Oscars 2025. Where are the great oracles of our time?

Despite being led by the most disasters of the bolts, neither Conan O'Brien was able to shake a choreography so forced and accelerate that he does not leave any margin to spontaneity or unforeseen events. But last Sunday's ceremony celebrated independent productions and Sean Baker, the director of 'Anora', made a point of demanding from the studios that are made of children and, instead of amusement parks, focus on the single experience that offer movie theaters.

It was a night that had very little. And if what had generated greater expectations had been the invitation to Conan O'Brien to present the Oscar ceremony, clearly the invitation came with a series of limitations to their usual style, and this in one of the critical moments of US political and cultural life. And if Conan did everything so that the gag would not stand out, if it was not uncharacterized, it cannot be said that the genius came out of the lamp. In the background, as a host, what Conan did was access to participate in an evocation and tribute to his disadvantaged persona And to the bizarre moments that led in the night to the audiences, bringing experimental elements to a somewhat mortified genre. Unfortunately, nonsense and spontaneism, when carefully choreographed, hardly produce the illusion of suspending such constraints from the format. The restrictions made the ceremony somewhat boring, and the ABC It registered an 8% drop in the hearings, attracting 18 million viewers compared to the 19.5 million last year. Jimmy Kimmel, who had featured the latest editions, became one of the most bold voices in the denunciation of the hallucinated degradation that Donald Trump has been promoting from the White House, and becoming one of the first names on the US President's list, the caution that the best was to go with another. But it was not enough to continue three years when Oscar hearings had increased consecutively. This decline was to predict, in a year when the bulk of entertainment is focused on the information programs themselves, Hollywood loses to the White House, and instead of stimulating fantasy, the machine is put to work on the delirious recomposition of their own reality. Thus, the fall followed the trend of other awards ceremonies, which saw their growth wag this year. The Grammy Awards attracted 15.4 million viewers last month, representing a 9% descent compared to the previous year. Golden globes in January also recorded a modest decline compared to last year.

Triumphal Night of 'Anora'

If in terms of production the night of the stars had no great shine, it was still a night when a curious reversal was given in Hollywood standards. Firstly, this year's clear winner was AnoraSean Baker, who was called four times on stage, taking four of the main statuettes home – original argument, assembly, achievement and best film -, with the protagonist of the film, Mikey Madison, surprised many when, against the betting trend, the winner was announced in the best actress category. And if only Walt Disney had received four statuettes in the same Oscars gala, he had then more than a production on the named lists, while Baker took the pot by one movie. And early it was realized that the subject underlying the festivities of the night was the production. The three producers of Anora – Baker, Samantha Quan (his mate) and Alex Coco – In their thanksgiving speeches they did not fail to emphasize that they had come to the proa of an independent production (a budget of six million dollars and a team of about forty people, according to Coco), which resulted from a work of love and devotion. And if the director of Anora For some time I had hoped and holes in the gym box with his previous films The Florida Projectwhich earned Willem Dafoe a nomination for secondary actor, and Red Rocket, who still generated some zunzum, but without imposing himself. This time, the most encouraging was the fact that his production does not appear unaccompanied. The brutalistIt was also done independently, it had a budget that surrounded the $ 10 million, and also complained about three statuettes, with its protagonist, Adrien Brody, raptured the second time the best actor award. The Real PainJesse Eisenberg's film was a $ three million budget, and gave Kieran Culkin the best secondary actor statuette. And even in the animated film category, the powerful Pixar made Goliath by falling upon an independent animation movie, Flowermade for four million dollars by director Latvian Gints Zilbalodis, with what he described as a nuclear team of « two or three ». The only two named for the best movie that had really imposing box office results, Wicked and Dune: Part II (Each one over $ 700 million to date) returned home with only the awards in the technical or design areas, thus seeing only these elements that cost more money.

