Worst Oscars ever — or at least in recent memory. This is what Hollywood gets for pushing out the likes of Ricky Gervais and Chris Rock: a toothless host in Jimmy Kimmel, warmed-over jokes that landed with a thud, and queasy politics that only hit one target hard. Trump: End times personified. Hamas? Just misunderstood.
Celebrities including Mark Ruffalo and Billie Eilish walked the red carpet with red ‘ceasefire’ pins, but nobody — not even Jonathan Glazer, the writer/director of ‘The Zone of Interest’, a masterpiece about the Holocaust — would stand up for Israel.
Glazer, in a supreme act of self-loathing, went so far as to renounce his Judaism. Thanking his partners, he said: ‘Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.’ Abhorrent.
The hostages still held by Hamas warranted zero mentions, not even from Steven Spielberg, wheeled out on the 30th anniversary of ‘Schindler’s List’. Nor were we told why the ceremony, bumped up an hour early for the very first time, began almost ten minutes late. As it turns out, pro-Palestinian protesters were blocking the route to the ceremony. But referencing them at all was off-limits.
No one had an issue standing up for Ukraine or awarding the documentary ’20 Days in Mariupol’. Nor was the inclusion of Alexei Navalny in the ‘In Memoriam’ segment — otherwise a disaster of terrible camera angles and interpretive dance — remotely controversial.
Israel and the attacks of October 7, however, went unmentioned. Instead, the Oscars turned into a Barbie-fest, some sort of weird apologia for snubbing (rightly!) star Margot Robbie and director Greta Gerwig, whose ever-supplicant mugging for the camera — as if she just can’t believe she’s allowed in the room — has aged harder than Al Pacino.
‘Barbie’ was terrible. It was a glorified infomercial for Mattel. Yet we have been told incessantly that America Ferrara’s clichéd, hackneyed speech about the would-be terrors of womanhood is a revelation. A soliloquy on par with ‘to be or not to be’.
Please. Ferrera’s trite sentiment is a bumper sticker from 1975. Not enough that the Oscars opened with a ‘Barbie’ sketch, that we had multiple ‘Barbie’ musical numbers, that co-stars Kate McKinnon and America Ferrera jointly presented an award, that the ‘Barbie’ theme music closed out the ceremony.
No, we had to endure Rita Moreno paying tribute to nominee Ferrera: ‘Your powerful ‘Barbie’ monologue [about] the most impossible standards females must try to live up to galvanized everyone with a pulse’. Did it, really? Wouldn’t ‘Barbie’ have swept the Oscars if so? It can’t be a feminist movie while treating womanhood as an inexorable burden.