Moments after “Everything Everywhere All at Once” swept to victory at the ninety-fifth Academy Awards—a result that landed like a love bomb at the Dolby Theatre, where I’d been sitting in the nosebleeds—I was at the Governors Ball, the Academy’s on-site after-party, contemplating a ceremony that had been full of feel-good moments but lacking the special brand of chaos that we’ve come to expect at the Oscars, with such high-profile debacles as the Best Picture envelope mixup and the Slap. At the party, a French pastry chef gave me a chocolate cigar, with caramelized popcorn on one end, which had been dipped in liquid nitrogen to make it smoke. As I bit into it, I felt a pang of uncertainty. What was this feeling?
That’s when I ran into the producer Donna Gigliotti, an Oscar winner (for “Shakespeare in Love,” in 1999) and onetime producer of the ceremony, who said that the show had been nice, but a little boring. “It’s the Joe Biden of Oscars,” she said, encapsulating the evening precisely. After the turbulence and sheer bizarreness of the Slap, this year restored a sense of normalcy to the awards: warm, relatively uneventful, familiar in its rhythms, reassuring in its dullness. The speeches had been sweet and aspirational, and the expected triumph of “Everything Everywhere,” produced from the right envelope, had given the evening a soft landing. Oh, right, I thought. This is what the Oscars usually feel like.
By the sushi bar, I saw Jimmy Kimmel, who had done an admirable hosting job—one year after the Slap and six years after he had presided over Envelopegate. I asked him if he had gone into tonight expecting something insane to happen. “No,” he told me. “We could go another forty years and not have anything else like that. The only thing I can compare it to in my lifetime is Mike Tyson biting Evander Holyfield’s ear off.”
Without a major incident, the 2023 Oscars could be appreciated for their cozier milestones. Though “Everything Everywhere” has its detractors, its rolling wins went over nice and easy at the Dolby, with heart-melting speeches by its three acting winners. Ke Huy Quan, who won for Best Supporting Actor, probably had the happiest arc of this year’s awards season, and his win capped a remarkable comeback after he’d left the business following his “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” child-actor years. Jamie Lee Curtis (Best Supporting Actress) choked up in her speech while talking about her famous parents—Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, both Oscar nominees—framing her win as a kind of family promise fulfilled. And Michelle Yeoh (Best Actress), who won a tight race with Cate Blanchett (“Tár”), accepted her Oscar from the co-presenter Halle Berry—notably, the last woman of color to win in the category. After Yeoh’s triumph, they are a party of two. The Best Picture win for “Everything Everywhere,” this year’s Oscar unicorn, was a victory for Asian representation and for weird, non-franchise, genre-busting crowd-pleasers that can make more than a hundred million dollars and soar to Oscar heights.
I had started my evening with the gang from “My Year of Dicks,” a nominee for Best Animated Short Film, whose title had reduced the nomination announcement to giggles. At midday, I arrived at the home of the writer, Pamela Ribon, who based the film on her quest, at fifteen, to lose her virginity to the right boy. When I got to her place, in Atwater Village, the house was overflowing with parents, kids, and stylists. Ribon came down in a whirling red gown, and Team Dicks, as they called themselves, posed for photos on the front lawn. “What do you think, Mom?” Ribon said, twirling in the breeze. “People weren’t this excited for either of my weddings.” Team Dicks piled into two black S.U.V.s, and Ribon reflected on the trajectory that had brought her from teen-age longing to the Academy Awards. “I had always had imaginary boyfriends, starting with Grover,” she said. Growing up outside of Houston, she’d watched the Oscars on TV. “I remember fighting with my dad the year that ‘Out of Africa’ was up for Best Picture instead of ‘Ghostbusters.’ I was really mad that Bill Murray wasn’t nominated, and my dad was, like, ‘Those aren’t the movies that get nominated.’ ” If she could travel back to 1991 and tell her fifteen-year-old self that she’d be riding to the Oscars, how would she respond? “She would say, ‘Is Johnny Depp there?’ ” Ribon said, grimacing. “I’d have to break her heart. ‘He is not who you thought he’d grow up to be.’ ”
The car turned onto North Highland Avenue, where security men checked beneath the car for bombs, and we passed a protester with a sign reading “THE WICKED STRUT ABOUT ON EVERY SIDE WHEN VILENESS IS EXALTED AMONG THE PEOPLE.” “Terrible actors rolling by!” he screamed. Ribon laughed. “He’s not wrong.” She reached into her bag and handed me a tiny crystal in the shape of male genitalia, officially welcoming me to Team Dicks. “It’s for healing and culminating,” she told me. The car slowed. We were at the Oscars.
I made my way to the red carpet, which—shocker!—wasn’t red but “champagne,” a color that the Academy had said was meant to be calming, like a beach sunset, perhaps to ward off another slap. The carpet was split into two lanes: one for Very Important People, the other for Relatively Unimportant People, where I passed the backside of a bleacher filled with screaming fans. Making my way around a jumbo Oscar statue, I saw a lot of sequins—sparkly was in—and an Epcot-like blend of fashions from around the world: saris, a kimono, a yarmulke, a Native American war bonnet. At the base of the grand staircase leading up to the theatre, I met Emile Hertling Péronard, a producer of the nominated short film “Ivalu,” wearing sunglasses and what looked like a white hoodie. He told me that he was from Greenland, and his hoodie was in fact a traditional garment called an annoraaq. “Greenland is huge, but there are almost no people there. The Oscars are huge, but they’re filled with people,” he observed. Was there anyone he was hoping to meet? “Not really,” he said. “I just want people to meet Greenland.”