The role of the gym

What this means is that the Academy this time realized what its noblest function might be, not to be wrapped in the exorbitant campaigns of the big studios, nor to get hostage to fan pressures, but to be careful and use their focus to give a second life to those films that, not being able to attract large audiences, waiting for a real opportunity to reach more opportunity people. After all, the Oscar ceremony is just a blatant show, but if it is in line with the great Hollywood franchises, and these large budget productions that attract an anesthetized audience and only reacts to even harder doses of spreading and exaggeration, its task is to formulate a kind of mala-consciousness. And if the gigantic blockbusters to which the industry tied itself these days are like compulsively tested synthetic and administered, Oscars seemed to have been intended for irrelevance, while writing themselves to meet what executives determined to be what the public at home wanted. If the ceremony was becoming too long, the solution was to cut the Eito, to accelerate, to leave some light and as short jokes as possible to the presenters, to tighten with the winners so as not to widen in the discourses of acceptance, not to take the winners of the honorary Oscars, since mostly managing wing, pushing them together with other technical categories for parallel ceremonies, This is the farewell, held in some hall before the new year and out of the view of the public. The important thing was to give strength to the show, tone everything, invest in bombastic elements, and not waste time justifying whatever it is. It was not long before it was found that brightness develops its own gangrene, and audiences already have their impulses so chewed by the sequences of a few seconds at the tip of their fingers, that a great ceremony can only succeed if they are able to offer a kind of antidote to this dispersal poison of consciousness.

But the Oscar ceremony instead of a tremendous gala that entered the homes of people and gave them the impression of having the big names in cinema, in a kind of wide coexistence, remembering that there are times like this, when the large scale takes advantage of a taste of familiarity, and celebrates this fantasy element that reminds us that the most important is not the movies, but this secret life we ​​traffic in the disappeared and the disappeared and the disappeared and the disapirin and the disappeared and the disapirin and the disappeared intermittent and the disapirin Daily suffocating. Deep down, Hollywood should be the union that works on behalf of those who are unable to drive great productions at the time they close their eyes, for sleep serves them less for exaltation than to break free from everyday dirt. However, from the moment they let the studio facts make decisions, with each adjustment they promote, the ceremony becomes more inventive, less youthful, less intimate, and farther from that truly open and commemorative spirit. «With the forced joy of its frantic pace, it has all the heat and charm of an urgent consultation»as Richard Brody, film critic of The New Yoker. «There is little humanity in a statuette nervously handed over with the ticker of a clock growing over them». And just think of this image of time with your overwhelming hurry, armed with an orchestra hunting dogs, stressing how gala music can be used to stifle a voice that tries to extract some meaning in the middle of all that apparatus.

Awarded movies do not save movie theaters

If in the Portuguese -language world most attention was run over by the campaign organized as a sports cheerleader around I'm still hereHaving Walter Salles taken to the best international film statuette, despite the harassment and acousted by Brazilian fans, Fernanda Torres did not take the coveted best actress award, but had the intelligence to join the choir that celebrated Sean Baker's triumphant night. And by accepting the best achievement award, delivered by Quentin Tarantino, Baker urged filmmakers, distributors and viewers to embrace the movie theaters on behalf of «A community experience that simply is not at home». However, as Brody pointed out, these movies that can snatch the Oscars will not save the movie theaters. “I also love to go to the movies, but the effort to reach large audiences with niche movies is similar to exhorting readers to buy printed newspapers and magazines; It is an appeal to nostalgia »Vinca Brody. Therefore, the answer is not just by reinforcing the creative control of filmmakers, and betting on independent cinema, Hollywood must mature, after years of concessions to an infantilized audience, which enters a movie theater like an amusement park, wanting to feel this seizure that causes a two-hour roller coaster. In this sense, it is when criticism fails to recognize the operatic visionarism of filmmakers such as Denis Villeneuve, Christopher Nolan, Alex Garland or Tarantino who fails to recognize those who truly test the boundaries without giving up the favor of the audiences. Brody depolved the new adaptation of Dunea classic of science fiction, which establishes a formidable parallel for the decisive elements of the existential crisis that we are living in the present. The academy has not even been waving towards civil war. But there is a distinguished possibility of being the reality in the coming months to prove that movie theaters, rather than hallucinogenic forms in aesthetic terms, still function as the great oracles of our time.