The 95th Annual Academy Awards are scheduled for this Sunday, March 12, broadcast live on ABC from the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles at 8 p.m. ET. Here’s what conservatives need to know about the night’s biggest nominees and controversies.
While plenty of movie fans forgo the opportunity to watch millionaires congratulate each other with gold statues, there are still some people who will watch this year’s broadcast out of morbid curiosity.
Millions are expected to tune in this year despite viewership being on a steady decline. The 2022 Oscars were the second-least watched version of the awards show in history, with 16.6 million viewers. The worst year was 2021, which only brought in 10.5 million people.
After last year’s spectacle of Will Smith smacking host Chris Rock across the face for making a joke about his wife, viewers looking for a bit of entertainment may tune in for the potential violence factor alone.
But those thrill seekers will likely be left unfulfilled. This year’s ceremony host Jimmy Kimmel already warned would-be attackers that he’s planning to hit back.
“If somebody comes up on the stage and slaps me? Well, I size them up, and, if I’m bigger than they are, I beat the s*** out of them on television. And if it’s the Rock, I run,” Kimmel told The Hollywood Reporter during a recent interview.
Kimmel is hosting the awards for the third time and will be the first solo host the Oscars have had since he filled the role in 2018.
Smith won’t attend this year’s show because he was banned from the Oscars for ten years. The Academy also put together a team to deal with any potential drama.
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“We have a whole crisis team, something we’ve never had before, and many plans in place,” CEO Bill Kramer told Time. “We’ve run many scenarios. So it is our hope that we will be prepared for anything that we may not anticipate right now but that we’re planning for just in case it does happen.”
As for the Oscar nominees, it’s usually a cornucopia of woke projects up for recognition. But this year looks a little different because some of the nominees are quality films without overt agendas.
While the hours-long ceremony offers golden statues in categories such as film editing, directing, cinematography, music, costume design, makeup, and hairstyling, most viewers are keenly interested in the big categories, which include Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Actress.
The films nominated for Best Picture this year include: “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Elvis,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “The Fabelmans,” “Tár,” “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Triangle of Sadness,” and “Women Talking.”
One of the most beloved non-woke movies of the year was “Top Gun: Maverick” and audiences responded enthusiastically. The nostalgic, pro-America sequel to the 1986 classic is 96% certified fresh in the critics category and has a 99% fresh audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It also earned $1.48 billion worldwide.
But “Maverick” has some stiff competition for Best Picture, including critic favorite “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which has the most nominations of any film this year with 11 total. “Everything Everywhere” also just won Best Picture at the Critics Choice Awards, and while it didn’t win the top prize at the Golden Globes, it was one of the nominees.
“Everything Everywhere” is a strange film with a solid message about the value of family and appreciating life as it is, not as you wish it would have been. There’s a token lesbian character as a nod to the leftist agenda, and the film is a bit self-congratulatory, but ultimately it’s not the worst or the wokest one of all.
The bleak WWI drama “All Quiet on the Western Front” is also not pandering to any leftist agendas. This Netflix movie would make history for being the first Best Picture win from the streaming giant, but it’s not expected to take this category.
While it’s impossible to guess who will win “Best Actor,” many predictions favor dark horse Brendan Fraser for his portrayal of an obese recluse in “The Whale.” Fraser skipped the Golden Globes despite being nominated for an award. The actor had previously accused the former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Philip Berk, of sexual assault and therefore refused to attend. Ultimately, Austin Butler nabbed that prize anyway for his work on “Elvis” and is nominated for an Oscar as well.
Other nominees for Best Actor include Colin Farrell (“The Banshees of Inisherin”), Paul Mescal (“Aftersun”), and Bill Nighy (“Living”).
The Best Actress category is rife with tension following some drama. Activists are furious that Danielle Deadwyler and Viola Davis did not receive nominations for their roles in “Till” and “The Woman King,” respectively.
They were especially incensed that Andrea Riseborough (“To Leslie”) received a nomination because the film was under the radar. These critics claimed that Riseborough being selected instead of Deadwyler or Davis is just another example of racism in Hollywood.
“We live in a world and work in industries that are so aggressively committed to upholding whiteness and perpetuating an unabashed misogyny towards Black women,” Nigerian-American director Chinonye Chukwu wrote after the nominations were announced.
Diversity enthusiasts are thrilled, however, that Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman nominated for Best Actress. There’s a good chance she’ll take home a golden statue for “Everything Everywhere.”
However, Cate Blanchett fans would see this as a disappointment as they’re saying she gave the performance of her career in the drama “Tár.”
Other Best Actress nominees include Ana de Armas (“Blonde”) and Michelle Williams (“The Fabelmans”).
Fans will also be eagerly watching to see who wins the Best Director category, which includes the nominees: Martin McDonagh (“The Banshees of Inisherin”), Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”), Steven Spielberg (“The Fabelmans”), Todd Field (“Tár”), and Ruben Östlund (“Triangle of Sadness”).
Hollywood is a liberal stronghold, and that shows no signs of changing. But this year’s nominees prove that overtly political, pandering films aren’t always the ones that get nominated for awards.