Tomasz Kot and Joanna Kulig in a scene from Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War
Brie Larson in a scene from her film, Unicorn Store
Woody Harrelson and Kevin Costner in a scene from John Lee Hancock’s The Highwaymen
Maxwell Simba and Chiwetel Ejiofor in a scene from Ejiofor’s film, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
Jim Cummings in a scene from his film, Thunder Road
Rosamund Pike in a scene from Matthew Heineman’s A Private War
Ewan McGregor returns to the Hundred Acre Wood in a scene from Marc Forster’s Christopher Robin
by Ken Bakely
Throughout the tumultuous sprawl of this Oscar season – specifically in conjunction with the actual production of the Oscar ceremony itself – I’ve had a lot of changes of heart with past opinion. My belief that the show should be as short as possible was challenged when the Academy tried to grotesquely edit the program’s schedule to make that happen. The kind of time-cutting measures I once thought I wanted turned out to feel disastrous and unbecoming of an evening intended to celebrate all aspects of film production. But as reliably as the Academy introduced bad ideas, they seemed pretty consistent at walking them back after they incurred tremendous backlash. By the time Oscar Sunday rolled around, the only remaining question mark going in was the lack of a host. Countless jokes were made about the calamitous 1989 Oscars, the last to go without an emcee, and the embarrassing musical numbers used to fill up space that year. And as Sunday’s show began with an otherwise stirring performance by Queen and Adam Lambert – which ended up serving as an immediate reminder that Bohemian Rhapsody, an aggressively mediocre concert film directed by Bryan Singer, was nominated for five Academy Awards (and would go on to win four of them) – it felt like anything could happen.
Glenn Close in a scene from Björn Runge’s The Wife
André Holland in a scene from Steven Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird
