Cozy about the modern – Newspaper Kommersant No. 42 (7487) of 03/14/2023

The 95th Academy Awards were held in Los Angeles without excessive fanfare, albeit with a definitive return to the traditional glamor of the pre-pandemic years. The results of the awards were equally predictable and unorthodox: the best film was the action-fantasy comedy “Everything Everywhere at Once” by the independent film studio A24, which received seven awards out of eleven for which it was nominated. comments Yulia Shagelman.

It seems that after last year’s scandal, when at five minutes to five minutes the winner of the Oscar in the category “Best Actor” Will Smith climbed onto the stage and slapped comedian Chris Rock (he did not quite successfully joke about Smith’s wife), the main thing that the American Academy was striving for cinematographic arts and sciences, is to ensure that the festive evening passes peacefully and without upheavals. The popularly beloved showman Jimmy Kimmel, already proven by the 2017 and 2018 ceremonies, was invited to host it (in the final of the first of them, as you know, the envelopes with the name of the winning film were mixed up, but the entertainer was certainly not to blame for this). The stage was decorated in a cozy old-fashioned way in the spirit of Art Deco, and even the traditional color of the carpet on which the guests walked into the hall was changed from dramatic red to calm beige, or, as it was elegantly called in press releases, the color of champagne.

That same slap in the face became the main subject of Kimmel’s jokes: he constantly reminded of her, emphasizing that this would definitely not happen during his “duty”. They were diluted with quite harmless jokes about the nominees, say, that James Cameron was making very, very long films for a very, very long time.

The ceremony itself was determined not to drag out, which led to some awkward moments – for example, when the specialists who received the award for best visual effects in James Cameron’s Avatar: The Path of Water were driven off the stage by music right in the middle of the thank you speeches.

However, not all winners were subjected to such measures, many were allowed to greatly exceed the allotted 45 seconds for speeches. First of all, this concerned the team of the film “Everything is everywhere and at once”. The authors of the film, Daniel Scheinert and Dan Kwan, took the stage three times to receive awards for directing, best original screenplay and, in fact, for the best film as producers. In addition, three of the four nominated actors in the film won their respective categories: Michelle Yeoh won Best Actress, and Ke Huy Kuan and Jamie Lee Curtis won Best Actor and Supporting Actress, respectively. The picture with a telling title received the seventh Oscar for best editing.

In total, the A24 studio, which already had one Oscar-winning film – “Moonlight”, which received three awards in 2017, collected nine Oscars at this ceremony, taking first place among filmmakers. Two more statuettes went to Darren Aronofsky’s film “The Whale” released by this studio – more precisely, Brendan Fraser, recognized as the best actor for the role of a man suffering from morbid obesity, and make-up artists who created for him a “fat suit” weighing more than 100 kg.

How well-deserved all these awards are is a debatable question: they looked especially discouraging against the background of the fact that Banshees of Inisherin, Fabelmans, Tar and Elvis, nominated several times, defiantly did not receive a single statuette. But they clearly signaled a turnaround for the academy, which has added many new members over the past five years. While it used to be dominated by white cisgender pensioners, the membership is now younger, more international, ethnically and gender diverse.

It can be said that the current ceremony honored not so much the cinema as the personal stories of the people who make it, and in accordance with the current discourse, including such people whom the industry had not noticed before.

Michelle Yeoh received her first Oscar nomination at 60 and became the first Asian woman to win the award. Ke Huy Kuan, who grew up in a refugee family, quit acting due to the lack of offers for performers of his type, but returned at the age of 51 and immediately collected a bunch of awards for a rather modest role both in terms of timing and expressiveness. Brendan Fraser was a star in the 1990s and early 2000s, then was sexually harassed by the president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, developed health problems, dabbled in supporting and third roles, and suddenly performed the “acting feat” that the academy loves so much in any of its composition. The story of Jamie Lee Curtis, the daughter of Hollywood superstars who never suffered from a lack of proposals, does not seem to fit into this narrative, but it seems that everyone just loves her very much, and she makes speeches that are easy to decompose into memes and quotes.

The second theme of the ceremony was the response to current political events in the world, outside the champagne-colored path. Thus, the best documentary was chosen by the academicians as the film “Navalny” by Daniel Roer, which tells about the progress of the investigation into his poisoning in 2020. The journalist Hristo Grozev and the family of the oppositionist, who is now serving a prison term, went up on stage to receive the award, and it looked, no doubt, very cinematic.

However, the topic of the day, albeit not directly, was also reminded by other winning films. Thus, the German “All Quiet on the Western Front”, with its distinct anti-war message, took second place in terms of the number of awards, receiving four of the nine for which it was nominated. “Best Foreign Film” was the most obvious of these, and “Best Production Design” was unexpected, the favorites in this category were different. Academicians also noted the picture for music and camera work. And Pinocchio Guillermo del Toro, which continues the theme of the horrors of war, the action of which the director transferred to the time of Mussolini, was named the best animated film.