I didn’t. I haven’t followed an awards season since 2012 - 13. After that year the show became too focused on pandering to social media, which really cheapened the whole thing. I think the Ellen DeGeneres selfie was the year after that, no? Case in point.
I watched some of last year’s since I read there was going to be a Godfather reunion and I wanted to see Diane Keaton or James Caan (or even Talia Shire), but no dice. I turned it off before The Slap, but I was taken aback by how cheap everything looked. From a production standpoint, it looked about on par with the MTV Movie Awards. Maybe it’s the always unflattering digital sheen of today’s cameras, which tend to flatten everything into looking like a daytime soap, but not a speck of glamour was in sight.
I only watched a few of this year’s nominees. The Whale was an abomination. I was pulling for Colin Farrell since he does consistently great work and seems to be one of few contemporary actors who has the rough wit and charm of an Old Hollywood star, like a Richard Burton or Peter O'Toole. My favorite movie of the year was Blonde: I loved it and I thought Ana De Armas, who I’d never paid attention to before, was incredible. It felt like a sequel to The Day of the Locust and a perfect foil to the superficial and patronizing “Free Britney”-esq content we’ve been fed the last few years that proffer sanitized interpretations of female tabloid figures - but that’s a tangent for another day. I imagine Lindsay Lohan is kicking herself, though, since if anyone was meant to play a terrorized, nude, threesome-loving Marilyn Monroe, it’s her. In fact, the movie reminded me a lot of her graphic Linda Lovelace biopic that never came to fruition (not to be confused with the bland Amanda Seyfried one from around the same time).