Oscars Live Blog 2024

2:22 AM Oppenheimer.  And I am going to cut out pretty quickly because it almost 2:30 in the morning, and I have to get some sleep, and be at Hachette HQ for my first meeting of London Book Fair week in not much more than eight hours.  This winner is deserving enough.  I did see it twice. I didn’t like it more the second time, but I liked it well enough.

2:13 AM This was a tough category to predict, but no complaints about Emma Stone who gives a fearless performance that is sui generis in Poor Things. Look at that list of nominees, and this is the toughest category full of brilliant performances.  But Emma’s - it’s the sui generis part that makes it worthwhile of winning over the others IMHO.

2:11 AM The whole dessert thing is challenged when I am in a temporary borrowed hotel room.  However, Bryce, outside King Cross/St Pancras on Tue-Fri afternoon are some food stalls, and on Friday I went and got some brownies from the stall that has a dozen brownies all of which are tempting. Also today I got some Aero balls at the movie theatre.  But we have an oreo brownie that I am mostly finished with, and a funfetti that I don’t think I’m going to have this morning and will have to work up the calorie count for sometime later on Monday.  There are also some good donuts and other tempting savories at these food stalls that are in the forecourt of King’s Cross.  If ever on the way to Hogwarts you can buy tempting treats for your entire house so long as it’s Ravenclaw.

2:09 AM The TV in this room has time out twice, like it doesn’t like being on for ninety minutes, but Ii’ve been able to turn it back on quickly enough.  But, really. 

2:02 AM He was robbed for Red Eye. 

1:54 AM Why am I doing this?  Blogs are so 1990s or 2000s. Social media is fragmented into a gazillion pieces. I’m not on TikTok. Why am I doing this?

1:50 AM This year’s In Memoriam segment is not prepared with the viewing audience in mind.  For a lot of it you have to have a very big TV or be standing right in front of your TV to easily see the names. The first outright fail in the Oscar ceremony this evening.

1:44 AM They’re Not Ken! But I’m still happy for Billie Eilish and Finneas.  But now we 100% need to get Ryan Gosling his Emmy for his performance of I’m Just Ken because that deserves something.

1:40 AM Oppenheimer will be going home with the most Oscars.

1:38 AM I really enjoyed seeing Barbie, especially the parts that didn’t have Will Ferrell, and seeing it as part of Oppenheimer in a mall full of hundreds of people in pink for a Barbie and Ken meet and greet that Saturday. But, while I kind of thought maybe it would be nice to see Barbie again I never got around to actually doing it.  So, it’s not Best Picture material for me.  I have to see my Best Picture winner twice, I have to be absolutely 100% compelled to see it twice.  And then I have to like it as much or more the second time, which is why The Holdovers and Saltburn are my two favorite movies of 2023.

1: 35 AM Can we give Ryan Gosling an Emmy for his performance of I’m Just Ken?  If there isn’t an Emmy category that covers this we need a new category or a special award or a something but this was one of the best musical numbers at the Oscars in the fifty years I have been watching Oscars.  OMG.  And if I can find that pink outfit tomorrow then I’m wearing pink at London Book Fair because I’m Just Ken. Amazing.

1:28 AM I’d rather talk about John Cena than Zone of Interest. But both don’t have any clothes.

1:23 AM instead of commercials ITV is giving punditry during the commercial breaks. British pundits. I am sure they are famous, but who are they?

1:11 AM My pre-Oscar viewing was Copa 71, which, who knows, could be a documentary feature nominee next year. It’s about the 1971 women’s football (soccer) world cup, an unsanctioned by FIFA competition in Mexico.  Which drew 110,000 people to the final, and was then written out of the history books.  A definite recommend.  It’s nothing special or unexpected - archival footage from 1971 and current day interviews with some of the players, and that’s about it.  A couple players from more recent sanctioned women’s World Cups who are “how didn’t I know about this.” The movie should be about the competition and the participants.  But I do wish the film had gone into a little more detail about the back story.  It says the footage was hidden for fifty years, but where was it hidden?  How was it found?  One of the participants on the British team says it was so disheartening to return to the UK to absolutely nothing, not a single greeter or photographer or anything, that she peeled off from her teammates and never spoke to any of them again.  Which is harsh. Did a lot of them do that?  Did other teams keep in better touch?  If you’re telling the story, I think you need to find a way of telling this part of it without going into it for so long that you lose track of the competition itself.  In its way the film is similar in theme to Mallory O’Meara’s LADY FROM THE BLACK LAGOON about the woman who designed the monster for Creature from the Black Lagoon and then got written out of history. One of the strengths of that book is its combination of personal journey of the author in rediscovering this piece of the past. 

