By Erin Free
The 2023 Academy Awards turned out to be nothing less than a seismic pop cultural event, with Will Smith slap-down of Chris Rock making doddering Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway’s La La Land announcement fuck-up look like, well, nothing more than a “senior moment” on a very grand scale. Will Smith’s slap was literally heard around the world, and while the audience and organisers responded like Chris Rock was Kitty Genovese, the world’s media (both mainstream and social) lit up like a Christmas tree, with all comers weighing in with their opinions…including FilmInk.
With the whole bizarre, ugly incident freshened up in punters’ minds courtesy of Chris Rock’s just-released Netflix stand-up comedy special (“I watched Emancipation just to see Will Smith get whipped,” was one of the comedian’s best lines), everyone was wondering how the Academy would address “the slap”, and its extended aftermath. With outspoken TV host Jimmy Kimmel doing MC duty for the third time (at the bargain basement cost of $15,000…apparently an Oscars standard), there was no doubt that last year’s debacle would certainly be dealt with in no uncertain terms. And while the shadow of last year’s controversial Oscars hung long and ominous, a bigger potential horror was the possibility that The Academy would get cold feet and revert to the dullness propagated back in 2019, when we saw quite possibly the worst Oscars ceremony in history.
That fear was instantly diminished by Jimmy Kimmel’s fantastic opening monologue. In one fell comedic swoop, Kimmel asked Seth Rogen if he was on mushrooms, suggested Steven Spielberg was high when he made E.T, delivered pointed jibes about streaming and TV, bomb-shamed the makers of Babylon, ingeniously hit the gender button with a joke about James Cameron not getting a Best Director nomination (“What is he? A woman?”), delivered the expected gags about the Oscars being so long, poked fun at the reinstitution of all the awards categories into the telecast (“The filmmaking community wanted them back in as much as the viewing audience didn’t”), and generally hit the comic mark with expert precision. Kimmel also made the brilliant point that nominees Ke Huy Quan and Brendan Fraser had both appeared in the Pauly Shore ball-tearer Encino Man, which earned him instant extra points.
Kimmel also warmed up nicely to the whole Will Smith situation, first mentioning that the large number of Irish nominees meant the likelihood of an on-stage fight was even higher this year. The talk show host eventually threw right into it, claiming that if something like that happened again this year, “the audience would do exactly what they did last year…nothing! You might even give the assailant a hug.” He also assured audiences that if anyone committed an act of violence, they would “be given the Best Actor Oscar, and the chance to give a nineteen-minute speech.” Brilliant, Ricky Gervais-level take-downs, they were perfectly delivered, and deservedly hit The Academy right between the eyes. Will Smith, thankfully, was not on hand to present the Best Actress Award, as is customary.
The winners on the night were a wildly popular bunch, with Best Supporting recipients Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis for Everything, Everywhere All At Once proving big favourites with the audience. Their speeches were incredibly rousing and personal, with their call-outs to their parents likely leaving not a dry eye in the house. For genre fans, Curtis’ identification as a horror icon would likely have come as a special treat. And it would also have been a great payoff for all those people that said “That kid will win an Oscar one day” when they saw Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom. The great Sarah Polley was also a huge and well-deserved winner for Best Adapted Screenplay for the masterful Women Talking.
Special note also goes to the hilariously mugging guy who kept camera-hogging during the short doco win of The Elephant Whisperer. Another special note: did everyone else see the hilariously sympathetic look on the Aftersun guy Paul Mescal’s face when the Avatar special effects guy was so rudely cut off during his acceptance speech? It likely brilliantly summed up the thoughts of everyone watching.
The presenters were also a fun mix, and were well served by the script, which was far lighter and more free-flowing than usual. The jokes were pithy, and mainly induced the right kind of cringing. The Rock and Emily Blunt were engaging in a funny charm overload; Donnie Yen was, well, the absolute legend that he is; Jenny the donkey from The Banshees Of Inisherin made a very welcome appearance; Julia Louis Dreyfuss and Paul Dano made for a surprisingly winning comic duo; Andie McDowell and Hugh Grant brought the nostalgia and the laughs (“Still stunning” Grant said of McDowell, while hilariously referring to his own face as “basically a scrotum”); the hilariously croaky throated Elizabeth Banks nearly stacked it while accompanied by her cocaine bear (“Are you trying to score? Wait til the after party like everybody else!”), which later roamed the aisles and harassed – what the fuck? – Malala Yousafzai!
