The Shoemaker Bugle

By Angelica Moreno

The 93rd Academy Awards show, ‘The Oscars,’ took place on Sunday, April 25. Now that we have our story’s basics aside, there are some things I’d like to say about this year’s Oscar winners.

I am a ‘quickly fixated’ and ‘prone to micro obsessions’ type of person. Once I like something, I love it and when I hate something, I just hate it. So when I got the final and complete list of Oscar winners, I was taken back. Why didn’t any of my favorite movies get awarded?

The movies I hoped to get awarded were: The Trial of the Chicago 7, Promising Young Woman and (shamefully mumbles under her breath) Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. An odd trio, but I’m not at my peak of pretentiousness to have picked the other movies to love, yet. I waited 364 days for this very award show and didn’t get exactly what I wanted. Wow; just wow. It’s like they don’t even know that I exist– because they don’t.

After a few minutes of sitting on this year’s winner list, (because I keep my phone in my back pocket) it all made sense why each movie got the award they got. All respect to The Trial of the Chicago 7 (below), but I guess they had their field day at The Golden Globes. You’ll get them next time, Aaron Sorkin.

Our most hated winner of the night was Anthony Hopkins for best actor in The Father (below). I didn’t hate it initially but the manipulative buildup of the show to have the viewers and audience think the late Chadwick Boseman would win for the big bang of an outro (and that did not happen), did rile some people up. To be fair, the director of the Academy Awards broadcast, Steven Soderbergh, came out to say he did not know who would win. He just directs the show to go smoothly, and that’s all. He made the personal choice to switch best actor to be last announced in case of Chadwick Boseman winning. You are absolved of your sin, Steven Soderbergh, but only from me personally. You made a lot of people mad.

Movie of the night Nomadland won major categories including best picture, best actress, and best director (pictured below). It is an Oscar-worthy movie but was it even a great movie? The Academy, people who vote for the winners, would go on the route to choose this. It has everything a pretentious person needs–minutes of no dialogue and taking in the environment, substantial acting for the part, only three good lines of dialogue that are #deep. Even with a lesson at the end of every movie, pretentious films feel like they barely had a lesson. It’s not pretentious enough, if I knew what it was about. Maybe I’m confusing pretentious with arthouse but they’re in the same ballpark.

There are many factors as to why Nomadland was the ‘movie of the night,’ but the part that strikes me dirty is the uplift and spotlight that Amazon Prime received. Jeff Bezos got free promotion in best picture Nomadland and that just makes me think someone high ranking in the Academy got paid to skew the votes to promote capitalist propaganda to us. Nomadland dashingly enlightened the idea of Amazon being a good thing in society (as if Jeff Bezos has created the perfect working environment and the gap between us and the top 1% isnt getting bigger by the day). All respect to Nomadland though–with art comes capitalism planted propaganda.

With the pandemic, not every movie got to be made and or released but every other category of the award show gave me the reaction of “Eh, that makes sense.” A big win for Promising Young Woman (original screenplay) that didn’t get recognition all award season other than many nominees and Minari (actress in supporting role) for bringing new talent into the spotlight (pictured below).

Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield from Judas and the Black Messiah (pictured below) continue to go under-appreciated for their talents but their time will come. The film was nominated for best picture and best supporting actor, but did win best original song.

That’s all I want to say about this year’s Oscars with the lesson being: always be cautious of the media you digest because sometimes it just might be American-powered propaganda.