They came, they saw, they ball-gowned. The Academy Awards, the ripe ruby in Hollywood’s glistening tiara, benevolently clogged our feeds on Sunday, momentarily drowning out Kate Middleton’s Photoshop skills.
I have so many fashion notes from Sunday’s shenanigans, but snippy takes on backless dresses are why God created private WhatsApp groups. I will say, however, that Carey Milligan ate (as she has all awards season) in peekaboo tulle, and Sandra Hüller dazzled as a 1950’s high-society cat burglar who never gets caught. (I will find her glamorously menacing until The Zone of Interest is out of my system.) I also wish I knew how to quit Greta Lee, who not only stunned in operatically draped Loewe (a standing ovation from my retinas, brava!) but bought a tangibly beating heart to Past Lives, a script that, although quite dry on paper, was absolutely sopping with feelings.
Speaking of transcendent parts, I’ve always thought myself immune to whimsy and silliness, but the evolutionary trajectory of Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter was genuinely fucking great. (I can’t be bothered to find lofty adjectives.) Stone turns an oblique retelling of Alice in Wonderland (or it is Enchanted?) into a true and strikingly modern tale of female emancipation. Poor Things is an eccentric pleasure that never grows tiresome in its eccentricities, and, frankly—as exasperating as I find it to type—a masterpiece.
As predicted, Oppenheimer dominated the trophy wins. What else happened? Wait, diamonds were a girl’s best Ken as Ryan Gosling gave us a pink-gasm. A lot of tux was given—honorable mention to Colman Domingo’s dickey bow—and also an ample serving of John Cena’s ass. Cord Jefferson took home an Oscar for American Fiction, and Britain’s favorite takeaway, Amelia Dimoldenberg, awkwarded on the red carpet. It perhaps would have been nice for Lily Gladstone to win best actress, and it would have been nice for America Ferrera to win her category, too, but worthy conominees took home the statues in their crème de la crème categories. Overall, this year passed with little of the trademark controversy that’s plagued previous ceremonies, at least as far back as #OscarsSoWhite.
There’s something quite nice about a nice Oscars, isn’t there? One that doesn’t leave you disappointed or angry or worried that the Academy is antiquated or unable to celebrate diverse storytelling. We’re so conditioned to respond to drama—to alarming (even a bit racist?) snubs, to the wrong best-picture announcements, to onstage slaps. After Oscar Sunday, we’re used to an Oscar Monday spent bemoaning what went wrong, who was robbed, and whose dress was ghastly. We like to point at Oscar mishaps as indicative of our broken society, and, well, as satisfying as that can be, we’ve had a tumult-free ceremony. It’s nice that the opulent wave of the Oscars has washed in and out without dragging anything too unsavory onto the beach—a night of a thousand looks with little painful aftermath.
Look, you don’t need me to tell you the world right now is a mess, but this year the mess is neither alleviated nor aggravated by the Oscars. I see the tweets saying that glamour during a genocide is perverse, and I get that argument, I do—I don’t want to dismiss the ugliness of the planet we live on for the sake of a few stunning frocks. But (if there can ever really be a but here) the awards do celebrate a medium that’s key to our understanding of each other’s stories. Hollywood contributes in no small way to global conversation and global empathy, and good storytelling transports people away from relentlessly harsh realities. I do think the worse things get, the more this is needed—not to dodge feelings but to just give your brain a moment’s respite, a pause before moving again to action.