As widely predicted, the big winner of the night was Oppenheimer, which blew up and took home seven awards from its thirteen nominations, with wins for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Cinematography, Score, and Editing. That ties it with last Oscar’s top (hot)dog Everything Everywhere All at Once for the most Academy Awards awards won since 2009, though Oppenheimer ‘only’ won four above-the-line awards compared to EEAAO’s record six. As winning director and one of the winning producers, this is a moment that has been a long time coming for fifty-three-year-old first-time winner Christopher Nolan. Nominated five times in previous years, and now eight times total, if you had asked people to pick filmmakers who had not yet won an Oscar but most deserved one before Monday, Nolan (along with The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’s Wes Anderson) would no doubt have been at the top of a lot of lists. Indeed, outrage over The Dark Knight’s snubs for Best Picture and Director noms back in 2009 was one of the main motivations for the Academy in re-upping the number of Picture nominees from five to the current ten. Not only a first-time win for Nolan, the same went for all of Oppenheimer’s successful team barring Ludwig Göransson, who also won Best Original Score back in 2019 for Black Panther. With producer Emma Thomas’ fellow win for Best Picture, she and Nolan (one of six nominated couples this year) have now fully cemented their status as one of Hollywood’s power couples.

Is Oppenheimer a worthy winner? That will, of course, depend on who you ask, what you think, and what you’ve seen. Inquirer writer Ziqian Sheng was not a fan of the film to say the least. But in many pundits’ and this non-pundit’s opinion, it’s a pretty good film and a pretty good winner: a grand public service announcement that serves both as a reminder of the power of atomic weapons and the bitter politics behind them, as well as to correct the record on J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and legacy. The film’s recreation of the Trinity test explosion underwhelms when compared to archival footage, somewhat undercutting the power of its warning (more CGI may not have gone astray, Mr Nolan). And there are a few cheesily executed gotcha moments in its last stretch. But overall, Oppenheimer is beautifully made, clipping along at a tense pace, making perfect use of its huge cast, and artfully entertaining even as it delves into difficult quandaries. With one moment so empathetically affecting that I had tears streaming down my face a la a crying wojak.

The other major winner of the night was Poor Things, which took home a not poor at all four wins for Actress (Emma Stone’s second after 2016’s La La Land), Makeup and Hairstyling, Costume Design, and Production Design from its eleven nominations. These wins came in some of the closest races of the year: with Best Actress widely predicted to go to the other Stone – Lily Gladstone – for their performance in Killers of the Flower Moon; Makeup and Hairstyling to Maestro; and Costume Design and Production Design being a coin flip toss up with Barbie. Why did Poor Things prevail where these films did not? The answer seems to lie largely in the sheer originality of its construction (though the film is based on a book, it is not a strictly faithful adaptation), from Emma Stone’s incredibly idiosyncratic and nuanced physical performance (in voice, face and everything below) as the ever evolving Bella Baxter, to the movie’s bombastically stylised and dressed 19th century world. Check out Inquirer writer Finnlay Victor Dall’s rave review for further insights here.

Not helping Poor Things’ competition were flaws in their own awards narratives as well. Strong as Gladstone’s performance and as anticipated as a potential first acting win for a Native American performer were (Gladstone is at least still the first Native American to be nominated for Best Actress), there’d been much debate over whether the role of Molly Kyle was actually a lead or more so supporting. Maestro’s campaign was fought hard across the board, but perhaps too hard given the online ridiculing Bradley Cooper has received for how much he seems to really want an Oscar (though as Emma Thomas noted in her acceptance speech, rare is the person who doesn’t), while the prosthetic nose for his character drew some accusations of being over the top ‘Jewface’ – funnily enough, three out of this year’s Makeup and Hairstyling nominees (Maestro plus Golda and Oppenheimer) featured their gentile stars transforming into historical Jews. And Barbie: while there were many wanting to see the Barbenheimer coupling result in multiple wins for it alongside, or in lieu of, Oppenheimer, its costumes and sets being largely loving recreations of pre-existing ones for the titular doll meant it just did not have that original edge that Poor Things things did.

The film with the third most wins meanwhile was The Zone of Interest, which took home two, in Best International Feature and Best Sound, from five nominations. Inquirer writer Johnny Hill made note of the importance of sound in the film in his rave review, which you can read here.

Picking up one win each meanwhile were Anatomy of a Fall, American Fiction, The Holdovers, Barbie, 20 Days in Mariupol, The Boy and the Heron, Godzilla Minus One, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko, and The Last Repair Shop. Best Picture nominees Past Lives (which had two noms total), Maestro (seven noms total) and Killers of the Flower Moon (ten noms total) were among the films that failed to nab anything.

As you may have noticed, many of this year’s victors (eight out of the thirteen to be precise) were period pieces, and also many of them (six out of the thirteen) war movies. Is this an example of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters having stuffy, old-fashioned tastes as they have in the past been rightfully accused (the average age of an Oscar voter is around 60, after all)? Given the diverse and freshly unique approaches last year’s period pictures and war watches took to depicting their subjects, I would say, no. Rather, the production of some of these acclaimed movies and their prevalence at the Oscars has, one expects, natch, been in part fuelled by their relevance in light of current global conflicts.

