12 Best, Worst, and Most WTF Moments of the 2021 Oscars
It’s fitting that Steven Soderbergh, who directed 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion, was the production brains behind the 2021 Oscars. Whereas the coronavirus-era Emmys and Golden Globes veered toward absurdist comedy in the face of our altered world, the 93rd Academy Awards went in a completely different direction. As helmed by Soderbergh, the pared-down ceremony opted for seriousness and austerity, ostensibly to reflect the times we’re living through. (Mercifully, no one delivered a glitchy living room speech over Zoom.)
Whether that’s your jam or not, what’s undeniable is that this was an Oscars like no other: The ceremony forsook the plush environs of the Dolby Theatre for the sunlit ticket-counter room in Los Angeles’ Union Station, with only a small audience of (vaccinated, unmasked) nominees and their plus-ones in attendance. Hostless as it has been since 2019, this Academy Awards employed a variety of beloved A-listers (Brad Pitt! Renée Zellweger! Harrison Ford!) to present what turned out to be, despite its blandness, an historic ceremony.
Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland swept in three big categories, including Best Picture — and, maybe more significantly, Best Director: Zhao is just the second woman, and the first woman of color, to ever win in the category. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom hair and makeup artists Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson were the first black women to win in that category, while the film’s 89-year-old costume designer, Ann Roth, became the oldest female Oscar winner in history. Meanwhile, first-time nominees Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah) and Yuh-Jung Youn (Minari) took the Best Supporting Actor statuettes, while vets Frances McDormand (Nomadland) and Anthony Hopkins (The Father) added to their mantel collections — the fourth Oscar for her, second for him — by winning the two big acting categories.
Read on for the best, worst, and WTF moments from an Oscars like we’ve never seen before, and probably won’t see again — and join us in pouring one out for the late, brilliant Chadwick Boseman, who won Best Actor in our hearts, if nowhere else.
-
WTF: Let the Music Play… Before Anyone Is Watching?
Image Credit: Richard Harbaugh/A.M.P.A.S. Look, we get it: The average Oscar ceremony has an impossibly packed itinerary, where every extra second can make an epic-length show feel interminable. Shifting the performances of the five nominated songs from the main telecast to the pre-show was a bold move, saving the producers about 15 minutes of valuable airtime. It also made sense — on paper, anyway — to allow powerhouse performers like Leslie Odom Jr. and the eventual winner H.E.R. to belt out their numbers in full, at an earlier time. But the musical numbers are often Oscar-telecast highlights. The same could’ve been true this year… if the primetime audience had gotten to see Molly Sandén and a children’s choir singing Eurovision’s stirring anthem “Husavik” in picturesque Iceland, that is. Instead, one of the night’s most magical moments happened over an hour before the big show began — and on a night where, as it turned out, a catchy tune or two would’ve been welcome. NM
-
Best: A Kick-ass Opening Leads Into a Refreshingly Low-Key Ceremony
Image Credit: ABC For film lovers who are tired of the pat bits and theatrics that have become the awards ceremony norm, this back-to-basics Oscars was a breath of fresh air. Taking a cue from Soderbergh’s oeuvre, the show kicked off with a heist movie-style tracking shot of One Night in Miami director Regina King strutting into Union Station, as colorful opening credits popped onto the screen. Setting the tone for a socially conscious night, King acknowledged the ongoing plight of black people in America (“If things had gone differently this past week in Minneapolis, I might have traded in my heels for marching boots,” she said of the recent Derek Chauvin verdict). She and the other presenters — Bryan Cranston, Riz Ahmed, and Laura Dern among them — introduced nominees with anecdotes about how they got their start in the industry or what inspired their work. The format made for a lot more talk than awards viewers are used to, but it also got to the heart of what flashier ceremonies obscure: that this is a night about honoring artists and visionaries, and it’s easier to be invested if we know where they’re coming from. In any case, it beats Seth MacFarlane singing about boobs or Jimmy Kimmel herding a crowd of tourists. JS
-
Worst: Excising Nearly All the Old Goofiness and Glam
Image Credit: Todd Wawrychuk/A.M.P.A.S./Getty Images It’s true that we didn’t have to endure any stilted presenter banter last night. It’s also true that we didn’t have to wait impatiently for some star in formal wear to step out of the wings to introduce another star in formal wear, to present the list of nominees. But after about an hour with no comic relief and minimal glamour, this show did start to feel verrrry slow. It didn’t help that the ceremony’s middle stretch was dedicated to the year’s lesser-known films and technical awards. The Oscars are meant to be a celebration of movies; but it’s also supposed to be an entertaining TV show. Even some of the staunchest cinephiles might’ve been tempted to switch over to the Dodgers-Padres game as a succession of perfectly nice but non-famous people (such as Scott Fisher, above, part of Tenet‘s winning visual effects team) walked across the stage to give dry speeches, with nary a joke or a couture “moment” to break up the monotony. NM
