The 93rd Academy Awards forget to honor the movies and the audience suffers

Nathan Swank April 26th, 2021

The 93rd Academy Awards, like everyone else in the world with their respective lives, faced the unique situation of continuing a telecast during a pandemic. But the Oscars also had the good fortune of airing a year after the pandemic began, where vaccinations are in full swing and the ability to zoom and social distance on camera is becoming a more practiced situation. So forgive me for not being too forgiving to the Oscars for royally messing up the ceremony.

The Academy chose not to have any frills nor humor, keeping things simple by awarding the categories and allowing longer speeches. I’m not totally against this idea, although I personally think getting rid of speeches altogether would be a more interesting experiment rather than letting them talk for as long as they choose.

But let’s be clear, my complaint has nothing to do with winners, losers, or the long speeches. While I’m thrilled the first Asian woman, Chloe Zhao for NOMADLAND, won Best Director (only second female in Oscar history) and love that South Korean Youn Yuh-jung at 73 won Best Supporting Actress for MINARI, who incidentally (along with Tyler Perry) easily gave the best speech among a snoozefest of talkers, I’m not here to recap the usual highs and lows.

My grievance is over the one specific choice to not show any clips or samples to the nominated films in each category. This baffling choice is perhaps one of the worst decisions in Oscar history.

Not showing clips to movies is a disservice to all the honored films and their different successes. For a show that is supposedly about recognizing the many aspects, achievements, and artistry, the Oscars gave no recognition to the films.

Five of the 23 categories showed clips – Best International Film, Best Animated Film, Best Documentary Film, Best Song, and Best Picture. That left 18 categories that were given no demonstration as to why they were nominated. Meaning audiences who already were probably less aware of the nominees than usual due to a year battling a pandemic, had no idea what was being nominated nor why. Best Sound winner SOUND OF METAL had no clip to present the audience to the nuanced tactic of the muffled vibration and inventive technique to put the audience into the head of a person who has lost their hearing. Costume and Makeup nominees had zero examples of their beautiful craftsmanship or artistry in creating a certain look or period which increased the performances in winner MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM. The audience was denied the groundbreaking effects of seeing buildings simultaneously torn down and built up utilizing incredible stunt work in forward and reverse from winner TENET. None of us were given even a taste of the clever dialogue and unfolding story of the daring PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN winning screenplay, or the beautiful production design of MANK, or other winners and nominees like THE FATHER, JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH, MINARI, and TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO SEVEN.

Clips or stills from the movies showcasing each nominee is a mutual benefit for everyone involved. The winners and losers get their work showcased to an audience who might otherwise never know or notice their great work before. Ultimately, the hope is to promote more people to see these films, which helps many of these comparatively low-budget or lesser-seen works of art get noticed. Simply seeing the people behind the scenes means nothing if we are not given a visual reference to the work be honored.

There is always a bump for nominated and winning movies after the Oscars. The ceremony promotes great art in films that are usually lesser seen than the big blockbusters. With nearly all the blockbusters out of commission for 2020, smaller films saw themselves with even more opportunity to be seen, only then to be squandered after they received that coveted Oscar nomination or even win. Many people, my parents included, always check out movies that catch their eye from watching the Oscar ceremony. But after NOMADLAND’s big win of Picture, Director, and Actress, my parents, and I’m guessing many others, still have no idea what that movie is or what it even looks like. What a shame if after last year’s PARASITE win, no one went to see the movie because they didn’t get any glimpses of it at the Oscar telecast.

Did I mention, the absence of movie scenes made the entire telecast completely boring? We don’t know many of these people, so their faces and gratitude is almost meaningless without being able to see at least a glimpse of their work they are being honored for. Winners would have been better served to show a trailer to their film rather than giving a thank you speech. Steven Spielberg’s WEST SIDE STORY trailer at commercial break was a huge success partly due to an Oscar audience starved to see any semblance of filmmaking during the telecast. Thankfully, the Oscars are making improvements in being more diversity inclusive in their nominees. Unfortunately this year, they forgot to include the audience.

For a ceremony honoring a visual medium, the 2021 Oscars surprisingly lacked any visuals at all.