Before we get into our individual re-caps of this year’s Oscars, let’s get the plaudits and results posted for our predictions this year.

Coming in first with 17 correct predictions and 4 runners-up is Wesley Lovell. He narrowly beat out Thomas La Tourrette who got 16 correct with 4 runners-up. Pete Patrick came in third with 11 correct and 10 runners-up. Overall, only one category didn’t have a correct winner or runner-up prediction: Animated Short Film. Wander to Wonder lost but the three different runner-up predictions weren’t for In the Shadow of the Cypress. Live-Action Short Film was the only category that only one person got a winner and/or runner-up prediction correctly. Wesley forecast I’m Not a Robot as the winner but the film was not selected as runner-up by anyone else.

Wesley was the only person to correctly predict Best Picture, Sound, and Live Action Short Film. Thomas was the sole forecaster of Animated Feature, International Feature, and Documentary Short Subject. The categories where no one correctly predicted the winner were Best Actress (where we all picked Demi Moore and all of our runner-up predictions went with eventual winner Mikey Madison), Best Film Editing (we all predicted Conclave while Wesley and Pete picked winner Anora as runner-up), and Best Animated Feature (previously referenced).

Now, let’s dig into the reviews of this year’s Oscars.

Wesley Lovell

A surprisingly adept presentation of the red-carpet preceded the show and gave viewers a look at the glamor of the red carpet without any attention being paid to the folks outside. It’s been enough years now that the Academy has hosted their own pre-show that it seems they’ve finally gotten things down; however, their limited sets of interviews were disappointing, nabbing only a handful of Oscar nominees and barely giving them time to say anything. It might be more fun if they were to extend to an hour before show rather than just the scant 30 minutes.

We then proceeded inside the Dolby Theater with a tribute to Los Angeles that featured a short series of clips from films set in L.A. How La La Land nabbed two spots I can’t quite understand. From there, we are brought into Ariana Grande singing the most famous wizarding song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. It was a full and beautiful rendition that gave way to “Home” from 1978’s The Wiz with Wicked co-star Cynthia Erivo belting out the iconic track. It was less solid with the last few lines coming out a bit garbled even if still well sung. Grande returned to stage for a brief duet to the pair’s Wicked Act I finale, “Defying Gravity, one of the most famous theater songs ever written. This entire production was gorgeously handled, soared musically, and ending wonderfully even in spite of the somewhat lame alteration of the final words. It was a terrific note to start on.

Unfortunately, the show continued on with a limp with a tepid opening from host Conan O’Brien. He was less pointed in his criticisms than past hosts, getting off a small number of solid one-liners but ultimately felt like he was playing it too safe. That his best material came later in the show when he talked about Anora being a film where an American finally stood up to a Russian. It brought the house down then but little in his opening really had that much impact. Two notable exceptions, a dud of a joke that would only interest Oscar aficionados but which was poorly researched. It involved Emil Jannings, the first Best Actor winner. He left Hollywood to return to Germany where he became a prominent figure in the Nazi movement. Not the kind of person you want remembered or to joke about nonchalantly. The other was at Karla Sofía Gascón’s expense. Yes her past tweets make her fair game but it was a bit tasteless to make that kind of joke against an existing Oscar nominee who was in attendance. She didn’t understand the joke and was asking for a translation when they cut to her so we didn’t get to see her honest reaction. Whether anyone likes her or not, the recognition for being the first trans nominee in Best Actress should have been recognized even if problematic.

The first award wasn’t much of a shock but the second was the first “upset” of the night with Flow beating out The Wild Robot. If this one-two punch with last year’s Boy and the Heron isn’t the signal that the major studio dominance of the Best Animated Feature category is over, I don’t know what is. Another shocker came just thereafter with In the Shadow of the Cypress toppling Annie winner Wander to Wonder in Best Animated Short Film. After that, things proceeded fairly routinely until the Anora win in Best Film Editing which foreshadowed a record night for writer/director/editor/producer Sean Baker who became the first person to take home four Oscars in a single night for the same film. He was also the first director to solo-edit his own film to take home that prize. (Alfonso Cuarón won the prize in 2013 but shared it with Mark Sanger).