-
Best: Emerald Fennell Wins for ‘Promising Young Woman’ Screenplay
Image Credit: ABC It’s the stuff meteoric rises are made of: Not only did Emerald Fennell’s feature writing and directing debut, Promising Young Woman, get five nominations, but she won for best original screenplay, beating out an otherwise all-male slate. That Fennell’s audacious, pitch-black comedy about a woman taking revenge against sexual predators received so much Academy love is a testament to how much Oscar voters have widened their scope in the past few years. “Oh, my God, he’s so heavy, and he’s so cold!” a shocked Fennell said, hefting her statuette. In one of the night’s most genuine reactions, the sweetly flustered filmmaker admitted that she hadn’t prepared a speech since an imaginary one when she was 10 years old, in which she thanked her “husband” Zack Morris from Saved by the Bell. (Haven’t we all?) She then paid tribute to her team (who made the movie in only 23 days!), and acknowledged the travails of filming while very pregnant (“I was crossing my legs all the way through”). It’s a great sign for the future that a fresh, whip-smart voice like Fennell’s was recognized. A promising young woman indeed. JS
-
Best: Daniel Kaluuya and More Deliver at the Mic
Image Credit: AMPAS/ABC It was clear early on that this would be a different kind of Oscar ceremony when the Best International Feature Film winner Thomas Vinterberg, director of Another Round, launched into a speech that just kept going, without any orchestra cueing him to wrap it up. The freedom to ramble paid off, as Vinterberg closed with a touching salute to his late daughter, who died in a car crash not long after filming on that movie began. It was moment he likely wouldn’t have gotten to had he been told to keep it short. Later winners like Mia Neal (Best Hairstyling for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) and Mikkel E.G. Nielsen (Best Editing for Sound of Metal) used their extra time well, too — Neal to celebrate her grandfather, a Tuskegee airman, and to urge more opportunities for minority crew members; Nielsen to underscore the importance of government funding for the arts. But the king of the extended speeches was Judas and the Black Messiah’s Daniel Kaluuya, whose extemporaneous list of thank-yous after winning Best Supporting Actor included both a thoughtful meditation on Fred Hampton’s legacy and, finally, a nod to his own parents for procreating. “My mum and my dad, they had sex… It’s amazing! I’m here!” he gushed. It sure is. NM
-
WTF: Where Are the Clips?
Image Credit: Chris Pizzello/AP If you were on social media during the ceremony, you probably already know that the creative choice which left viewers the most baffled (before the show’s bonkers ending, that is) was the relative lack of sounds and images from the nominated films. To be fair, whenever the producers did couple their list of nominees with clips, as they did with Best Documentary Feature and Best Picture, they picked longer, more meaningful moments, rather than relying on the over-compressed montages that have been the Oscars norm in recent years. Still, too often viewers were presented with a bunch of names and no context for why they were being honored. Pictures of the year’s best visual effects, production design, and costumes? We didn’t get to lay eyes on any of those. When the nominees for Best Score (won by Soul‘s Jon Batiste, Trent Reznor, and Atticus Ross, above) were read? Total silence. What was the idea here? To prove how important the production crew is to motion pictures by keeping their work completely off-screen? For an event that’s intended to showcase the magic of the movies, there were precious few movies to be found. NM
-
Best: Bong Joon Ho’s Ode to Filmmaking
Image Credit: Jaehyuk Lee/A.M.P.A.S. Korean director Bong Joon Ho blew the Oscars wide open in 2020, when his masterful Parasite swept the three main awards categories, becoming the first non-English-language film to do so. Presenting from a theater in Seoul, Bong spoke in his native Korean as he introduced the best director category, his words translated by Sharon Choi. In a ceremony full of often random anecdotes about nominees, Bong got specific: He asked each director to explain their art form in 20 seconds. Their answers presented a clearer picture of each filmmaker’s vision than a short film clip might have. Another Round’s Thomas Vinterberg compared directing to jumping off a cliff; Minari’s Lee Isaac Chung said that “film must respond to life”; Nomadland’s Chloe Zhao said that she asks herself, “What would Werner Herzog do?”; Mank’s David Fincher explained that there are really only two ways to shoot a scene, and “one of them is wrong”; and, delightfully, Promising Young Woman’s Emerald Fennell recalled telling her mother as a kid that she “wanted to write stories about murder.” JS
-
Best: Chloe Zhao’s Historic Directing Win