1:10 AM backtracking briefly, Robert Downey Jr pulled off a slightly less “V” V neck look. Maybe I need to go shopping on Monday for a slightly more “V” look for the JABberwocky table at London Book Fair.

12:45 AM No, it’s not a career achievement or redemption arc that gives Robert Downey Jr. an Oscar tonight. It’s a great performance.  

I spent the entire length of Oppenheimer wondering who was playing this character, because I had zero idea and the performance was so good and the contained fury of the character’s self-justifying evil was incredible to watch.  It was Robert Downey Jr?  FFS it was Robert Downey Jr.  There are other really really good performances in this category, but this is the great one.

12:28 AM Sigh No way can I pull off the Ryan Gosling look, and kill me if I try.  But OMG does he put the “V” into V neck, and with that chest and the angularity of his face it works and it is amazing.  I’ve forever wished that Gosling had spent the early years of his career being a movie star instead of the star of Lars and the Real Girl sorts of things, and I can’t wait for Fall Guy to open several weeks from now.

1:09 AM GMT Almost to my surprise I ended up seeing four of the five nominees for International Feature, and the best I can say for Zone of Interest is that The Teacher’s Lounge was arguably worse.  Except that I’d rather see The Teacher’s Lounge just to throw things at the screen when the lead character is doing stupid thing after stupid thing after stupid thing.  I hated passionately the lead character in The Teacher’s Lounge.  While The Zone of Interest just sits there doing nothing.

Actually worth seeing for meritorious reasons are Perfect Days and Io Capitano, and my own choice to win this category would be Io Capitano.

Perfect Days is a movie I saw with some reluctance. I haven’t raced through the Wim Wenders filmography. But the nice thing about the Alamo Seaon Pass is being able to take a chance on something, and this - how does it work?  It’s a movie about a guy cleaning toilets.  And yet, it’s full of heart, it manages to steer clear of the arty slowness even as it’s going into great detail of how one cleans a toilet.  Multiple times.  It’s the sort of thing in the four hour Wiseman documentary that I was “could we see this just once and not six times” but here I didn’t mind if we saw a couple times the person squirting underneath the rim. The lead character’s enigmatic but I never felt annoyed that the movie was relying on the artificial withholding of information.  It keeps doing things that I don’t like, and I kept going with it, and it’s worth seeing.

But Io Capitano is for a plot person.  It is Scott Meredith’s Writing to Sell, with identifiable lead characters and problems problems problems that goes to very dark places and it’s engrossing in every single minute of its running time.  

12:22 AM Is Poor Things going to go home with the most trophies?  Possibly.  Three wins in technical categories that are hard to argue with.  It isn’t all pink. It isn’t all stuff what was there before. It’s all imagined by the artists that put Poor Things on the screen.  And Poor Things is nowhere near my favorite of last year’s movies, but I liked it a lot more than I thought I would based on my experience with the director, and it was oozing with creativity in every scene and every frame.

12:18 AM The pandemic, I don’t like to talk much about.  Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families it was unhappy for everyone in its own unhappy way. But part of the way through for me was the escape of going to the movies, and Billie Eilish is forever part of that.  The World’s A Little Blurry was one of the last movies to open before movie theatres in New York City were allowed to reopen, and there I was on the Metro North to White Plains to see a movie about a singer I’d never really known very much about because it was a movie to see, an excuse to be someplace with other people instead of alone in a giant emptiness. I am so glad I got to learn about Billie Eilish because she and Finneas are quite a duo.  And in other or earlier times, I might have skipped past a movie about a singer I barely knew.  

The multiplex I went to in White Plains is gone.  Showcase Cinemas closed that, the Linden Boulevard multiplex I went to for another Oscar nominated movie is gone.  The Jamaica Multiplex where I saw a movie once is soon gone, and College Point is soon gone, but I will always have Billie and Finneas in my memory book.

The Barbie song - it’s a good one.

12:04 AM GMT “Changed my life.” Cord Jefferson on his Oscar win. 

