"Everything is as it should be."

                                                                                  - Benjamin Purcell Morris

 

 

© all material on this website is written by Michael McCaffrey, is copyrighted, and may not be republished without consent

Follow me on Twitter: Michael McCaffrey @MPMActingCo

Oscars Round Up - Comfortably Dumb

/

OSCARS ROUND UP

Well…the Oscars happened last night and I have some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that once again I won my Oscar pool! The bad news is that the only reason I won my Oscar pool is because I have no friends and no family left to compete against (Fyi – my one-legged wife left me for a sexy Neil Diamond impersonator with a bad heart). Such is the plight of the unlovable loser – or winner as the case may be!!

I thought Sinners was going to be the big winner, and while it did pretty well, it wasn’t the juggernaut I thought it would be…proving once again that I am still slightly flummoxed by the “new” Academy. Sinners did well but it didn’t win the middle of the road awards a juggernaut needs, and it lost head-to-head against One Battle After Another too much to be Oscar champion.

Speaking of One Battle After Another, it is well-documented that I am no fan, but PT Anderson is one of my all-time favorite directors, so his winning Best Director and Best Picture did not fill me with rage…only a touch of ennui with a dash of malaise. My one hope is that he gets his mojo back and starts making masterpieces again. I admit I am not optimistic.

Jessie Buckley, Amy Madigan and Sean Penn winning acting awards is fine…but Michael B. Jordan winning Best Actor is so ridiculous as to be clinically insane. Jordan seems like a nice guy, but over the years he has shown himself to be a remarkably limited…and often bad, actor.

I once thought, back in The Wire and Friday Night Lights days, that Jordan was going to be Denzel 2.0…but as he’s become more famous, he’s become much worse an actor, which is disheartening. On the bright side, at least he’s not an asshole.

Ryan Coogler winning Best Original Screenplay is…predictable and absurd. Sinners is the type of movie that stupid people think is smart and dumb people think is deep…and the script is a perfect monument to that thesis.

I loved Coogler’s first big film Fruitvale Station – also starring Michael B. Jordan…but since then he’s churned out big studio slop that people have fawned over and that I’ve been repulsed by.

Black Panther is a middling Marvel movie…Black Panther II is…GARBAGE. Creed is much the same. And Sinners is sort of an amalgam of all of the things wrong with those franchise films stuffed into a derivative new franchise. Ugh.

Also on the bright side…Coogler seems like a good guy…so I am glad for him but not glad for what his success means for the art of cinema.

Cinematography went…as I predicted, to Autumn Durald Arkapaw of Sinners, the first woman to win the award. The cinematography of Sinners is actively awful (as was her earlier work on Black Panther)…but because she is a woman, and a woman of color to boot, she was a shoe in to win this award over a bevy of white dudes. Shrug.

The actual Oscar telecast seemed to me to be a disaster. Conan O’Brien hosted and to put it mildly…he struggled. I’ve never understood the appeal of Conan and never thought he was ever funny…and he proved those sentiments to be accurate on Sunday night.

Hosting the Oscars is a tough gig…hosting the Oscars when you aren’t funny but are trying to be seems like a Herculean task…one that Conan is incapable of doing well.

The ceremony was stuffed with cringy bits by award presenters and a bevy of technical glitches. The only two funny parts were when some poor bastard desperately wanted to say something after winning an award but was played off and his mic turned off…which made me laugh out loud, and the other when the luminous Anne Hathaway presented an award with fashion queen Anna Wintour. Hathaway and Wintour did two funny bits that were so well executed they deserved Oscars themselves. Bravo!!

As for me, there will be no “Bravo!!” My shameful performance in my Oscar picks is a true embarrassment and will be a stain I will never, ever be able to wash off. I got a measly 18 out of 24 picks correct…and that’s with giving me the benefit of the doubt on the tie in the Best Short Film category.

My hope is that since we live in a country and culture that has a chronic case of alarmingly aggressive myopia and has the memory of a Tsetse fly, that by next year’s Oscars everyone will have forgotten my abysmal performance this year and I will be able to arrogantly boast about my Oscar picking prowess once again.

But for now, I will, like our degenerate and corrupt ruling class when they’re exposed as being deviant criminals, simply feign humility and promise to “do better” going forward.

Thanks for reading and keep an eye out later this week for the pinnacle of cinema awards…THE MICKEYS©®…and also THE SLIP-ME-A-MICKEY©® awards which recognize the very worst of 2025’s movies.

©2026