29 March 2022 - 'Coda' wins Best Pictures at the Oscars
Onstage Slap Rattles Oscars, Before ‘CODA’ Triumphs
Brooks Barnes and Nicole Sperling (The New York Times, 28/03/2022)
In an Academy Awards ceremony where an onstage altercation between Will Smith and Chris Rock overshadowed the honors, “CODA” from Apple TV+ won the Oscar for best picture, becoming the first film from a streaming service to be welcomed into that rarefied Hollywood club.
The 94th Academy Awards on Sunday had a freewheeling, irreverent tone from their start, with ABC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences laboring to prove that the Oscars could be lively and culturally relevant. By the ceremony’s end, it was certainly a night for the Hollywood ages.
The Oscars ceremony was a mess even before Will Smith slapped Chris Rock
Sarah White (CNBC, 28/03/2022)
Sunday’s 94th Academy Award ceremony was already a ham-handed attempt at boosting ratings even before the soon-to-be Oscar-winning actor Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on stage.
The event should have been a celebration of diversity. Ariana DeBose became the first queer woman of color to win an acting award, Troy Kotsur was first deaf man to win an Academy Award for acting, and Jane Campion became the third woman to win in the directing category.
It should have also been a watershed moment for the streaming industry. AppleTV+’s “CODA” became the first movie from a streamer to win best picture.
The Overcrammed, Overrushed, Frenetic, Joyless, and Briefly Violent 2022 Oscars Ceremony
Richard Brody (The New Yorker, 28/03/2022)
It’s a weary movie trope: characters who are so tightly controlled and disciplined that they eventually blow a fuse and spark chaos. It turns out that an Oscars ceremony can be sickened with tension, too, and that’s what happened last night, at the Dolby Theatre. Even if Will Smith had kept his cool and remained in his seat, the ceremony would have been a historic train wreck, a calamity foretold by the frenzied efforts of the Academy to rescue it from itself in advance.
Desperate to keep the broadcast short, the producers shunted eight categories of awards to the hour before the broadcast—and yet the ceremony ran three hours and forty minutes. Grasping for a larger viewership after last year’s precipitous decline, the producers added two fan-centered segments that stopped the proceedings in their tracks. Trying to gin up enthusiasm for movies themselves, the show looked back nostalgically at James Bond, “The Godfather” movies, “White Men Can’t Jump,” “Pulp Fiction,” even “Juno,” as if to undermine whatever enthusiasm viewers may have for today’s films and to make the luminaries in the hall look like overshadowed latecomers.
This was an Oscars to remember – unlike some of the winners
Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian, 28/03/2022)
“That was the greatest night in the history of television!” said a stunned Chris Rock, and it was certainly up there with Bernard Levin getting punched in the face, live on air in 1962, by the husband of a woman whose novel he’d been mean about.
But was it the greatest night in the history of the movies. Erm, no. This was an Academy Award ceremony which contrived to give the best picture award to the most shallow and mediocre movie on the list – along, incidentally, with keeping craft prizes out of the live broadcast and also the honorary Oscars for Elaine May, Liv Ullmann, Danny Glover and Samuel L Jackson.