The 2022 Oscars: A Retrospective
It is no secret that the Academy Awards, known more commonly as the Oscars, have seen a major regression in the last several years. As the years go by, the Oscars have become less and less popular among people. In one flashback sequence of the television show Better Call Saul, there is a brief moment where the characters are talking about their annual office Oscar pool, and everyone is handed ballots to give their predictions. Those days are long over.
The 2022 Academy Awards are a microcosm of exactly where the Oscars have gone wrong. Instead of a ceremony honoring the best filmmaking of the year, we instead have a bunch of hyper-rich celebrities smugly lecturing us about how much better they are than us, while the hosts punctuate the time between announcements with unfunny political jokes. It is not fun or entertaining listening to celebrities who flew in on their private jets and make more money in a week than I have made in my entire life lecture me about climate change and class injustices. The actual, you know, movies have become second fiddle to the social commentary from our "social betters."
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There is also the coma-inducing length. It is really hard to get invested when there are ten minutes of commercials between seemingly every award. I understand that the ceremony is about making money, and advertisers give you money. It is the same logic for the Super Bowl. It makes it hard to get invested in the program, though.
The biggest problem, though? The movies themselves. Nobody has seen any of them. If you take out Encanto and maybe Cruella and Dune, more people would have seen the footage of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock than any of the nominees for every single award combined by a considerable margin. The award that most people have any interest in is Best Picture. It is interesting to see which movie is given the award for the best film of the year. However, people are caring less and less about that now too. Nobody has heard of the films being nominated. Of the seven Best Picture nominees released theatrically, they grossed a combined $10.1 million at the box office. For reference, the 2019 winner Parasite grossed $10.2 million just by itself. Last year's winner, Nomadland, also took home the record for lowest-grossing Best Picture winner of all time.
To be fair, COVID-19 just happened to be a thing in 2020. Even if it was not, it is still unlikely that it would have been a box office smash. The most recent film to beat $100 million (adjusted for inflation) at the box office was Argo in 2012. Ten years ago. So the Oscars these days are a bunch of rich people giving each other awards for movies that almost nobody has heard of and even fewer people have actually seen. There have been times they have tried to fix this, such as the gimmicky Best Picture nomination for Black Panther, but on the whole, there is no reason to be interested.
As for the actual ceremony itself? It was boring. It sucked. The hosts were unfunny and cared more about making political jokes than actually discussing movies. I remember the 2009 ceremony (honoring the 2008 films) hosted by Hugh Jackman. He told jokes about the movies being nominated, and he had an entire song and dance number complete with set and costume changes, including a bit where he got in a fake Batpod pondering why The Dark Knight was not nominated for Best Picture despite making a billion dollars. It was the best.
What do Wanda Sykes, Amy Schumer, and Regina Hall open with? Pay gap, Mitch McConnell, systemic racism, and the controversial Florida bill jokes, all done with the smuggest and holier-than-thou delivery only the Hollywood elite can provide.
Oh.
K.
Almost every "joke" that they told failed hard. Why can't the Oscars be about, you know, movies?!
That is not to say that all of the ceremony was bad. The highlights were easily the montages honoring the James Bond and Godfather franchises. You know...stuff about movies. In terms of actual winners, the highlight was Troy Kotsur winning Best Supporting Actor for his role in CODA. Kotsur is deaf, and as such, he signed his acceptance speech, which was so powerful that even his interpreter was getting choked up a bit. That was an amazing moment.
Theeennnn there was... the event. The thing. You all know what I'm talking about, even if you didn't see the ceremony. It was easily the most talked-about moment in the Oscars since the wrong winner was announced for the 2016 Best Picture (though, for the record, neither La La Land nor Moonlight deserved Best Picture. Hell or High Water did) and more people have seen that slap than saw the Best Picture nominees. It is one of the most memed moments of the year already.
There is a lot of controversy around it. Will Smith slapped Chris Rock about a joke Smith was laughing at until he saw that his wife (with whom he has an open marriage) didn't like it, so he slapped Chris Rock. The main reason for the joke not landing was that Jada has alopecia, a condition that causes hair loss, so Chris Rock's joke about her short hair didn't go over well with her. By all accounts, Chris Rock did not know about her condition and declined to press charges against Will Smith afterward. Several minutes after the slap, Will Smith won Best Actor for his role in the film King Richard, and gave a speech with a vague apology that didn't mention Chris Rock by name, and preached about loving your fellow man.
And the Academy wonders why people are annoyed by Hollywood elitism.
The Academy has been debating whether or not to expel Smith from their ranks, which would make him only the sixth person to receive that punishment, alongside Roman Polanski, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Carmine Caridi, and Adam Kimmel, aka four convicted sex offenders and someone who made VCR recordings of screeners to share with his friends and family.
The most offensive thing about the ceremony was the memorial video honoring the people who had died in the past year. Most years, it has been one of the highlights of the ceremony, where we all pause in reflection and remember the people who made movies great. This year, they tried to shake things up a bit with a gospel choir singing an upbeat song and dance number that was intended to be a celebration of life. This is good in theory, but in execution, it was horrible. It is like somebody made a bet that they couldn't make a worse memorial ceremony than the famously bad one last year. The focus was far more on the people singing and dancing than the ones who passed away.
There are a lot of reasons why people stop watching the Oscars over the years, and the 2022 Academy Award ceremony is the epitome of them. Nobody has seen the nominated movies, the hosts, presenters, and winners care far more about preaching about their pet social cause than talking about the movies. More of the ceremony is commercials than the actual ceremony. Overall, the Academy has stopped making the Oscars about entertainment and the movies themselves. What is the point anymore? The days of Hugh Jackman's song and dance are long over.
For decades, the Academy has shown that the Oscars could be great. Now, it seems like they have stopped caring about the viewer as much as the viewer has stopped caring about them.
But the Will Smith memes are great. So there's that.