As Cillian Murphy said in his acceptance speech for Best Actor: “We made a film about the man who created the atomic bomb, and, for better or for worse, we’re all living in Oppenheimer’s world, so I would really like to dedicate this to the peacemakers everywhere.” Detailing Oppenheimer’s world as it stands now, Mstyslav Chernov, director of 20 Days in Mariupol, said in accepting the award for Best Documentary Feature that: “I wish I would never [have] made this film. I wish to be able to exchange this to Russia never attacking Ukraine, never occupying our cities.” While Jonathan Glazer, in a reasonable and balanced speech that has nonetheless drawn controversy, read following The Zone of Interest’s Best International Feature win that: “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say look what they did then; rather look what we do now. Our film shows where dehumanisation leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people… Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanisation. How do we resist?”

Outside of Past Lives – which was the best reviewed non-documentary film of 2023 going off of Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes average ratings, and deserved in this writer’s opinion additional noms and a few wins for writer-director Celine Song, her cast and crew (see Inquirer writer Lilly Sokolowski’s review for a rundown of the film’s emotional effectiveness) – the big snubs this year lay not in who didn’t win from those nominated, but in who was not even nominated at all. To name a few films in particular: All of Us Strangers, Fallen Leaves, Showing Up, (start of next title) Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (end title), Priscilla, Suzume, and May December (though that one did at least score an Original Screenplay nom). Much has also been made of Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig’s exclusions from the Best Actress and Best Director nominees respectively.

Only one woman was nominated for directing this year, but three films directed by women were nominated for Best Picture, a new record. One day, hopefully sooner rather than later, that number will reach five or more. In other records, at the age of 22 and 26 respectively, Billie Eilish and brother Finneas O’Connell are now the youngest people to have won two Oscars, following their Original Song win for “What Was I Made For?” On the flip side, at age 83, Hayao Miyazaki is now the oldest person to have won the Oscar for Animated Feature Film. The film in question, The Boy and the Heron – which beat out favourite Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – marks only the second time a hand-drawn production has drawn the prize, the first being 21 years ago when Miyazaki also won for Spirited Away; as well as the very first time a US classified PG-13 film has won, with previous winners being rated either PG or G. A fitting swan song for Miyazaki? Fingers crossed not. For Oppenheimer meanwhile, its wins mark the first time in twelve years that a Best Picture winner has also contained the winner for Best Actor. And, with $960+ million from the global box office, makes it the highest-grossing Best Picture winner since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King twenty years ago.

As for the presentation of the ceremony itself, the review of returning host Jimmy Kimmel by, y’know, Donald Trump, whose ‘not tweet’ Kimmel chose to read out near the end, sums up Kimmel’s performance somewhat well: a ‘less than average person trying too hard to be something which he is not, and can never be.’ Solid as Kimmel’s clap back may have been (“Isn’t it past your jail time?”), did he get baited? Yes, yes he did. And overall, his hosting this time round was not as solid as last.

Some of Kimmel’s and his team’s jokes landed, of course. Particularly those involving (future Oscar sweeper?) Madame Web and Palm Dog winner Messi, of Anatomy of a Fall fame. But, for the most part, the funnier bits of the night came from those prepared for or by other presenters, such as (future Oscars host?) John Mulaney and his Field of Dreams tribute (Mulaney’s monologue for the Academy’s Governors Awards back in January is also worth a watch). Credit must go to Kimmel and his team for paying tribute and pledging solidarity in his opening monologue to the below-the-line crews and teamsters, who are represented by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and Hollywood Teamsters (aka Teamsters Local 399) unions, and are negotiating a new contract with the big studios this year following the lengthy and hard fought writers and actors strikes last year, which Kimmel also reflected upon nicely seriously and lightly. However, no credit goes to Kimmel for infantilising yet again the medium of animation and undervalued animators by asking if voters let their kids fill out the feature ballot.

To close out the ceremony, Kimmel aimed his wit one last time at Christopher Nolan for not possessing a mobile phone, quipping, “If only he had some way to text his family the good news”. Despite much of Nolan’s family being in attendance and Emma Thomas having just won Best Picture alongside her husband… So it was that the Oscars ended not with an Oppenheimer bang, but a Jimmy Kimmel whimper.

Thankfully, this year’s broadcast avoided being defined by mediocrity thanks to a few other stellar performances. The choice to have former Best Acting category winners laud this year’s nominees as friends and colleagues, as first occurred in 2009, was for the most part a nicely emotional way to make every nominee feel like a winner, even if some pairings were obviously less personal than others. It would be hard to pull this off annually, but it could be nice to see the Academy do a similar thing for other categories going forward and share that love across all of filmmaking. And more notably, though Barbie may have only won one award for Best Original Song, through its original songs it stole the show, from the simply effective staging of Eilish and O’Connell’s performance, to the elaborately encompassing Kenergy of Ryan Gosling (literally me) singing (if not in perfect pitch, nonetheless pitch perfectly) “I’m Just Ken”. More than Kenough.