In a sense, you could say it was like the good old days. Oscar night, whether the telecast is great or just so-so (I’m all but incapable of finding the Oscars outright bad — I’m too much of an entertainment junkie), always gave you the feeling that Hollywood was at the center of the world. The Oscars were about quality meeting popularity, about a kind of middle-of-the-road solid ground — and, at moments, artistic fearlessness. They were a dream of how Hollywood wanted to be seen, a referendum on the state of the movie business. The image that the industry projected of itself always came through loud and clear.
That was certainly the case this year, as “Anora,” Sean Baker’s epic comedy about a sex worker who makes fast work of marrying a Russian oligarch’s son, won five of the six Oscars it was nominated for, in what amounted to an awesome sweep. What felt new and different is that in so decisively anointing an independent film that the vast majority of those watching the telecast had, in all likelihood, never seen, the Oscars, duplicating the spirit of the Independent Film Awards, sealed what may be fast becoming their new identity as a boutique awards show.
The telecast itself was a brisk and elegantly executed piece of media stagecraft, successful in more ways than not. It was lavishly designed and purged of dead spots, and the winners were given the chance to reveal who they were, which is really the heart of the show. The evening opened in high style with a fanfare from “Wicked,” as Ariana Grande, in a dress that looked like a Schiaparelli-designed accessory to Dorothy’s ruby slippers, sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and was then joined by Cynthia Erivo for a performance of “Defying Gravity” that was so spellbinding that nobody had to fly — the number itself levitated.
Then Conan O’Brien came out, and while I confess that his brand of meta cynicism has never been my cup of talk-show japery, he absolutely rocked his debut as a host, walking the perfect line between acid and affection, whether he was ribbing “The Brutalist” (“I didn’t want it to end, and luckily it didn’t”), tweaking the Karla Sofía Gascón debacle in a way that nipped any awkwardness of her presence in the bud, or observing that “Bob Dylan wanted to be here tonight, but not that badly.” This was Conan at his acerbic best, giving Jimmy Kimmel a run for his money. He got into a hilarious sparring match with Adam Sandler, seated in the audience in his video-game-playing duds, and even did a mock musical number, “I Won’t Waste Time,” that was a parody of Oscar production numbers and evoked a bit of the old Billy Crystal spirit.
The show had many good things: the appearance of Mick Jagger to present the best song award, the sandworm puppet joke (at least, the first one), Conan’s fake commercial for “Cinemastreams” (a way of streaming a movie for blitzed young people on a big screen…in a building!), and the sight of L.A. firefighters defusing the seriousness of a tribute to them by making jokes about “Joker 2.” There were also a few not-so-good things, like the eminently forgettable James Bond tribute (007 montage, variety-show dancing, three songs) and the second sandworm joke.
But the staging of the awards themselves drew on the best innovations of recent years to make every category feel meaningful. Kieran Culkin, winning best supporting actor for “A Real Pain,” got the ball rolling by upping the ante on the procreative wager he’d made with his wife in his Emmy acceptance speech. (Now that he’s won an Oscar, he wants a fourth kid.) For a while, it looked like there would be a spread-the-wealth dimension to the awards. But the first tip-off that “Anora,” after winning for best original screenplay, was going to have a big night came when Sean Baker, the film’s celebrated writer-director, won for best editing (Baker edits his own films).
As “Anora” kept racking up wins, you could tell that the audience in the Dolby Theater was ecstatic, even as people at home were probably saying things like, “So what is that movie anyway?” There were several speeches of moving import, like the plea for communion in the Middle East from the team of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers who directed the best documentary winner, “No Other Land,” or best actor winner Adrien Brody’s pensive plea, after he’d been cut off by the music (summoning his clout as a two-time Oscar winner, he proceeded to cut the music off himself), to “not let hate go unchecked.”
Is it wrong to choose quality over popularity? Theoretically, no. You could say, of course, that it’s probably the right thing to do. Yet in effectively rejecting mainstream Hollywood even as it reveled in the conventional trappings of it, the 2025 Oscars gave off a message that was notably different from the sweeps of old. The image of the industry the show projected was that of being more dominated than before by its newly international voting bloc. This was a kind of movie taste that was not going to have room for such potential crowd-pleasing winners as Demi Moore, for her inspired work in “The Substance,” or Timothée Chalamet, who apart from being brilliant as Bob Dylan gave what is arguably the only performance by an actor this year that drove a kind of national conversation. I think Chalamet would easily have won were this the Oscars of a decade ago. But Brody’s tough, tormented performance in “The Brutalist,” like the film itself, is a kind of walking signifier of artistic purity. And that, for better or worse, is what now rules at the Oscars.
