Oscar- How did it go?

 Oscars 95. Well now that its over lets check in with how it went. I know I have been critical of the Academy but that's only because I love it. Tough Love.  My issue with them is they have tended to play to a very narrow subset of population making them feel obsolete.  They have made a lot of changes in the recent years so lets see how they did. First I want to congratulate the producers for having a smooth show and nobody got b*tch slapped or any other unexpected weird thing. In a way I'm kinda disappointed. It did make it interesting. Congrats on the appearance of Cocaine Bear BTW.  Lets dig into who won. 

Sound. Sound is very hard and tends to be an afterthought of filmmakers who like to focus exclusively on visuals. Top Gun Maverick won. something about the jet sounds. I haven't seen it so I cant comment. But that sounds about right. 

Production Design. All Quiet on the Western Front won that. Yeah that probably was very difficult to pull off. Can you imagine being a set decorator and your job was to blow stuff up? And you won an Oscar for it to boot. Cool Beans for them. Although, Elvis had some stunning production design. 

Costumes: Wakanda Forever. Yeah that was a no brainer. Like the first movie the team for costumes took great care and much research for that. 

Editing: Everything Everywhere all at once. Editing takes planning. you have to shoot a particular way to edit a certain was. Its a lot harder when you don't plan so the editor here was in production meetings early on adding his two cents. Kudos to him and The Daniels for coming up with creative edits. I think this award was spot on.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Women Talking won and don't get me wrong its a good script but I do think that Rian Johnson got a little hosed with Glass Onion. This is really a tough one and don't have a clear answer for this. 

Cinematography: All Quiet on the Western Front won and that was a clear winner. War films are hard.

Best Animated Short. I haven't seen them all but My Year of Dicks was Bloody brilliant. I loved they said Dicks on live TV. Yeah I know I have the sense of humor of a teenage boy. 

Supporting Actors. These are much much harder to be objective about and picks tend to be controversial. I do think Ke Huy Quan was the right on choice for supporting actor but Angela Basset and Stephanie Hsu got hosed. Don't get me wrong Jamie Lee Curtis did good but she wasn't in the movie that much. Angela Basset had to give voice to a world in grief. She gladly took on that enormous responsibility and nailed it. Stephanie Hsu played many people with a wide range of emotions and personalities. So this was not a good look and harkened back to some failures in the past. 

Best Director: The Daniels won for Everything Everywhere. Yes it was a good choice based on the nominees BUT as I pointed out women made films and people of color films were shut out. So I don't know if they would have necessarily won if the shut out films had been included. Keep in mind that Women Talking was nominated for Best Picture but the female director was not. That's a problem.  

As we go higher its the same criticism. I liked the choices for winners beyond this point but as I have said too many excellent films by women and people of color were shut out. 

So all in all it was improvements but Lots of work to do.