Why are the Oscars trying to be the Grammys?

The Academy Awards were all song and dance

An Oscar Grammy.
(Image credit: Illustrated | 1Free/iStock, artsterdamd/iStock, Aerial3/iStock)

In most respects, the 92nd annual Academy Awards ceremony was one of the good ones: It ran closer to three and a half hours than four, there was no host bumbling through the thankless MC job, and, most importantly, Bong Joon-ho's terrific movie Parasite became the first-ever non-English-language film to win Best Picture (it also won Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature). Though there have been plenty of surprising and/or deserving choices in recent years, the Academy still makes its share of boring, safe, or outright lousy ones. The only upside of this tendency to anoint movies like last year's appalling Best Picture winner Green Book is that the ceremony still has the ability to surprise us with something like Parasite, a critically beloved genre-jumping arthouse hit from South Korea about class warfare that wasn't ever considered a true frontrunner.

Another advantage the Academy has in occasionally producing these kinds of satisfying surprises is that a great awards moment can paper over a lot of production head-scratchers. If Parasite hadn't triumphed — if 1917 had taken the top prize as widely expected — the show might have stayed on course for a Krusty the Clown-level exclamation of what the hell was that? And the answer to that question seems to be: That was a movie awards show trying to capture the performance-based buzz of a music awards show.

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Jesse Hassenger

Jesse Hassenger's film and culture criticism has appeared in The Onion's A.V. Club, Brooklyn Magazine, and Men's Journal online, among others. He lives in Brooklyn, where he also writes fiction, edits textbooks, and helps run SportsAlcohol.com, a pop culture blog and podcast.