Like many other things this year, the Oscars were anything but typical.  Since the awards show, many people have taken to social media to negatively comment on the lack of showiness this year’s ceremony, saying it was one of the worst awards shows in history. Held in Los Angeles’s Union Station, this paired down version of The Oscars felt like exactly what we needed this year, intimate.  

To open the show, Regina King strutted through Union Station in a television show-style introduction and introduced the first award, best original screenplay. As an aspiring screenwriter myself, I love that King took the time to delve into a brief background of each writer’s journey of getting to the Oscars. It was announced that Promising Young Woman, a film analysis of rape culture, had won that category. The film’s director, Emerald Fennell, was the first woman to win a screenplay award since Diablo Cody won for Juno 13 years ago. I took a sigh of relief. For much of the night, I was pleasantly surprised at the strides The Academy had made in diversifying their winners. Yuh-jung Youn won Best Supporting Actress for her role in Minari. Youn was the first Asian woman to take home an acting award since Miyoshi Umeki won for Sayonara in 1958. Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson also made history by becoming the first black women to win an Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling for their work in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Most notably though, was probably Chloé Zhao’s win of Best Director for her film, Nomadland. Zhao became the first woman of color and the second woman overall to win this award. The Academy did take big strides this year in honoring unique and important stories and individuals, they had major mishaps that I’m extremely disappointed in. 

Minari, a subtitled film about Korean immigrants who come to Arkansas to start a farm, was nominated for six awards. In the end, the film only took home one. It seems as though this is because Parasite, another Korean film, won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 2020. No matter how beautifully executed Minari was, they would not give major awards to a foreign film twice, (although Minari was made by an Asian American director in America). Another major pitfall on The Academy’s part was with the winner of Best Documentary. The award went to My Octopus Teacher, A film about the profound friendship that forms between a washed-up filmmaker and an octopus he meets in South Africa. While this was a lovely story about the meaning of human connection, which is probably what won it the Oscar, nothing compared to the passion and humanness of one of its fellow nominees, Crip Camp. This film tells the story of Camp Jened, a summer camp for disabled kids run by hippies in the 1960s and early 1970s that later feeds into the disability rights movement of the 1990s. This movie shows a glimpse into the world of the disabled that doesn’t show authentically on screen nearly enough. To me, if The Academy was looking to steer away from the “status quo” and redefine what stories they think need to be told, they made the wrong choice.  

I thought the ending would be a big redemption to the pitfalls of the night, but I was sorely mistaken. The Academy decided to shake things up a bit and decided to announce Best Picture, then Best Actress, and Best Actor to round out the night. To give a brief history lesson, Best Picture has been the last award announced every year excluding 1947 when fan-favorite Rosiland Russel was a shooing to win Best Actress for her role in Mourning Becomes Electra. Needless to say many believed that the Academy’s decision to put Best Actor last meant that something big would happen. In this instance, that something was to be the late Chadwick Boseman’s win for his role in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.  

After Nomadland’s Best Picture win, and Frances McDormand’s Best Actress win, also for Nomadland, the audience was ready for the big reveal. Joauqin Phoenix stepped onto the stage, made small talk with the audience, the nominees were introduced, then silence. He opened the envelope. The audience’s breath held. Then he said, “Anthony Hopkins, The Father.” Hopkins was not there to claim the award and just like that, the night was over. It felt like all the air was sucked out of the room. The anticipation of Boseman’s win was built up for weeks. It could’ve been the perfect heartfelt goodbye to a Hollywood hero whose story was ended too soon. The fact that the ceremony was ended with Best Actor felt like a slap in the face for all the small advancements that were made that night. Boseman would’ve been the first Black Best Actor winner since Forest Whitaker’s performance in The Last King of Scotland in 2006. That was 15 years ago.  

And so, in typical Academy fashion, the 2021 Oscars took two steps forward and four steps back in reframing what it means to be a film worthy of acclaim. Let us celebrate the small victories of the evening, but let us also not forget there is much work to do.