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The Oscars’ Most Pressing Cause This Year Was the Movies Themselves
This year’s ceremony was an inward-looking affair that found the industry foremost concerned with itself.
And this year, still limping from the pandemic and the strikes, and destabilized by contractions due to streaming, the film industry was hit by the Los Angeles wildfires that laid waste to the homes of so many of its workers, and called into question the very assumption that it would continue to have a geographical center. This year’s awards turned toward the past, with red carpet outfits that aimed for throwback glamour, and a recurring Oz motif that linked Wicked and the late Quincy Jones’ work on The Wiz to the 1939 classic but also seemed to speak to the desire to disappear, however temporarily, to a beautiful fantasy kingdom. This cozy feeling was only really ruptured by the deserved triumph of No Other Land, which won the award for Best Documentary, leading to Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, two of the film’s four directors, to give a speech that was urgent and bracingly direct in describing what has been happening to Palestinians as ethnic cleansing, and blaming U.S. foreign policy for helping block the path to an equitable political solution.
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