When Daryl Hannah let fly with a “Slava Ukraini” before presenting the Academy Award for Best Editing, it felt like an attempt to burst the comfortable bubble the Oscars had been erecting around the Dolby Theatre all evening up to that point. What Hannah said wasn’t more than an off-the-cuff reference to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, but it was the first moment, 100 minutes into the ceremony’s runtime, when the tumult of the reality outside was acknowledged in more than vague terms. Host Conan O’Brien mentioned “divisive politics” in his opening monologue, the director of Flow closed out his acceptance speech by saying that, like the animals in his films, “we’re all on the same boat,” and Emilia Pérez songwriter Camille expressed the hope that her winning song “speaks to the role music and art can play and continue to play as a force of the good and progress in the world.” (In neither of the speeches for Emilia Pérez’s two wins were trans rights mentioned.) But as though by previous agreement, or maybe just because the sheer enormity of current stressors made it daunting to do justice to any particular one, this year’s Oscars were an inward-looking affair that found the industry foremost concerned with itself.
The result was the most solid Oscar broadcast in years, though that had less to do with the relative lack of recognition of what’s going on in the world than with providing reassurance that Hollywood is still good at putting on a show. The Academy Awards have had a storied, complicated relationship with politics that hinges on the myth, repeated by O’Brien tonight, that a billion people watch the telecast. With that kind of audience, participants really have no choice but to use their platform for higher purposes, even if the result sometimes feels like a forced marriage with questionable effectiveness. But that number has never been real, and if it was ever a little bit close, it certainly isn’t now that cinema, awards shows, and live TV have all slipped from cultural dominance. We’re long past the era when the Oscars could position themselves as the irresistible sugar that helps more serious messaging go down. And this year, still limping from the pandemic and the strikes, and destabilized by contractions due to streaming, the film industry was hit by the Los Angeles wildfires that laid waste to the homes of so many of its workers, and called into question the very assumption that it would continue to have a geographical center. Hollywood needed to put on a show, to put itself in the spotlight, to self-mythologize, and to use the wattage of its stars to draw attention to its less famous craftsmen.