Oscars 2022 Review: 7 Ups & 8 Downs

Downs...

8. Cutting Eight Awards From The Main Show

The show's producers made the extremely controversial decision this year to pre-record eight of the awards, with categories such as Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound, and all three short film fields being doled out before the main show.

Despite considerable protest from many high-profile figures in the Academy, this went ahead as planned in an apparent attempt to shorten the ceremony's length and allow more time for skits and segments that might bring audiences back to the Oscars.

Beyond the fact that the show ended up clocking in at a weighty 3 hours and 42 minutes, it was embarrassing to see extremely crucial categories like Best Film Editing get revealed on Twitter and then be given a piecemeal chopped-down treatment in the show itself.

Dune, the big winner of the night with six awards, won five of its awards off-screen, which seems even sillier when you consider that it was by far the highest-grossing of the ten Best Picture nominees and therefore the most popular.

Ultimately it's tough to accept that saving a minute or two for each of these awards was really worth the feathers it ruffled in the Academy. Above all else, it seems flagrantly disrespectful to the artists whose work is effectively implied to be "less important."