Oscars 2024 Review: 10 Ups & 6 Downs
A mostly satisfying night - with a few stumbles.
It once again feels like it's taken an eternity to get here, but awards season is finally over, signalled of course by the season-capping Oscars ceremony.
It's felt like an especially long-in-the-tooth road to the Academy Awards this year due to most of the winners seemingly being set in stone for many months now, and yet, the predictable-on-paper show nevertheless threw in a few compelling curveballs to keep the night interesting.
Following up last year's fantastic ceremony dominated by Everything Everywhere All at Once, this year's broadcast similarly offered up a satisfying slate of winners in most categories while keeping the show bounding along at a pacy clip.
It certainly wasn't perfect - they still can't get the In Memoriam segment right, for one - but on the balance of its merits, this was certainly one of the better Oscar ceremonies in recent times, if not ever, serving as a solid template for what the Academy Awards should be in the modern era.
And so with that in mind, here's everything that left film fans punching the air with glee, and then cursing the Oscars' very existence the next moment...
Downs...
6. Jimmy Kimmel's Safe, Forgettable Hosting Job
2024's Oscars marked the fourth time that Jimmy Kimmel has taken hosting honours, and though he's absolutely a reliable pair of hands to deliver an inoffensive, well-greased show, it may ultimately have been safe to a fault.
While awards shows don't need hosts who pride themselves in the mean-spirited roasting of attendees, most of Kimmel's jokes were defanged and toothless to the point of tedium, making broader-than-broad cracks about Killers of the Flower Moon's runtime, German stereotypes, and Robert Downey Jr.'s troubled past, among other things.
Though Kimmel did win back some goodwill when he read aloud Donald Trump's negative tweet-review of the show while it was in progress, for the most part he felt like an uninspired choice to be hosting again.
Fingers crossed that next year the Academy gives the honour to a more interesting, left-field pick - John Mulaney sure made a solid case for himself during his brief time on stage, no?