The Oscars: Just happy to be here

A band of outsiders gained entry into Hollywood history at the 80th annual Academy Awards, said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. The oddball brothers of filmmaking, Joel and Ethan Coen, took home four Oscars for their chilling adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, including wins for Best Picture and Best Director. The Coens have long chosen eccentricity over accessibility, said Jim Emerson in the Chicago Sun-Times. But the brothers thanked the Academy for letting them play “in our corner of the sandbox” as they “completed their journey from cinema’s fringes to Hollywood’s mainstream.” The night’s other “outsider” winners were those hailing from foreign lands: Britain’s Daniel Day-Lewis (Best Actor) and Tilda Swinton (Best Supporting Actress), France’s Marion Cotillard (Best Actress), and Spain’s Javier Bardem (Best Supporting Actor). Their wins mark “only the second time in Oscar history” that actors from outside America were awarded all four acting trophies. Yet most of the films nominated for Best Picture were “uniquely American” in their subject matter.

They were also almost unrelentingly grim, said Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times. No Country for Old Men offered a harrowing portrayal of the changing face of the West, Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton tackled the ugly and ominous side of New York’s corporate behemoths, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood recounted one pioneering oilman’s dark, deluded conception of the American dream. Such cynical subject matter didn’t exactly lighten a sense of ennui already hovering over the evening. A months-long strike by the Writers Guild had been settled only weeks before the big night, leaving the academy just 12 days to prepare. There was definitely a “cloud over the merriment.”

Oscar organizers had obviously prepared for a worst-case scenario, said Cintra Wilson in Salon.com. Worried that the writers’ strike wouldn’t be over in time, they assembled canned montages of acceptance speeches and bizarre moments of Oscars past. Many of these found their way into the evening’s show, even though the strike had been resolved by then. All that filler not only made for dull viewing but “sucked every possible ounce of spontaneous life, marrow, and energy” from the event. Oscar night served its purpose as “a welcome return to pomp and ritual” for an industry bruised by labor strife, said David Halbfinger and Michael Cieply in The New York Times. But alienated viewers weren’t celebrating—or even watching. The ratings were the lowest since Nielsen began keeping track in 1974, and 20 percent lower than last year.

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