Golden night for moms, migrants and rebellion against the war

The 95th Oscars are history. With that, hopefully, the infamous slap Will Smith gave comedian Chris Rock in 2022 will finally take its place as a side note in the Academy Awards’ long history of scandal.

From the point of view of the show, this last Sunday night of the most important film award in the world can be checked off as a routine with great effort to do everything right. She was particularly artistic and socio-political.

With “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, a US production triumphed that barely ten years ago – before the democratizing potential of social media, before #MeToo, #OscarsSoWhite, #BlackLivesMatter – would never have gotten this far. The work turned eleven chances into seven goldmen (more right), won over almost 10,000 industry representatives eligible to vote and combines many aspects that once would have disqualified them. Not a young, an older woman, the Chinese migrant Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh, 60), who runs a laundromat in the USA, is her center – unvarnished, overworked and thrown into science fiction with an almost exclusively Asian ensemble. Her identity and self-esteem issues resolve as she finds balance as a mother. Here, two world-class themes are combined in a monument that the Academy has so far been unable to produce – issues of women, who make up more than half of the world’s population, and migration, which affects more than 280 million. The intention of the film to generate understanding and empathy corresponds to the function of its channel, that of cinema.

With the quadruple Oscar victory (including best international film) of the Netflix adaptation based on Remarque’s novel “Nothing New in the West”, the Oscars were also a successful night for streaming and thanks to their leading actor, the Viennese Burgtheater actor Felix Kammerer (27), also for Austrian artists, although the Tyrolean editor Monika Willi, nominated for “Tár”, got nothing. If “Nothing New in the West” is mostly listed as a war film, it is more of an anti-war film that furiously denounces the burning of a generation of young men.

Success for Tyrolean cameraman

More than a year after the start of the war in Ukraine, one could describe it as “Nothing new in the East”. The Oscar for the best documentary film for “Navalny” about the Russian oppositionist Alexei Navalny hits harder in this notch, here the Tyrolean Niki Waltl (40) was responsible for the camera. “Navalny” shows “a certain element of politicization,” according to the Kremlin.

This is less surprising in democracies, where culture is always political. “The Whale” with Brendan Fraser (54), who beat Austin Butler (“Elvis”), is not an exposure of a gay man with obesity, but a gripping indictment of conservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Hard criticism of the country of the Oscars itself: the USA.

The winners by category

• Director: Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan for “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, further in the cinema, including Moviemento Linz
• Leading Actress: Michelle Yeoh
• Supporting Actress: Jamie Lee Curtis
• Supporting Actors: Ke Huy Quan (all three for “Everything Everywhere All at Once”)
• Leading actor: Brendan Fraser for “The Whale”, theatrical release: end of April
• International film “Nothing New in the West”, on Netflix
• Animated film: “Pinocchio”, Netflix
• Original Screenplay: Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Adapted Screenplay: Sarah Polley, “Women Talking,” in theaters
• Camera: “Nothing new in the West”
• Editing: “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
• Costume Design: “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”
• Production Design: “Nothing New in the West”
• Make-up, hair: “The Whale”
• Visual Effects: Avatar 2: The Way of Water, in theaters
• Sound: “Top Gun: Maverick”, first in cinemas, now streaming on Sky X
• Best Music: “Nothing New in the West”
• Documentary film: “Navalny” by Daniel Roher, first in cinemas, now streaming on Prime/Sky