Online Reporter
LOS ANGELES. – As Sunday’s Oscars ceremony approached, it seemed to be shaping up to be a showdown between the vampires and the revolutionaries, between Sinners and One Battle After Another.
In the end, One Battle After Another won both best picture and best director, but it was a very good night for Sinners, too, including an original screenplay award for writer and director Ryan Coogler.
There were some surprises over the course of the evening, including a rare tie in the live action short category, a remembrance of Robert Redford that included Barbra Streisand singing a bit of “The Way We Were,” and Jimmy Kimmel stepping in just long enough to make some pointed comments about media censorship. But let’s go over some of the major takeaways.
A celebrated director gets his Oscar
Paul Thomas Anderson won best director for One Battle After Another after three previous nominations for There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza.
Anderson had already won several major Oscar precursor awards this year, including top directing prizes at the BAFTAs and from the Directors Guild of America, so he was the odds-on favorite.
The other nominees in the category were relative newcomers: Ryan Coogler, Josh Safdie and Joachim Trier were all first-time directing nominees; Chloé Zhao was nominated (and won) for Nomadland at the ceremony in 2021.
Michael B. Jordan won a rare acting award for a genre movie
Sinners is a drama, but it’s also very much a genre film. It’s horror. I
t’s vampires. Those are not the kinds of films that most often win Oscars for actors.
But Jordan, with his first nomination, won over performers from much more traditionally awards-friendly films.
Three of those actors (Leonardo DiCaprio, Timothée Chalamet and Ethan Hawke) already had multiple acting nominations before this year.
Amy Madigan, the award-winning straight-up monster
Madigan won best supporting actress for her deeply unsettling and entirely singular performance as Aunt Gladys in Weapons, which is even more fully a horror movie than Sinners.
While the nominated cast members from Sinners – Jordan, Delroy Lindo and Wunmi Mosaku – play regular people who are swept into an unreal situation, Madigan is playing, essentially, the boogeyman (boogeywoman?).
It’s thrilling to see the Academy recognize a performance that is as weird and funny and scary as just the last few minutes of what Madigan does in Zach Cregger’s terrifying story of a town that sees a whole classroom full of its children disappear.
The casting Oscar makes its debut
This was the first year that there was an Oscar for casting, which is very much overdue – there have been casting Emmys for ages. It was easy to argue for any of the nominated casting directors.
Marty Supreme and The Secret Agent both deploy nontraditional actors in some roles, Sinners and One Battle both use a wide variety of well-known and well-regarded stars in interesting ways, and Hamnet places most of the weight of an enormously heavy story on the shoulders of just a couple of performers, including best actress winner Jessie Buckley. – www.npr.org