Image Credit: ABC Of the many oversights in the Academy’s 93-year history, perhaps the most egregious is that, before 2021, only five women had ever been nominated in the Best Director category — and only one had taken home the prize (Kathryn Bigelow, for The Hurt Locker in 2010). That changed this year, when both Chloe Zhao and Emerald Fennell made the list. Zhao went on to win the night for Nomadland, cementing her place in history as both the second woman and the first woman of color to take the category. And her speech was as generous and open-hearted as her film, a quietly gorgeous portrait of a woman set adrift in the wake of the 2008 recession. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately of how I keep going when things get hard,” Zhao said. She went on to quote a line from a poem she learned when she was young, translated from Mandarin: “People at birth are inherently good.” It’s an ethos that shines through in the filmmaker’s work — and likely why, as we’re all struggling to find ways to connect, Nomadland was the story that most spoke to our troubled times. JS
-
Worst: ‘My Octopus Teacher’ Squeezes the Life Out of Its Competitors
Image Credit: Courtesy of Netflix Hey, we don’t have anything against octopi. They’re supersmart, they can open jars, and they’re great ambassadors for ocean conservation. But we do take umbrage with My Octopus Teacher, Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed’s buzzy, sentimental documentary about one man’s weird obsession with a single octopus, beating out its four vitally relevant competitors. Really, any one of the other Best Documentary entries would have been a better choice: Garrett Bradley’s Time, about a woman fighting to get her husband released from prison; Alexander Nanau’s Collective, which follows Romanian journalists investigating massive health-care fraud; James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham’s Crip Camp, which traces the source of the American disability rights movement; or Maite Alberdi’s The Mole Agent, about an elderly spy infiltrating a Chilean nursing home. By contrast, My Octopus Teacher is a fairly myopic portrait of a guy transferring all his feelings onto an unwitting cephalopod. (And, to make matters worse, no one even bothered to thank the octopus.) JS
-
Best: Yuh-Jung Youn Takes Home a Statue — and Charms the Room
Image Credit: Todd Wawrychuk/A.M.P.A.S./Getty Images Daniel Kaluuya apparently wasn’t the only winner in a randy mood last night. When Minari’s Best Supporting Actress Yuh-Jung Youn walked onto the stage to claim her award, she took a moment to ogle the category’s presenter (and Minari executive producer) Brad Pitt, saying it was good to meet him before coyly asking, “Where were you when we were filming?” She then went on to humbly chalk up her success in this year’s awards season to simple luck, and to thank her two sons for making her “go out and work.” The speech was so endearingly off-the-cuff and utterly disarming that even fans of the perpetually snubbed nominee Glenn Close had to crack a smile. NM
-
WTF: Glenn Close Doin’ ‘Da Butt’
Image Credit: ABC/AMPAS Let’s be clear: It was absolutely delightful to hear Glenn Close talking to the comedian Lil Rel Howery about the 1988 E.U. go-go hit “Da Butt,” from Spike Lee’s School Daze… and even funnier to see her get up and dance to it. But the bit (or should we say “da bitt?”) came at the end of a stultifying Oscars musical quiz in which Howery first cornered a cussing Andra Day and then a mildly confused Daniel Kaluuya, all for a piece of shtick that arrived way too late, as the show was in its homestretch. After nearly three hours with no real levity, this was when the producers decided to slip in a little comedy? Even worse, after a commercial break, they cut straight to Angela Bassett in mid-presentation of the In Memoriam segment. Talk about whiplash. NM
-
Worst: The Show Fizzles Out as Boseman Gets Snubbed
Image Credit: Todd Wawrychuk/A.M.P.A.S./Getty Images The Oscars generally end on the biggest category — Best Picture — before the credits roll and we ease back into our couches to cheer for Moonlight or groan about Green Book. It’s a narrative arc that awards viewers have come to know and look forward to. But Nomadland’s win was, strangely, followed by two more categories. Best Actress winner Frances McDormand had nowhere to go but down after she literally wolf-howled while accepting her film’s Best Picture award (an apparent tribute to the movie’s late sound mixer, Michael Wolf Snyder), so she basically grabbed her trophy and walked off. But that was nothing compared to the head-scratcher to come. Chadwick Boseman, who died last year at the age of 43, seemed to be a shoe-in to win Best Actor for his final role as the blustering, passionate trumpet player Levee in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Then presenter Joaquin Phoenix opened the envelope to reveal that, in fact, Anthony Hopkins had won, for his portrayal of a man suffering from dementia in The Father. Phoenix awkwardly accepted the award on behalf of the absent Hopkins, and viewers across the country stared at their TV screens in bewilderment. It’s likely that Soderbergh & Co. thought the Boseman win would make a poignant coda to the night. But that moment of catharsis never came; and Boseman, an actor whose work burned like a comet in the final years of his all-too-brief career, will never get the Oscars recognition he deserves. JS