For the most part, the telecast was fairly rote and frequently dull. The presenter banter was, with two exceptions, relatively bland. Those exceptions were the classy presentation of the writing awards by Amy Poehler and the surprisingly on-point riff on the Best Production Design category with Ben Stiller. The imbalance between the supporting categories and the leading categories was shockingly disappointing. In support, they didn’t bring back past winners like last year but they did have the presenters go into lengthy praise sessions on the nominees. This felt a bit flat. The leading categories didn’t get that individual attention, which seemed a bit tacky in retrospect. They did get clips but even that made the supporting presentation appear off as well. The other interesting decision, one that worked surprisingly well, was for the Costume Design and Cinematography categories where they had five presenters, each from a different one of the nominated films, praising the work of the associated creative team. It was an interesting choice but was something they should have done with other technical categories too, like Production Design and Original Score. Often viewers don’t know anything about these categories or why they are important, so skimping on the details relegates some categories to superfluous positions while overly highlighting others.

The decision not to broadcast the original songs was another blot on the ceremony. Ostensibly it was to allow more time for bigger acts to perform, though I still maintain that having Elton John and H.E.R. on the telecast would have been a big get. Instead, they replaced those with three sets of musical numbers. The first was the only one that worked thanks to the soaring vocals of Grande and Erivo. The second was a horribly written number closing out O’Brien’s opening set. The song sound terrible and the presentation could have been better performed at the High School level. The third, a tribute to the James Bond franchise was the most atrocious.

It started out well enough with non-nominated Margaret Qualley dancing to the James Bond theme. It was a Bond-esque routine that suggests Qualley would be an excellent Bond girl. Lisa from K-Pop group Blackpink came out after and sang “Live and Let Die.” Her vocals were uneven and the dance routine distracting but she did well enough with her rendition. Her successor Doja Cat, however, was entirely off-key. Performing the classic Shirley Bassey track “Diamonds Are Forever,” she seemed to be performing in a key lower than that of the orchestra, which caused her vocals to clash. With Bassey as an originator, you have to have some major vocal chops to compete and even barring a mis-keyed earpiece, it was a train wreck. They finished off with a performance of more-recent vintage, “Skyfall.” Once again, you have to be a terrific performer to outdo the legendary Adele and unfortunately RAYE was not up to the task. While hers didn’t sound as off kilter as Doja Cat’s, it was painful to listen to and ended the tribute on a sour note. Trying to appeal to young girls isn’t a problem. Employing artists who have no hope of meeting or exceeding the original material is one though. Alan Carr would have been pleased to know that his Snow White/Rob Lowe fiasco has finally been outdone.

In the end, the Producers Guild of America and Directors Guild of America got the last laugh while the British Academy succeeded and failed in equal measure. PGA and DGA successfully forecast the Best Picture and Best Directing races respectively, something they’ve done quite well with in the past. However, that Conclave win at BAFTA and then at the Screen Actors Guild really threw a wrench in the works. BAFTA did get one out of the ordinary forecast right: Mikey Madison as Best Actress. SAG missed with both Best Cast and Best Actress, neither of which are uncommon occurrences.

Overall, while it wasn’t nearly as predictable as some past years, many of the races did end up about where we expected them to with runners-up and ordering of contenders matching up fairly well with Oscar tastes. The Contender series didn’t do as well but I’ll be discussing that next week.

With a lukewarm show with several sour notes to its credit, the Academy is in a precarious position. It played it too safe, replicated events other shows did better, and never quite settled into a rhythm that felt exciting. We’ll just hope they learn their lesson for next year’s show.

Pete Patrick

I liked the musical opening with the tributes to The Wizard of Oz, The Wiz, and Wicked in the order of their creation. Conan O’Brien’s entrance was a little forced, but he rebounded easily.

The tributes to James Bond and Quincey Jones were extraneous, both having been honored recently at the Governors Awards. I can’t recall any previous honorary winners since the Governors Awards began being given such tributes – they were ostensibly formed in part to make the Oscar show flow better, besides which they did do a tribute to the Bond franchise not that long ago.

The In Memoriam segment was very classy this year, and Morgan Freeman’s heartfelt tribute to Gene Hackman set the right tone.

The presenters were mostly B-list. Andrew Garfield’s supposedly impromptu tribute to Goldie Hawn was a bit much but the others were mostly smooth. Ben Stiller’s presentation of Best Production Design, though, was overdone – we got the point the first time it looked like we were having an episode of vertigo.

A slimmed down Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s presentation of Best Supporting Actress was the classiest of the four returning winners. I could have listened to her all night.

