For non-believers, the only stimuli of the Oscars are the surprises (and, before, when they were presented live, the always emotional honorary awards). Surprises of two kinds. On the one hand, the granting of statuettes to works that are priced downwards in the pools, an exciting slap in the face to predictability. That, like last year, a discreet nonsense about the multiverse eats Spielberg’s excellence raw, in the end it matters little. And on the other hand, those fortuitous, off-script moments, like the lapse between Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway or Will Smith’s slap at Chris Rock. Those things are the salt and pepper of these orsian oceanographies of tedium that are Uncle Oscar’s galas.
There were no surprises, too bad, at the 2024 Oscars. As the bets predicted, ‘Oppenheimer’ took the most precious meat in the delicatessen. It is a relative triumph of cinema: a good film, but nowhere near a masterpiece. Yes, on the other hand, it is a triumph of megalomania: Nolan will no longer have anyone coughing on him, like Cameron after ‘Titanic’. The rest of the prizes, fairly well distributed. That Berger and Bayona did not consummate their dreams is within reason (Miyazaki and Glazer were very considerable weights), but that Scorsese (ten nominations) left empty-handed cries out to heaven. And the history of cinema is written from other sides and beyond Los Angeles. From the frivolous side (here everything is ‘wonderful’, ‘amazing’, ‘unbelievable’, as they never tire of screaming on the red carpet), there were fun moments: the Oscar for best costumes awarded ‘à poil’, the Schwarzenegger couples
A hygienic reflective exercise would consist of thinking which films, among all the contestants, will survive in memory; how many possess that indefinable, magical, seamless, sublime substance of cinema that makes you love beyond eternity (Renoir, Ford, Ozu, Minnelli…). There are flashes of that substance (and legitimate poetry) in the films of Wenders and Celine Song, just as in those of Scorsese and Bayona the trace of the great cinema spectacle of bygone eras remains. But they are drops diluted in a sea of ??triviality. The Oscars fade with the passage of time. Not real cinema.