Both the screenplay winners are excellent choices.  American Fiction is a great script because it takes something that could have been one thing in lesser hands and turns it into a script that is a great many things.  It’s about family, it’s about publishing, and in both cases about both the specific we see on the screen and the bigger than that.  I can speak from personal experience that the publishing end of it is accurate.  Sadly accurate.  A lot more complexity to this than the log line.  

This is harder category than original screenplay, because other than Zone of Interest I can find points in favor of the other nominees in the category.  Poor Things is like only Poor Things in the history of movies.  Barbie is a phenomenon, but one with enough problems (everything with Will Ferrell, for starters) that isn’t falls out of contention for me.  Oppenheimer is great.  But American Fiction is a deserving winner in this category.

11:51 PM Anatomy of a Fall is a great movie.  It could have lost five or ten minutes in the cutting room and been even better, but it is a great movie, and a worthy winner over The Holdovers, which is the only of the other nominees that I would beat a drum for.

It’s really really hard to do the did she/didn’t she sort of thing and have it work, but the script for Anatomy of a Fall, it’s there on the page of the written words.  As well as the performance of them, the direction of them, but it’s there on the page.  It has some of the best individual scenes of any movie of the year, multiple that crackle with tension and uncertainty and ambiguity.  And those scenes are that good because they are there on the page.  A film worth seeing, and an Oscar deservedly won.

11:46 PM I’ve seen almost every nominated everything for the Oscars this year, except that I can only do so much of the Netflix award bait.  Every year there are movies that are really not all that good IMHO which Netflix sets itself with every fiber of its being to getting Oscar nominations for.  I did NYAD and regret it, and I missed one Best Actor performance and just a couple other items from  I think it’s a good list of nominees.  There’s one movie, Zone of Interest, which I think is wildly overrated.  One of those movies that’s completely empty of meaning to the point where the critical establishment bends over backwards to imbue it with the meaning that isn’t present in the movie itself. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/14/movies/the-zone-of-interest-review.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bk0.gSjP.tqxG_WnILB7r&smid=url-share

I was floored when Manohla Dargis spoke up for my POV in the NY Times.  

The thing to ask yourself about Zone of Interest - if you didn’t know going in because someone told you the whole concept of “oh, they’re living just outside Auschwitz,” how much of it would you get from actually watching the movie?  And the answer is, almost nothing.  The movie relies 100% on the Cliff’s Notes rather than itself ti get its point across.  And then it just drifts along with very little story until it reaches an end when it decides to reach an end which it could have reached fifteen minutes sooner or later or whenever. 

If you’re going to do the “my movie was robbed” thing, I always think it’s reasonable that you name the nominee that should have been snubbed instead of the thing you think was snubbed.  Any category Zone of Interest is in, have at it, because Zone of Interest is bupkus.

11:26 PM The Holdovers was the other of my two most favorite movies of 2023, along with Saltburn. It’s so full of heart and warmth and directorial vision and is a movie that I would watch on TV with commercials forever and ever except it will probably be stuck behind the closed doors of streaming forever and ever.  

11:25 PM: Da’Vine Joy Randolph has swept the award season.

11:24 PM Jodie Foster is the one good thing in NYAD, which I ended up taking a snooze in. Mary Steenburgen has always been one of the best things in any movie she’s ever been in.  Go watch Philadelphia to see some of her best work in a movie full of good performances.

11:20 Better Together!  Glad to see Jimmy Kimmel saluting the Teamsters et al whose unwillingness to cross picket lines was super helpful in last year’s strikes.

11:16 PM Ooooh!  Dig at Robert DeNiro. 

11:14 PM Missed a joke or two as the picture kept cutting out and I dashed down the hall to the alternate viewing location.

11:06 PM Where is Saltburn?  One of my two favorite movies of 2023 is nominated for zero Oscars.

11:02 PM GMT Are the Oscars starting at five past or am I on a five hour tape delay.  And someone has come up a second time to fiddle with the TV so hopefully if it working working instead of cutting out and rebooting.  If not I have prevailed upon the hotel for a key for another room to use for the next four hours.

10:38 PM GMT I had to get the concierge into the room to figure out why the TV wasn’t coming on, and now it is, and the picture has been cutting in and out some and I’ve had only sound, but fingers crossed everything is set for my annual Oscars blog, life from BAFTA city where London Book Fair is set to begin in a little more than 30 hours.