Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticThere are two ways to view this year’s Academy Awards telecast. One of them isn’t pretty. The other is strangely … hopeful.
But both speak to the powerful transitional moment in which the movie industry is now caught.Version #1: This year’s Oscar night, by bending over backwards to “reinvent” itself, wound up as a weird kind of dull fizzle.
There was no snarky, let’s-bait-the-stars opening monologue — which seemed, in theory, an enlightened way to go following a year of unending casualty and turmoil.
But after not too long, you began to crave the oxygen of a few jokes, anything to lighten the samey-same mood of social-political reverence and speeches that droned on without end.
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