Avant garde also happily came to the Oscars in the personages of David Byrne and Stephane Hsu (filling in for Mitski), whose hot-dog fingered performance of “This Is A Life” from Everything, Everywhere All At Once played like a brilliant extra scene from American Utopia. It was wonderfully weird, and the other musical performances were also similarly fresh and eye-catching. “Naatu Naatu” from RRR brought the Tollywood with all of the colour, vibrancy, and excitement that suggested, with a dance-filled mini-extravaganza that brought the house down. Lady Gaga introduced her own song from Top Gun: Maverick (was that a first?) as if she was cutting an MTV Unplugged installment (wait, is that still even a thing?) and then proceeded to totally fucking kill it, all in very, very extreme close-up, and dressed like she was still at a rehearsal. “Royalty in her own right” (really?) Rihanna also impressed with “Lift Me Up”, her heartstring tugger from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Against some big names, however, “Naatu Naatu” took the gong and made Hollywood history in the process as the first Telegu song to take out such an award.
The “In Memorium” section was devastating as usual, with a tearful John Travolta’s intro deeply moving. A fully dreaded, piano-tinkling Lenny Kravitz provided the gorgeous musical backdrop, as we mourned the very sad passing of the likes of Olivia Newton-John, Ray Liotta, Irene Cara, Kirstie Alley, Bob Rafelson, Jean-Luc Godard, Burt Bacharach, Louise Fletcher, Gina Lollobrigida, Vangelis, Raquel Welch, Jimmy fucking Caan, and many more…but not Robert Blake, which Jimmy Kimmel amusingly joked about. Also, who was that saying “Thanks, Lenny” during the fade to an ad break.
To much justified cheering, Brendan Fraser lost his shit when accepting his Best Actor Award for The Whale. The young veteran’s transformative performance was a well-deserved and safely presumed winner, and nice guy Fraser was touchingly humble in his acceptance speech. It was a great moment, and one of the many highlights of the ceremony.
The big winner on the night, of course, was Everything Everywhere All At Once, which also scored the Best Director, Best Film and Best Actress gongs (history-making Michelle Yeoh was a hugely popular winner, and gave a very sweet speech), with all recipients from the film wonderfully super-pumped and impassioned in their exciting and excitable speeches. But seriously, the producers of the Oscars must have a peek at the winning films way before the ceremony, right? Could it be that much of a coincidence that they ingeniously engineered a heart-warming, crowd-pleasing Dr. Jones/Short Round reunion by having Harrison Ford present the award for Best Film? We thinks not, people…
Everything Everywhere All At Once also, of course, continued the welcome diversification of the Oscars with its largely Asian and Asian-American cast, while its wildness and weirdness also proved that Best Film Oscar winners no longer have to be serious, ponderous, epic films, but can be creative, provocative head-scratchers with modest budgets that capture and enrapture through inventive filmmaking alone. The film’s success was also a solid pay-off for those three people that saw Swiss Army Man and said, “Those directors will win an Oscar one day.”
Free from controversy or high drama, the 2023 Oscars were entertaining and amusing, but very, very long. But with that said, does anyone else miss the inclusion of those career-type, Hollywood legend suck-up awards that used to be included within the ceremony itself, rather than handed out at previous events in the months leading up to the big show? It would’ve been pretty cool, for instance, to see more than a three-second clip of Aussie titan Peter Weir accepting this year’s honorary Oscar from Jeff Bridges. These special awards add gravitas, nostalgia, and a sense of history to the Oscars that has been sadly lacking since they were dropped. Yes, the Oscars ceremony is gruelling in length, but not all editing is for the best. Bring these special segments back in some way…please! Oh, and thanks to broadcaster Channel 7 for not turning the Oscars into an opportunity to plug all of their shithouse upcoming shows, like previous braodcaster Channel 9 was constantly guilty of.
Also, Oscars organisers: maybe bring Jimmy Kimmel back next year…he kept it rolling, and provided just the right amount of edge too. The Oscars are always better with one host who actually knows how to host, and Jimmy Kimmel nailed it. Mmmmm, maybe bring back the cocaine bear too…
Click here for our report on last year’s Oscars.
