H Awards season if there's one thing I enjoy less than spending a couple of hours slogging through some tedious mediocre piece of Hollywood slop it's spending a couple of hours slugging through some tedious mediocre awards ceremony where Hollywood celebrities who flew in on private jets were in $10,000 dresses preached to us about the evils of capitalism and how we all need to work together to fight climate change or save the Ukraine or whatever the current popular thing is this year oh a it's like your average Scottish wedding it's boring for the most part but there's
always a chance of a fight breaking out or some drunken arshole making a fool of themselves during their speech sadly though this year it was not to be the 2025 Oscars were notable precisely because of their lack of controversy there were no big upsets no shocking wins or losses no outrageous speeches or inflammatory rhetoric damn man even Mark Hamill managed to keep both his pants and his Trump Arrangement under control for the evening proving that he truly must be a good actor because he can pretend not to be a crazy person for a while Conan
O'Brien one of the few late night talk show hosts who isn't a creepy manipulative [ __ ] hosted with his usual laid-back self-deprecating style which was just as tolerably okay as you'd expect from a guy who's been in Show Business longer than most of us have been alive he delivered a few pointy Jabs at his fellow celebrities and one or two at the orange man but most of his jokes were pretty safe and predictable and well fine I guess I have to admit though one of the most unintentionally hilarious moments of the night was watching
Rachel Ziggler W light on stage with galad do to present an award looking like a small petulent child reluctantly going clothes shopping with her mom honestly putting these two together in public is like parking a Lamborghini next to a Ford Escort and you could practically feel the hostility crackling in the air around them the promo tour for Snow White is going to be [ __ ] wild man it's Hollywood baby in terms of the actual results which I assume is why the dwindling audience still Tunes in for this stuff Anora was the big winner of
the night with five wins including best picture best actress and best director and that's fine I guess it's a solid enough drama about a guy who falls in love with a stripper marries her at a Vegas wedding chapel and ultimately gets cold feet when he tries to introduce her to his family we've all been there bro it's a decent little movie with strong performances especially from Mikey Madison and I'm not particularly happy ending that feels quite brutally realistic and appropriate yeah it wasn't exactly a life-changing experience and if I asked chat GPT to produce a
generic Oscar winning movie then I'm pretty sure it would spit out something exactly like a Nora but whatever it was always going to be a safe bet and I think that was a Hallmark of the Oscars this year Amelia Perez which for some reason was nominated in almost every category that exists was arguably the big loser of the night with the only significant award going to Zoe salana for best supporting actress and and I actually think that was a pretty fair choice because she delivered a great performance even if it was in a [ __
] movie it does make me wonder though if Amelia Perez was originally supposed to sweep the Awards this year but the organizers put their fingers on the scales after all the backlash to the film and it's uh star but Drinker you swaave tuxedo wearing Hollywood Legend I hear you say the awards are voted on by the academy and there's no way to influence their decision the brutalist which was basically three and a half hours of Adrien Brody being miserable ultimately paid off for the guy and netted him a best actor Awards it's the story of
a Jewish architect who immigrates to America after the war and helps design a new library for a mother [ __ ] the only real sticking point for me was the substance which I think should have netted Demi Mo a Best Actress Oscar not just for her work on that movie which was fantastic but as a kind of Lifetime Achievement Award considering she's been in the business for more than 40 years at this point I mean the movie did at least win for best makeup which is obviously pretty welld deserved but it would have been nice
to see a mainstream hit like that get a bit more recognition as it stands most of the winners this year were the kind of lowbudget obscure movies that were only going to be of interest to people who drive for 14 hours straight to go to wanky Regional film festivals and pretend like they're enjoying themselves as much as last year's Oscars focused on big commercially successful crowd-pleasing movies this year did a complete 180 and I'm not entirely sure that it paid off all of this is to say that the 2025 Oscars was basically a 4-Hour snore
Fest that Drew a million less viewers than the previous year which was already a bit of a low point and if I had to guess I'd say that was mostly intentional the Oscars acts as a kind of bell weather for the state of play in Hollywood and what we can expect from them in the year ahead whereas previous Awards ceremonies have been filled with Defiance and political posturing and big extravagant rants against the dreaded orange man the attitude this year was like a man that's been bent over a table and violently humbled this is an
industry coming off a miserable year of strikes and disruption followed by another year of disappointing flops and financial contraction not to mention a US election that absolutely did not go the way they wanted and if I'm right 2025 isn't going to be much better for them there was an almost tangible feeling of unease this year like they were some unproductive employee that knows their bosses watching their every move and is desperate not to attract any more attention to themselves and you know what I'm perfectly fine with that because they 100% deserve this they got too
big for their boots they overestimated their own importance and cultural power and now they're learning the hard way that they serve us not the other way around a few more years of this and they might just learn their place at last in the meantime though it's going to be interesting to see how much more irrelevant next year's Oscars becomes it's Hollywood baby anyway that's all I've got for today go away now
