Critic’s Notebook: Conan O’Brien Helps to Steady an Erratic Oscars Telecast
In his opening monologue for the 2025 Oscars, host Conan O’Brien made a pronouncement about how any acceptance speech that went on too long would be subject to John Lithgow’s “disappointed” face.
Some 3.5 hours later — well after Conan did a musical number about his promise not to waste time, after a half-dozen winners made speeches that the orchestra cut off almost before they began — Adrien Brody took the stage for his second best actor win, announcing that the theme of his speech would be everything he learned in the 20 years since his first win for The Pianist. He proceeded to babble without interruption or apparent purpose for several minutes, finally started to get played off, instructed the orchestra that he wasn’t leaving, and rambled for several more minutes — and THE DIRECTOR OF THE TELECAST NEVER ONCE CUT TO JOHN LITHGOW BEING DISAPPOINTED. Maybe the director forgot. Maybe John Lithgow forgot. Maybe nobody wanted to be mean to Brody as he rambled.
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The expression “Chekhov’s Gun” is basically a recommendation that every element you introduce in a story should have a dramatic purpose, or else you’d be better off removing it. If there’s a gun in the first act of a play, it has to be fired by the final act.
Sunday night’s Oscars telecast wasn’t without its moments. There were some good winners and some decent speeches and even some solid production ideas. Plus O’Brien was a fully capable host, and some of the writing within the telecast was impressively sharp. But I’m not sure I’ve ever watched a telecast that had less tonal consistency, or more moments or bits where I thought, “Wait, why did they do this but not that? Why did that do that here but not there? Why was this the mood they wanted to strike in this moment? Why was that introduced if it wasn’t going to pay off?”
I’m perfectly happy to pretend that this telecast was the show we deserved at this point in history, when everything — the political climate in the U.S., the aftermath of devastating Los Angeles fires, what’s happening in the world, and what’s happening in the industry the show is meant to be celebrating — feels so unstable.
But maybe it was just an uneven mess. Who’s to say?
I don’t understand why the show started with a tribute to Los Angeles and Los Angeles-centric movies and then shifted abruptly into musical numbers from The Wizard of Oz, The Wiz and Wicked — movies that have nothing to do with Los Angeles and yet still played out in front of a reproduction of the sparkling lights of L.A.
And if we were starting the show with a song from The Wiz, I don’t understand the decision to pay tribute to the late, great Quincy Jones with Queen Latifah’s performance of “Ease on Down the Road,” a song from The Wiz that Jones produced but did not write. By all means honor Jones, but give some respect to Charlie Smalls.
I don’t understand why the “I Won’t Waste Time” song needed to exist. Yes, kids. I do understand irony. But it wasn’t funny enough to be there.
I don’t understand why we did away with performances of the nominated original songs — other than that this year’s original song nominees were … not great — and replaced them with a strange tribute to James Bond. The latter either was or wasn’t meant to be a bittersweet acknowledgement of the passing of the franchise’s torch from the Broccolis to Amazon’s Algorithm, complete with a dance number by Margaret Qualley and a song medley featuring Lisa from Blackpink, Doja Cat and Raye, none of whom seemed exactly matched with the songs they were singing. Might I posit, yet again, that if they wanted to honor the Broccolis, maybe the best way to do it would have been to present Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson with their honorary Oscars as part of the main telecast?
I understand completely why the producers introduced a new format in which five actors from the films nominated for costumes and cinematography sang the praises of the respective artisans, with clips and focus on the nominees in the audience giving a rare wealth of exposure to those talented individuals. This worked, future Oscars producers.
On the other hand, attempts to mix up the presentation format for other awards mostly didn’t work: previous winners struggling through scripted puffery about this year’s nominated actors, Ben Stiller saying some things about production design that got lost in shtick, songwriters talking about the songs the Academy didn’t think were good enough to be performed on air, etc.
I understand a lot of the choices in the In Memoriam segment — mostly muted audience reactions, “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem (performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale) instead of a mawkish song. But there will be a record number of fans outraged by snubbed favorites this year, and a lot of them will be right; some unambiguously significant names were left out.
I understand what Nick Offerman brought to the table as the show’s announcer, and he mostly succeeded in simply providing information, with the occasional sly joke slipped in, like when he mispronounced Amy Poehler’s name. But his presence was inconsistently utilized at best.
The tributes to firefighters and first responders and mentions of the January fires were there because it was clear they needed to be, but nobody was really committed to making them a coherent part of the show (though I laughed at two of the three jokes that Conan “asked” honored officers to present).
The politics in the telecast came through hit-or-miss. O’Brien’s most pointed line of the night was to observe of Anora‘s wins, “I guess Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian” (complemented by Daryl Hannah’s voiced support for Ukraine, though your guess is as good as mine why the 20th anniversary of the 2004 release of Kill Bill: Volume 2 was being saluted). The most discussed speech of the night is sure to be the paired best documentary acceptances from Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham and Palestinian activist Basel Adra of No Other Land — though it’s fair to wonder why the only other time antisemitism came up was in the later stage of Brody’s speech, well after the self-obsession caused my attention to waver.
There were other speeches that were political because of the state of the country, whether it was the repeated salutes to sex workers from the Anora team or Zoe Salda?a and Wicked costume designer Paul Tazewell celebrating boundary-breaking wins, or even Flow director Gints Zilbalodis reducing the message of his film somewhat simplistically to “We’re all in the same boat. We must find ways to overcome our differences and work together.” But you can just as easily count all of the things that didn’t get addressed, from trans rights on a night when Emilia Pérez won multiple awards to almost any specific aspect of the current dismantling of social safety nets.
O’Brien mentioned various other elephants in the cultural room. He got laughs with a Kendrick Lamar/Drake joke. He made multiple jokes about Karla Sofía Gascón’s ill-fated and bigoted posts on X (formerly Twitter), as everybody else went out of their way to pretend she didn’t exist. He snuck in several absurdist non sequitur jokes that reminded me of Conan O’Brien at his weirdest and most digressive. Even if I’d have trimmed several of his extended gags, I thought he came across like somebody who has hosted shows and hosted them well in the past. Which he is.
Other entertaining bits? June Squibb claiming she was being played by Bill Skarsgard, though they subsequently overexplained and watered down the joke. Poehler’s “I dare you to laugh” wordplay about screenplay adapters and power adapters.
I’m sure there’s more, but this has gone on way too long and I’m beginning to feel John Lithgow’s disappointment.
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