LOS ANGELES — “Nomadland,”
Chloé Zhao’s meditation on grief
and the damaged American dream, won Academy Awards for best picture, director
and actress at Sunday night’s surreal ceremony, a stage show broadcast on
television about films mostly distributed on the internet.
اضافة اعلان
It was a sleepy event until the final minutes, when academy
voters served up a dramatic twist ending: Anthony Hopkins, 83, won the best
actor Oscar for “The Father,” beating out the late
Chadwick Boseman (“Ma
Rainey’s Black Bottom”), who was the runaway favorite going into the night,
having been lauded by film organizations and critics’ groups for months.
Frances McDormand was named best actress for “Nomadland,”
the third time she has won the award. “Nomadland” gave Searchlight Pictures its
fourth best-picture prize in eight years, an astounding run unrivaled by any
other specialty film company. “We give this one to our wolf,” McDormand said as
she held the best picture statuette, an apparent reference to Michael Wolf
Snyder, a “Nomadland” sound mixer who took his own life in March. She then
unleashed an unbridled wolf howl.
In many ways, the 93rd Oscars amounted to a celebration of
diversity, an issue that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has
emphasized in wake of the #OscarsSoWhite protests of 2015 and 2016, when its
acting nominees were all white. This year, nine of the 20 acting nominations
went to people of color.
Daniel Kaluuya was recognized as best supporting actor for
playing Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in “Judas and the Black Messiah.”
“Bro, we out here!” Kaluuya shouted in joy before changing
gears and crediting Hampton (“what a man, what a man”) and ending with the cri
de coeur, “When they played divide and conquer, we say unite and ascend.”
The supporting actress award went to Yuh-Jung Youn for
playing a comically cantankerous grandmother in “Minari.” She was the first
Korean performer to win an acting Oscar, and only the second Asian woman; the
first was Miyoshi Umeki, a Japanese-born American actress who was recognized in
1958 for playing a bride who encounters racism in “Sayonara.”
“I’m luckier than you,” Youn said to Glenn Close, a
supporting actress nominee, to laughter. (Peter O’Toole and Close now jointly
hold the record for most nominations in the acting categories without a win —
eight apiece.)
In other firsts, Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson became the first
Black women to win the makeup and hairstyling Oscar, a prize they shared with
Sergio Lopez-Rivera for their work on “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” “I know that
one day it won’t be unusual or groundbreaking,” Neal said about her win. “It
will just be normal.” Ann Roth won for her “Ma Rainey” costume design,
becoming, at 89, the oldest woman ever to win an Oscar.
Zhao, who is Chinese, became only the second woman, and the
first woman of color, to win the award for best director.
“I’ve been thinking a lot lately of how I keep going when
things get hard,” she said in her acceptance speech, referring to a Chinese
poem she used to read with her father that began with the phrase “People at
birth are inherently good.”
“This is for anyone who has the faith and courage to hold on
to the goodness in themselves and to hold onto the goodness in each other,” she
said.
“Soul,” the Pixar film about a Black musician stuck between
Earth and the afterlife, added to the celebration of diversity, winning best
animated film and score. The Walt Disney Co., which owns Pixar and Searchlight,
won a total of five awards.
The ceremony got underway on Sunday with Regina King, a
former Oscar winner and the director of “One Night in Miami,” strutting into a
supper-club set. It harkened back to Hollywood’s earliest days, when the
Academy Awards were held in hotel ballrooms — laid-back, insider events without
the pressure of worrying about whether the television masses might find them
compelling.
“It has been quite a year, and we are still smack dab in the
middle of it,” she said solemnly, referencing the pandemic and the guilty
verdict in the killing of George Floyd. “Our love of movies helped to get us
through.”
With very little additional preamble — signaling a low-key,
stripped-down-to-the-essentials ceremony, the snoozy opposite of the typical
pomp and circumstance — Oscar statuettes began to get handed out. Fennell, a
first-time nominee, won best original screenplay for “Promising Young Woman,” a
startling revenge drama. The last woman to win solo in the category had been
Diablo Cody (“Juno”) in 2007.
“He’s so heavy and so cold,” Fennell said about her little
gold-plated man in an impromptu speech that revisited one she wrote when she
was 10 and loved Zack Morris in the television series “Saved By the Bell.”
It was one of the few lighthearted moments in a telecast
notable for marathon acceptance speeches.
Christopher Hampton and Florian Zeller won the adapted
screenplay prize for “The Father,” about the ravages of dementia. “Another
Round,” about middle-age men who decide to get drunk daily, won the Academy
Award for international feature film (previously referred to as
foreign-language film). Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg dedicated “Another
Round” to his daughter, Ida, who was killed in a car crash in 2019.
“Maybe you’ve been pulling some strings somewhere,”
Vinterberg said, providing a notable moment of emotion.
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