War is Over! Wins Best Animated Short

 

Well, the Oscars are tonight, and I can't watch it because I'm busy working my day job. However, I did see that Best Animated Short is one of the first categories being presented. And of course it went to War is Over!, the anti-war short film inspired by the music if John and Yoko. It's not too surprising, as it coalesced into the favorite over the past few weeks from its star-powered beginning and its noble message, and its connections to Pixar through director Dave Mullins. I've seen some really scathing reviews of this film and its over-simplified message. I even saw a list that ranked War is Over! as the 53rd best film nominated for an Oscar...out of 53...yeah, they really hated it.

I didn't hate War is Over! as much some of those other reviewers, but I do feel that it would be one of the weaker winners in this category. The anti-war message is delivered with very little subtlety and is extremely shallow. Especially when compared to some of the other nominees. Also I'm very annoyed that there is no way to get the film online, which means my digital collection of Oscar nominated animated shorts is missing an important entry. Alas, I have come to accept the inevitability of War is Over! winning, which it naturally did. 

But then Hayao Miyazaki won Best Animated Feature for Kimi-tachi wa dou Ikiru ka? (That's The Boy and the Heron for you non-weeaboos) and maybe things aren't so bad after all. Anyways, I'll give an overview of the rest of the ceremony once it's done.

So I ended up peeking into the ceremony briefly while Octavia Spencer and an actress whose name I can't remember were bantering painfully before presenting Best Original Screenplay. It was pretty awful and I couldn't stomach it anymore. I didn't watch it again until late in the ceremony when I saw firsthand that the Academy had brought back the infamous cult induction style presentation of the acting Oscars that they had done before in 2008, when five former winners stand in a semicircle and say nice things about each of the nominee before breaking the hearts of four of them. It's nice seeing so many Oscar winners on stage at once, but at the same time it prevents us from seeing one of my favorite things to watch out for in a ceremony: the Oscar film clip.

Of course it probably didn't matter this year. I hadn't seen that many films nominated for an Oscar, and I didn't really have much motivation to watch many of them. Oh I saw all of the front-runners: Oppenheimer, Barbie, Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Holdovers not to mention the animated features Kimi-tachi wa dou Ikiru ka and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse. But I just really didn't feel the need to seek out some of the other films like The Zone of Interest or Anatomy of a Fall. I was too busy going to hockey games and baseball games and wasting my time in Animal Crossing and enjoying the dresses that I use for pillow covers. In the end I still saw most of the films that ended up winning.

Yes, for the second year in a row the Best Picture winner took home seven Oscars. Last year it was Everything Everywhere All at Once, and this year it was Oppenheimer, the film that finally convinced the Academy to give Christopher Nolan a whole bunch of awards. There was little surprise that it did well in technical categories like Score, Editing and Cinematography, and also captured Best Actor and Best Supporting actor for Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. The next big winner of the night was Poor Things which took home several other technical Oscars like Costume Design, Production Design and Makeup alongside the biggest "surprise" of the night when Emma Stone won Best Actress over Killer of the Flower Moon's Lily Gladstone. I did like Poor Things more but I was hoping Gladstone would win just because of the high school superlatives that listed her as "Most Likely to Win an Oscar." Also she shares a birthday with my childhood best friend. Alas, it was not to be. 

The utter domination by Oppenheimer and Poor Things meant little love for some of the other highly touted films. The Zone of Interest was the only other movie to win multiple, and that's because one of the awards was Best International Film for which it was the slam-dunk front-runner. (The other being Best Sound). The Holdover won rave reviews for its rich characterization as well as its early 70s aesthetics, but its only win was for the last acting category, with Da'Vine Joy Randolph winning Best Supporting Actress. American Fiction and Anatomy of a Fall walked away with the screenplay Oscars that I skipped. For all of its box office success, Barbie was only able to take home Best Original Song for its Billie Eilish ballad "What was I Made for?" And the only film that wasn't nominated for Best Picture to take home a competitive non-animation, non-documentary award was Godzilla Minus One, which won Best Visual Effects.

At least it fared better than the three Best Picture nominees that were shut out. Past Lives was the easiest to understand, as it was only nominated for two awards, and when it didn't win for Best Original Screenplay it sure as heck wasn't winning Best Picture. Maestro was a film that people respected but nobody loved. It received seven nominations and many people thought it had a great chance at winning Best Makeup, but that ultimately went to Poor Things. The most tragic of all was Killers of the Flower Moon. Martin Scorsese's 3 and a half hour crime epic was expansive in scope and had many supporters, but that wasn't enough to keep it from losing all 10 of its nominations, making it the third Scorsese film to go 0 for 10, joining Gangs of New York and The Irishman. That makes it doubly impressive when one considers that only five films ever went 0 for 10 (the others being True Grit and American Hustle). At least it didn't go 0 for 11 like The Turning Point and The Color Purple. 

Meanwhile, acclaimed director Wes Anderson finally won an Oscar after being snubbed for The Grand Budapest Hotel, as his quirky Netflix short The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar captured Best Live Action Short. I watched the two shorts nominated for Best Documentary Shorts pertaining to Taiwan, but neither of them won as The Last Repair Shop captured the Oscar in the end. And the Ukrainian war documentary 20 Days in Mariupol captured Best Documentary Feature.

Was any of these wins warranted? I really can't say, just because I hadn't seen so many of the films. The only category where I saw all five nominees was, of course, Best Animated Short. And no, I would not say that War is Over! really deserved the Oscar over such films like Ninety-Five Senses or even the upset contender Letter to a Pig. But what can I do? At least Kimi-tachi wa dou Ikiru ka? won the Oscar!

Best Animated Short: War is Over!
Best Animated Feature: Kimi-tachi was dou Ikiru ka?
Best Picture: Oppenheimer
Best Director: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
Best Actor: Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
Best Actress: Emma Stone, Poor Things
Best Supporting Actor: Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
Best Supporting Actress: Da'Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers
Best Adapted Screenplay: American Fiction
Best Original Screenplay: Anatomy of a Fall
Best Editing: Oppenheimer
Best Cinematography: Oppenheimer
Best Costume Design: Poor Things
Best Original Score: Oppenheimer
Best Original Song: "What was I Made for?", Barbie
Best Production Design: Poor Things
Best Sound: The Zone of Interest
Best Visual Effects: Godzilla Minus One
Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Poor Things
Best International Film: The Zone of Interest, United Kingdom
Best Documentary Feature: 20 Days in Mariupol
Best Documentary Short: The Last Repair Shop
Best Live Action Short: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Oppenheimer: 7
Poor Things: 4
The Zone of Interest: 2
20 Days in Mariupol: 1
American Fiction: 1
Anatomy of a Fall: 1
Barbie: 1
The Holdovers: 1
Kimi-tachi was dou Ikiru ka?: 1
Godzilla Minus One: 1
The Last Repair Shop: 1
War is Over!: 1
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar: 1
Killers of the Flower Moon: 0
Maestro: 0
Past Lives: 0