Opinions on the champagne carpet were mixed. At the top of the stairs, I saw Carrie Brownstein, the riot-grrrl rocker and “Portlandia” star, with her partner, Karen Murphy, who was nominated for production design, for “Elvis.” The performance artist Miranda July, who narrated the nominated documentary “Fire of Love,” joined them. “I love that color,” July said, of the carpet. Brownstein found it soothing. “Red makes you feel agitated,” she said. “Maybe they studied it for a year and were, like, ‘The problem was the carpet.’ ” Minutes later, I saw the artist Nan Goldin, the subject of the documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” who pronounced the carpet hue “horrible.” “What happened to the red carpet? I don’t think the champagne’s working, do you?” she asked. We headed into the hall, where an announcer said, “Please take your seats. This year’s Oscars will begin in thirty-five minutes.”
I took my seat, in Row G, up in the highest balcony. My young seatmate, a first-timer at the ceremony, regarded the set and said, “I’m enjoying seeing the apparatus from the inside.” The lights dimmed, and out came Kimmel. His opening monologue pleased the live crowd—though a jab at “Babylon” ’s box-office belly flop drew gasps. Quan’s early, expected win seemed to unite the audience in euphoria. Then came Best Supporting Actress. On my right was an executive from Marvel Studios, who tensed up—Angela Bassett was Marvel’s first-ever acting nominee, for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” When she lost, to Jamie Lee Curtis, the executive clapped politely, then slipped out during the next commercial break.
Watching the show in the room, you have no idea what the Internet is transforming into GIFs and memes. A friend texted me enthusiastically about Bassett’s “non-reaction” when she lost—somewhere out there, was Twitter going berserk? No idea. We were onto David Byrne’s hot-dog fingers. “I think I’m the only person who didn’t enjoy ‘Everything Everywhere,’ so I’m going to spend the next three hours feeling insane,” my seatmate confided. He was underwhelmed by the spectacle. “No drama yet. It’s feeling very choreographed.” After promotional segments for “The Little Mermaid” and the centennial of Warner Bros., he was becoming positively jaded. “The sponcon and didacticism in the preface to each category are not doing very much for me, I have to say.” I told him that the Oscars are always essentially sponcon. “It feels particularly bald-faced tonight,” he countered.
The performance of “Naatu Naatu,” the nominated song from “RRR,” was a welcome shot of adrenaline—as if “Cocaine Bear” were a dance number. Soon afterward, Team Dicks lost, to “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse,” and Hugh Grant got a laugh by saying the word “scrotum.” We seemed to be sitting behind a pack of Netflix staffers, who whooped whenever “All Quiet on the Western Front” won something, which appeared to be happening a lot. Could it actually take the crown from “Everything Everywhere”? I wandered down to the main lobby, where I spotted Daniel Roher, the director of the documentary “Navalny,” holding his Oscar. “May I have your notebook for a second?” he asked me. He handed his statuette to someone and sketched me. He lobbied for a gig as a New Yorker cartoonist: “I just won an Oscar! My stock is up!”
We were closing in on the big categories. My seatmate, a lonely “Tár” stan, applauded loudly for Todd Field and Blanchett, but they lost Best Director and Best Actress, respectively, to the Daniels and Yeoh, of “Everything Everywhere.” “The Daniels are very good at giving speeches,” he admitted, as we filed out at the end. I went up to the Governors Ball, sharing an escalator with Paul Mescal and Ruth E. Carter, who was holding her Oscar for Best Costume Design, for “Black Panther.” Michelle Williams floated by, then Steven Spielberg and his entourage from “The Fabelmans,” looking somewhat deflated to have made it out with zero Oscars.
After finishing my chocolate cigar, I rode down the escalators and saw Oscarland already reverting to what it truly is, which is a shopping mall—behind a gold curtain, I passed a Hot Topic. (The Oscars, like everything in Hollywood, are a glamorous illusion.) Out at a gas station, I got an Uber and headed to the Vanity Fair party. On the red—actually, powder-blue—carpet, an ecstatic Quan was gathering people from “Everything Everywhere” for a group photo. The host and Vanity Fair editor Radhika Jones looked on as Kerry Washington, Gina Prince-Bythewood (the director of “The Woman King”), and Tracee Ellis Ross headed into a portrait room. “And all the Blacks descend!” Ross pronounced.
Inside the party, waiters handed out In-N-Out burgers, and everyone was extremely famous and good-looking. A guy thought I was Andy Samberg, someone I don’t resemble at all, and I spent a good long while listening to Judd Hirsch talk about geothermal energy. I spotted John Waters talking with Austin Butler, about God knows what. Pedro Pascal was introduced to Diego Calva, of “Babylon,” and they greeted each other in a burst of Spanish, punctuated by the words “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Moments later, I found myself a foot away from the lady of the evening, Michelle Yeoh, who entered to a groundswell of applause and snapping iPhones. Nearby was Meredith Hagner, from “Search Party,” in a feathery white skirt. “I love watching famous people wait in line when they don’t think they should wait in line,” she said. “It’s heaven. Like people at Disneyland waiting for the Dumbo ride.”
The person I really wanted to see, though, was Ruben Östlund, the Swedish director of “Triangle of Sadness,” a sly satire of the habits of the ultra-privileged. What did he make of this whole Oscar scene—the pomp, the posing, the champagne carpet? “It seems to be horrible to be a woman when it comes to the Oscars,” he told me, when I spotted him near the entrance. “The kind of competition that goes on when you are dressing. It’s so comfortable to be a man! I’m sorry for all women that have to deal with Oscar night.” He went on, “For some people, they don’t know that the Oscars is taking place in a mall. When I say that to Swedish people, they think that’s hilarious.” Having lost Best Director to the Daniels, he joked about his undelivered acceptance speech: “Dear socialist comrades of U.S . . . ” Then he went through a metal detector and entered the land of the movie gods. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