Mikey Madison was the only one of the acting winners who gave a classy, traditional acceptance speech. Kieran Culkin rambled as usual, Zoe Saldaña cried again as if she were winning the Nobel Peace Prize for world peace, and Adrien Brody was insufferable especially as he droned on about the next twenty years hopefully making up for the last twenty between his Oscars.

All four of Sean Baker’s speeches were nicely done but he was more passionate at the Spirit Awards where he talked about low attendance at movie theatres causing the loss of revenue for independent filmmakers as their films move quickly to streaming and die after years of work in bringing them to the screen.

It was better than most recent shows, but it was still too long.

Thomas La Tourrette

I did not do so well at predicting this year. Sometimes I pay more attention to what other prognosticators are saying, but this year I went more by what I thought would and could win. Yes, everyone was saying Kieran Culkin would win and he did. But when it came to other categories, I did not always follow the crowd. Some of that comes from mixed feelings about the big winner of the night, Anora. Several friends have loved it, but I just did not get it. I have noticed that more female friends have responded better to it than men, which may make something of a difference. But I just did not consider it an “Oscar” film. And probably ten years ago there was not a chance that it could have won, but times have changed. It is the lowest grossing film to win best picture. And as much as I appreciated writer/director/editor/producer Sean Baker’s exhortations to experience films in the theater, I just wish I had liked the movie he was winning for. He tied Walt Disney’s record for most wins by one person in a night, though Sean’s were all from one movie whilst Walt won for different films.

It was a decent show. Conan O’Brien was a game and relaxed host. His bit about coming out of Demi Moore’s body ala The Substance was humorous, though I wondered if anyone that hadn’t seen the film understood what was going on. His song about not wasting time worked okay but probably could have been shorter. Especially as the producers had made the odd choice not to have any of the nominated songs performed. I grant you that they were not a stellar lot this year, but it would be nice to have them done. Though I am not sure how “El Mal” would have been done on stage. But to then do a long tribute to the James Bond franchise with three songs performed and then a bizarre homage to Quincy Jones with a song from The Wiz, which he did not write, sung, it seemed a slap in the face to the music nominees. The opening songs from The Wizard of Oz, The Wiz, and Wicked were superbly sung by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, but I am not sure what they had to do with Los Angeles.

The telecast did some things well. Having actors from the movies extolling the work of the costume designers and cinematographers was a real nice touch that I hope they continue. Ben Stiller’s schtick to introduce the production design award was okay, but after what they did for costume design, it made me wish they had done something similar for it. Occasionally the Academy gets something totally right, like the award for feature documentary to No Other Land. It was by far the best and most moving of the documentaries, and the acceptance speeches by the Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers hit home the atrocities being done on the West Bank. I was also pleased that Flow won for animated feature, somewhat unexpected but totally deserved. The in memoriam sequence was nicely handled with no star singing a song that they had to keep cutting to like has happened in past years. People will quibble as to whether Alain Delon, Mitzi Gaynor, and Olivia Hussey should have been included, but they will never be able to list everybody.

There will be some griping still about category fraud as both Kieran Culkin and Zoe Saldaña could just as easily been nominated and won for lead rather than supporting roles. I think Saldaña actually had more screen time than Karla Sofía Gascón who was nominated as lead for Emilia Pérez, but Zoe was impressive in the movie. The acting races were packed with strong performances this year, something that does not always happen. Whereas best picture felt a little weak. It was a decent year for films, but not a great one. International feature felt stronger with all five nominees deserving of being there. I’m Still Here was a deserving winner, though Emilia Pérez or The Seed of the Sacred Fig were awfully good too. As always there are surprises, actress, editing, live action short, and animated short did not go where I expected. When Anora won for editing, it seemed pretty certain that it would win for director and picture too. Actress was still a surprise, as Demi Moore had such a good backstory going that she seemed the likely winner. But the Academy does like an ingenue and Mikey Madison was in practically every frame of Anora. Wicked, Dune: Part Two, Conclave, and Emilia Pérez all won some deserved awards. Even though it did win two awards, Emilia Pérez did lose 11 though, which ties it with The Turning Point, The Color Purple, Becket, Johnny Belinda, and The Power of the Dog for most losses in an evening. A Complete Unknown went winless off of its eight nominations, which did upset fans of the movie. And poor Diane Warren is now zero for 16 when it comes to Oscars. There’s always next year for her, as she has been on a streak of consecutive nominations.

So, the 97th Oscars are over and it’s time for me to go to bed too.