The 94th Academy Awards were controversial before the ceremony itself even started. Every announcement from the organization in the lead-up to the big night was met with contention and often outrage from film fans. The idea this year was to market the Oscars to people who wouldn’t normally watch by cutting down on some categories (aka not airing them live) and including what were essentially the results of Twitter polls as part of the ceremony - the “Fan Favorite” movie moments.
The problem with this is that the Oscars aren’t supposed to be for people who don’t like movies. By cutting out a lot of the elements that make the Oscars what they are, they just made the ceremony far less enjoyable to watch for the people who are normally big fans. If anything, the most memorable parts of the night weren’t the awkwardly staged bits or voting on popular movies, but were rather the entirely unplanned things that happened and the moments where a person who is very talented in their craft received an award for it and gave an emotional speech.
It doesn't seem like a big ask that the biggest movie awards show of the year should have a focus on achievement in film, but apparently, even that was difficult for the Academy to muster. They presented a number of awards off the air and spliced in clips of them throughout the ceremony. So while they did technically air, the recipients were accepting their awards in what was basically an empty theater because everyone was still on the red carpet. It's just such a disrespectful way to give these artists their recognition because it's making a statement that some roles are more important than others. Why televise the Best Score category when you could watch comedians make awkward jokes about why animation is only for kids and not a legitimate art form?
The attempts to manufacture viral moments were so obvious and so half-hearted at the same time. Every bit that hosts Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes, and Regina Hall did immediately fell flat, and it felt like the whole show was a bunch of celebrities gathered in a room for a fun night (that was never achieved) rather than a night to celebrate film as an art. That may sound pretentious, but that's the whole point of the Oscars. Trying to draw in a new audience is pointless because these weak attempts at cultural relevance are just going to drive the core audience away.
No one wants to see which movies the general public of Twitter thought were the best films of the year (especially when they include entries like Cinderella and Zack Snyder'sJustice League). The main moments that people are talking about after the fact are the ones that the Oscars couldn't plan for themselves, as well as the moments that felt like what the Oscars should be. The act of someone winning an award and making an emotional acceptance speech is the bread and butter of the Academy Awards, and those were the moments that felt the most genuine over the course of the broadcast.
Ariana DeBose winning Best Supporting Actress for her role in West Side Story and making history as the first queer woman of color to win an Oscar was a huge moment. Likewise, Troy Kotsur's Best Supporting Actor win (which made him the first deaf man to win an Oscar) was a such a high point for the broadcast, because it celebrated such a historic win. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from that point.
Obviously, the most-talked-about moment from the night was the Will Smith/Chris Rock incident. It's ironic that through all of the Oscars' attempts to create moments that people would talk about and to try to make the ceremony more watchable for general audiences, the thing that actually accomplished all of that was something they could never have planned for. This isn't to say that it's great that the slap happened, but it certainly makes a case for why the Oscars shouldn't try to create viral bits and should just let them happen naturally. The most memorable Oscars moments are always the things that go wrong that no one expected, such as the Moonlight and La La Land Best Picture mix-up, or John Travolta mispronouncing Idina Menzel's name.
The ceremony wasn't even any shorter, which was apparently another goal of theirs. Despite cutting important categories, the show still dragged on past the three-hour mark, which would have been fine and normal if their whole pitch wasn't about how the ceremony was going to be shorter this year. Perhaps it was all of the hosts' poorly written skits that made things go much longer than they needed to, like Amy Schumer's tasteless joke about Kirsten Dunst being a seat filler or Regina Hall's sexual harassment bit where she basically patted down male celebrities she found attractive that made the show go on so much longer, not the actually categories that people have tuned in to see.
That's not even mentioning the "In Memoriam" section, which got flack last year for being too fast paced, with the names and photos of deceased celebrities being shown almost faster than anyone could read them. This year they took a different route by...singing upbeat songs, apparently? That's right, during the tribute commemorating the deaths of Hollywood figures, a choir stood on the stage singing music that was more upbeat than the mood allowed and dancing around, which is such a bizarre choice on the behalf of the producers. It just felt disrespectful to not take this moment to play more somber music and actually reflect on the lives of these people that passed, and instead to focus on the performance of this choir.
Everything about the ceremony was strange and simply didn't work, especially the parts that were produced in any way. This year's Oscars made a great case for why they should go back to a hostless Oscars and just let the presenters have short bouts of banter before announcing nominees and winners. Either that or they should get better hosts, because picking three random comedians with no chemistry or relation to each other really does not make for a ceremony that gels together. In trying to "fix" the Oscars, it seems like they just made it worse. Perhaps this is a lesson to the producers of the show that the best thing they can do is focus on what's really important: film, and honoring those who made great achievements in the medium during the year. Everything else is unnecessary, and everyone collectively agreed that those manufactured bits were the worst part anyway.