“It’s Time,” read the posters for “12 Years A Slave’s” For Your Consideration ads. The Academy did ultimately anoint Steve McQueen’s masterpiece the Oscar for Best Picture of the year, but the statement could honestly refer to the very end of this long-winded Awards season.
Who could have known that at the end of it all, this year’s Oscars could not only be good, but could arguably be called great?
Perhaps “great” is a strong word, and perhaps this ceremony wasn’t as well received as I imagined. This morning I awoke to a decent helping of snark and disappointment as though the media had to meet some sort of quota. But if John Travolta butchering a name or a somewhat long ceremony as a result of some shrug worthy montages about heroes were the worst of it, can’t we call this year’s Oscars a success?
Most of the brunt typically falls on the host; Ellen DeGeneres stuck her landing with a monologue that wasn’t exactly edgy or on par with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s from a few weeks ago, but she wasn’t corny, offensive or sleepy, and at no point did we suffer through a musical number.
Rather, this year had six wonderful performances that rivaled what we saw at the Grammys a few weeks back. Pharrell came home empty handed last night, but “Happy” made for the most fun and enjoyable way to kick off the evening while “Let it Go” was an ideal finale. Also, surprise surprise, Twitter hates U2.
This year also abstained from any orchestrated bits or sketches practically designed to illicit groans. The only running gag was of Ellen passing out pizza to various tuxedo-clad gentlemen, and not only did the audience appear genuinely thankful for the snack, it produced this delightful image of Brad Pitt serving pizza to Meryl Streep.
Pundits additionally have wondered if audiences are simply apathetic to the awards, and Ellen proved them wrong by taking a star-studded selfie that was the first tweet ever to get retweeted over 1 million times. It beat Barack Obama’s “Four More Years” tweet and photo back in 2012.
Those with a soft side look to the Oscars to provide tearful, human moments of acceptance speeches, and they’ll be happy to know that not one winner was played off by music. Jared Leto, Lupita Nyong’o, Cate Blanchett, Matthew McConaughey and Alfonso Cuaron all knocked it out of the park, touching on the politics and the causes surrounding this evening in the form of the Ukraine, women on film, victims of AIDS and as Leto said, all those without the freedom to love who they choose.
But most of all, this season has been wonderful because everyone’s been talking about how strong the movies truly are. Some will moan that 10 time nominee “American Hustle” won not a single award, and “The Wolf of Wall Street”, “Nebraska” and “Captain Phillips” all equally came up with a goose egg, but more people will see “12 Years a Slave,” “Her” and seven time winner “Gravity” as a result, and that’s something to be excited about.
Oscar nominations came out about six weeks ago. It feels like ages since I saw any of the nominees themselves. And yet the Oscars have been on my mind I read incessantly as I fought with myself to make this year’s awards seem meaningful, exciting and most of all fun. This morning I find myself happy at all the results, but I’m most of all glad that the Oscars could actually live up to the hype we’ve provided all season.