Nomadland makes Oscar history, the film directed by Chloé Zhao poses a profound conversation about the damaged American dream, at the 93rd Academy Awards ceremony the film won 3 statuettes for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, the Chinese-born director becomes the second woman to win as a director, after Kathryn Bigelow who in 2010 won for “The Hurt Locker, becoming the first foreigner to win this prestigious award.
The ceremony began Sunday with Regina King, a former Oscar winner and director of “One Night in Miami,” walking onto the set of a nightclub. The ceremony harkened back to the early days of Hollywood, when the Academy Awards were held in hotel ballrooms, without the pressure of having to worry about whether the TV crowds would find them appealing.
“It’s been a very tough year, and we’re still in the middle of it,” he said solemnly, referring to the pandemic and the guilty verdict in the George Floyd murder. “Our love of film has helped us get through it.”
Said Regina as host of the awards
“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 over films distributed mostly over the Internet.
“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to keep going when things get tough,” he said in his acceptance speech, referring to a Chinese poem he used to read with his father that began with the phrase “People at birth are inherently good.”
Chloé Zhao’s speech
In many ways, the 93rd Academy Awards was a celebration of diversity.
An issue that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has emphasized following the #OscarsSoWhite protests of 2015 and 2016, in which all the nominees were white. This year, nine of the 20 acting nominations went to people of color.
It was an unsurprising event until the final minutes, when academy voters pulled off a dramatic final twist: Anthony Hopkins, 83, won the Oscar for best actor for “The Father,” edging out the late Chadwick Boseman (“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”), who was the heavy favorite going into the night, having been praised 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 award in eight years, an astonishing streak unrivaled by any other specialty film company. “We give this award to our wolf,” McDormand said as she held up the best picture statuette, in apparent reference to Michael Wolf Snyder, a sound mixer on “Nomadland” who took his own life in March. She then let out an unbridled wolf howl.
Daniel Kaluuya was recognized as best supporting actor for playing Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in “Judas and the Black Messiah.” “Brother, we’re out here!” shouted Kaluuya gleefully before switching gears and crediting Hampton (“what a man, what a man”) and ending with the cri de coeur: “Where 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 girlfriend who faces racism in “Sayonara.”
“I’m luckier than you,” Youn told Glenn Close, nominated for supporting actress, with a chuckle. (Peter O’Toole and Close now jointly hold the record for most nominations in the acting categories without a win: eight each.)
“Soul,” Pixar’s film about a musician caught between Earth and the afterlife, added to the celebration of diversity, winning Best Animated Feature and Original Score. The Walt Disney Company, which owns Pixar and Searchlight, won a total of five awards.
Netflix wins several awards, but not Best Picture.
Netflix received its first Oscar nomination in 2014 for “The Square,” a documentary about the Egyptian revolution. Since then – largely due to copious amounts of money spent on awards campaigns – the streaming giant has come to dominate nominations. This year it racked up 36, more than any other company, and “Mank” received 10, more than any other film.
Netflix won seven statuettes, including feature documentary (“My Octopus Teacher”), hair/makeup and costume (“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”), animated short (“If Anything Happens, I Love You”) and live-action short (“Two Distant Strangers”). He also won two for the little-seen “Mank,” earning Oscars for production design and cinematography.
On Sunday, Netflix had two nominees, “Mank” and “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” But they fell short to Zhao’s “Nomadland,” which connected with voters in part because it seemed to rise to the cultural moment, with its themes of homelessness and economic pressure as a cinematic corollary to the pandemic.
@wil-walteros Source: Brooks Barnes and Nicole Sperling New York Times
