The Academy really did it: they somehow one-upped the bizarre ending to the 2017 Oscars, when Warren Beatty infamously announced the incorrect winner for Best Picture. Tonight’s show was off-kilter throughout, which is understandable given the pandemic we’re still living through; still, it was surprising when the Best Picture winner was announced before the Best Acting awards. At that point many assumed the producers made that switch so the show could end with Chadwick Boseman posthumously winning Best Actor for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Boseman was the prohibitive favorite to win, and it felt like a powerful and emotional way to end what had been a curiously flat and lifeless show. So it was pretty shocking when Anthony Hopkins—who wasn’t even there, or live via satellite like other nominees who couldn’t make it in person—was announced as the winner. It’s like the show realized how deflating that was, because it then went off the air in a hurry, like it was rushing to go hide its head in shame after publicly embarrassing itself. It made for some weird TV, as the whole show did; it also made for some really funny tweets.
There was way more to make fun of than just that shocking finale. This was an Oscars that saw Frances McDormand howl like a wolf while seeming totally bored by another victory, whose winners were basically allowed to speak for as long as they wanted without being played off, whose “in memoriam” segment moved as fast as the closing credits of a film being played on basic cable, and that made an instant meme of the octopus from Best Documentary Feature winner My Octopus Teacher. It didn’t look or feel like any other Oscars we’ve seen before, but it was still about as boring as unsatisfying as these shows always are. And it was still very easy to make fun of, which is the most important thing for our purposes. Here are the funniest tweets about tonight’s Oscars, from some of the best comedians and writers on Twitter. You should probably just go follow all of them right now.
I’ll tell you who has time to see EVERY movie made in a single year, and his name is OSCAR! And he watches them while they’re being filmed, too! But only a coveted few can take him home at the end of the night! And then he watches everything weird they do in their beds!! #Oscars
Riz Ahmed’s wife is a novelist who he met when they were working on their laptops at the same cafe and I would like to know how come the only stranger I ever met while working at the Annex was a man w perpetually bloodshot eyes who told me he used to be a CIA operative
Toss in some cutaways to what people are saying at the tables, to the folks backstage, to Bob Balaban trying and failing to place a drink order, and you could mistake this for a Robert Altman movie called Awards Show.
If you told me as a 16 year old while listening to “I Wanna Fuck You Like an Animal” that during a future pandemic Trent Reznor would win an Oscar for a Disney movie I would say “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHG FUTURE MAN GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY CAR I’M VERY HIGH!!”
Frances McDormand’s energy is absolutely terrifying. She’s a being of pure confidence now. If I woke up one day and every country on Earth surrendered to her I wouldn’t bat an eye.
