Oscars 2021: The six biggest talking points, from unbearable speeches to a twerking Glenn Close
This was always going to be an unusual year, but ‘unusual’ doesn’t have to be mean ‘mostly unbearable’
An unusual year in film culminated in an inevitably unusual Oscar ceremony. There were surprise wins and hilarious speeches, but primarily this was a joyless slog. Recent years have proven that the Academy Awards can be speedy and efficient when it comes to pacing, so it was confusing that this was so dull.
Daniel Kaluuya, beacon of unstoppable charisma, provided much of the night’s laughter, along with a seemingly game-for-anything Glenn Close. It was also difficult to take issue with many of the wins – every major film seemed to get something or other, and Minari’s Yuh-Jung Youn got to deliver another salty acceptance speech after her show-stealing performance at the Baftas earlier this month.
Despite all of that, though, the show was generally interminable. Here are the six major talking points from tonight’s ceremony, and you can see the winners in full here.
Where were the jokes?
This was a curiously drab three and a bit hours, with few moments of levity. As much as we like to rib Oscar hosts like Ellen Degeneres and Jimmy Kimmel (or even the traumatic pairing of James Franco and Anne Hathaway), the Academy Awards need a bit of self-mockery to break up the stuffiness. Parading mostly humourless movie stars on stage to do all of the talking was a mistake.
Thank you, then, to Lil Rel Howery, Daniel Kaluuya and Glenn Close’s glutes
Yes, Questlove’s incredibly late-in-the-show move to play a musical guessing game with members of the audience felt like a desperate bit of improv to brighten things up. But watching Howery and Kaluuya riff on Get Out, in which the pair starred, and Close twerking to a track from Spike Lee’s School Daze was at least *something* to giggle at.
Steven Soderbergh was a big win… until he wasn’t
Roping in the director of Ocean’s Eleven to produce this year’s ceremony seemed like a masterstroke at first. Everything else is different this year, why not make it a different kind of show, too? The night’s opening, with Regina King striding through Los Angeles’s Union Station and on-screen credits introducing all of the night’s presenters, played like a lost Ocean’s movie. It was high-gloss glamour at its finest. And there was, at least in the ceremony’s early stages, an appealingly cinematic gloss to the show – particularly when Bong Joon-ho emerged from the shadows to present Best Director. But then things seemed to falter. The pacing lagged, the speeches went on too long, and the unique glitz of Soderbergh’s involvement seemed to completely dissipate. What happened?
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