The Playhouse Post: How the Oscars Have Changed

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We have a packed week ahead of the Oscars this Sunday!

We’re showing the broadcast up on the big screen at the end of the weekend – but before then, in anticipation of the ceremony, we’re showing two previous Best Picture winners in IMAX: On Thursday, Barry Jenkins’ powerful coming-of-age saga Moonlight screens in a dazzling upgrade, while last year’s Oscar heavyweight Oppenheimer returns to its big-screen glory on Friday, with additional showtimes throughout the weekend. Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan always makes the most of IMAX technology, and we’re eager to bring his latest achievement into our biggest theater as he launches production on his next epic, The Odyssey.

The IMAX experience this weekend also includes Becoming Led Zeppelin, a documentary chronicling the evolving musicianship of the most talented rock band ever. Revisit all the hits crammed into this immersive experience and its exceptional sound design that resurrects the energy of their earliest days.

Additional Oscar offerings continue this Sunday with a matinee of the awe-inspiring (and family-friendly) Latvian animated adventure Flow, the wordless story of a cat and his animal friends surviving the end of the world. (If you joined us for the jungle romp Paddington in Peru, you might find some common DNA here.)

Our repertory series “The Spirit of 1932” concludes with the Best Picture winner of that year, the starry ensemble drama Grand Hotel, which features a dizzying array of stories crammed into a single glamorous set, as well as the radiant Greta Garbo unleashing her famous decree: “I want to be alone.” (Garbo later claimed she actually said “I want to be left alone,” adding “there is all the difference,” but give it a listen and see if you agree.)

Who knows what will happen on Sunday night, but Best Picture nominee Anora certainly has a lot of momentum going into the weekend. Check out this riveting black comedy at our theater on Monday.

Finally, we’ve got plenty of showtimes left for Captain America: Brave New World for those still catching up.

We’ll have Oscar ballots for our first annual Oscar pool available at concessions. Fill one out and leave it with our staff anytime this week. We’ll announce the winners after the show on Sunday. Join us!

And now, a little more context as awards season draws to a close…

The Oscar show changes year to year, but that’s nothing compared to its early days. Consider this: There is much speculation about what audiences will see on Oscar night, from a rumored Wicked performance featuring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo to the Best Picture showdown between Anora and Conclave. By contrast, when Grand Hotel won the top prize in 1932, nobody saw anything at all. The Oscars were relegated to a radio broadcast every year, with a few gaps, until the first televised edition in 1953.

Grand Hotel was a unique Oscar winner in part because the big-budget MGM drama was the only Best Picture winner in history that lacked nominations in other categories. These days, that would have been unthinkable for an acclaimed movie of its scale. Grand Hotel epitomizes the popular notion of “Oscar bait” with its boatload of formidable A-list performances from the likes of Lionel Barrymore, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, and Greta Garbo.

Back then, however, Oscar contenders didn’t endure the packed months of campaign events that today’s performers must endure to position themselves for consideration. Actors and directors shake a lot of hands, and attend a lot of parties, to put themselves in front of the 10,500 Academy members who vote on the awards. The behind-the-scenes machinations of Oscar influencers often catch newbies by surprise.

Just ask Jesse Eisenberg, who landed his first nomination 15 years ago for his performance as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. “I really didn’t understand what I was doing at all these lunches,” Eisenberg, a nominee this year with his screenplay for A Real Pain, told me by phone this week. “I met with the producers in August, before the movie came out in October. They told me that I would probably get nominated, but would likely lose to Colin Firth.”

It was an accurate prediction: Early the next year, Eisenberg landed his nomination for Best Actor, and then lost it to Firth for his performance in The King’s Speech. “It was so surprising to me that someone would know that, months before both movies came out,” Eisenberg said. “In some ways, it popped my bubble and made me realize how much engineering goes into all this.”

Eisenberg has gotten more industry-savvy over the years, in part because he’s learned how to operate on both sides of the camera. With his bittersweet buddy comedy A Real Pain, in which he stars along Best Supporting Actor frontrunner Kieran Culkin as cousins visiting the Polish concentration camp endured by their late grandmother, Eisenberg has managed to bring a passion project to more audiences through opportunities provided by the long haul of a campaign. “We had literally zero expectations in terms of awards,” he said. “This movie was rejected by every distributor and made for $3.5 million in Poland. I’ve looked at every single event in this campaign as more opportunities to promote the movie. I wanted to capitalize on the attention.”

Still, it’s hard to convey the sheer mania and mind games that Oscar season enacts on its participants. In my years attending the ceremony as a journalist, I witnessed more than one occasion in which nominees entered the building looking happy to be there, only to end up at the bar coping with the unexpected heartbreak of a loss later that night. It’s a routine that forces everyone to care about the stakes.

No Oscar ceremony stands out in my mind more than 2017. The show ended with a shock: Moonlight became the surprise Best Picture winner after presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway mistakenly announced La La Land. The show nearly ended as the wrong team gave their speeches, until La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz bravely revealed the truth and read it from the card in his hand. It might have created gripping television, but for Moonlight director Barry Jenkins and his team, it was a frustrating moment that squandered the chance for this delicate underdog to appreciate the triumph they had fought for.

The vibe in the room was even more chaotic than the end of the telecast, as photos of the crowd response show. (See the one below. I’m the guy in the upper right hand corner, standing up in his seat with a look of amazement on my face.) With all the confused chatter filling the room, it was hard to get a sense of what exactly happened as the audience poured out to the lobby.

Upstairs at the Governors Ball, I saw Jenkins, a remarkable talent whose lo-fi 2008 debut Medicine for Melancholy made his subtle filmmaking abilities clear before he went off the grid and spent nearly a decade figuring out his next steps. When I first met him years earlier, he was working with a tightknit group of film school buddies from Florida on low-budget passion projects, and Moonlight didn’t exactly change that (with a budget of $1.5 million, it remains the most inexpensive Best Picture winner in history). The industry, however, changed a lot – and awards season was eager to elevate a poetic accomplishment that tapped into a marginalized American experience.

In that respect, Moonlight changed the game. It pushed Oscar season to operate more expansively than traditional Oscar bait, and helped usher in an era of eclectic Best Picture winners that included the first non-English-language winner, Parasite, and the mindblowing immigrant time-travel comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once. This year, Anora, The Brutalist, and Emilia Perez all demonstrate how much the season has expanded to encompass ambitious filmmaking achievements.

The legacy of Moonlight extends well beyond a few awkward moments of live TV. With its lyrical portrayal of a young Black man coming to terms with the world, it has inspired new generations of moviegoers and enabled Jenkins to continue directing extraordinary, adventurous work. When I snapped the photo below at the Governors Ball, he was still processing it all – but on some level, he knew that more good things would come.

The hype and glamor that surrounds Oscar season often obscures the representational value it has for talent working their way through the system. With Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan was awarded for crafting original stories with all the incredible resources the industry offers up. This year’s masterful animated achievement Flow, a double-Oscar nominee for Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature, reflects the many years of efforts by Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis and a very small team that created a truly original cinematic achievement with universal appeal. For these creative visionaries, the Oscars matter.

For everyone else, of course, there’s plenty of glam to enjoy as well. It’s possible to take the Oscars seriously and still enjoy the fun. Swing by the Playhouse to watch the show on Sunday to see if those rumors about an opening Wicked performance are true. Timothee Chalamet will probably dress to impress. And Conan O’Brien is hosting, which means the silly factor may keep the show worth watching regardless of who wins the night.

Then again, this is one of the most unpredictable years in recent memory. Get your hands on an Oscar ballot and don’t forget to vote.

For now, see you at the movies.

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