The Highs and Lows of the 2021 Academy Awards: All You Need To Know

We are here with everything that has happened at Academy awards held on 26th April for the 93rd time.

Among the most memorable portions of the 93rd Academy Awards was when Glenn Close, who earned her eighth Oscar nomination for playing Mamaw in the widely panned “Hillbilly Elegy,” revealed an unexpected amount of knowledge about go-go music. That tells you quite a bit about the simultaneous chaos and uneventfulness of the Oscars this year.

The ceremony did make history a few times, however, including “Nomadland” director Chloé Zhao becoming the first woman of color to win best director (a feat she quickly followed by winning best picture).

• The Setting/Format/Tone
  • Lack of Clips/Montages
  • Song Performances Happened During the Pre-Show
  • No Playing People Off, So the Speeches Were Long
  • Ask Chris about “watching” it via Twitter
• Random Moments
  • Frances McDormand’s howl (backstory)
  • Oscars Trivia segment, leading to Glenn Close’s “Da Butt”

Producers Mixed Up The Ceremony, To Mixed Results

The decision to shoot the ceremony “like a movie,” as producer Steven Soderbergh put it, was one of many ways in which the telecast strayed from the norm. Not only did the team switch around the usual order of categories — leading to the anticlimactic best-actor reveal — but they also ditched the music that usually plays people off the stage, leading to lengthy speeches that admittedly included more off-the-cuff moments (we’re looking at you, Daniel Kaluuya).

The lack of a proper tribute to Boseman might also have stung more because of how rushed the “In Memoriam” segment felt, the song’s higher tempo matching the speed at which the montage flipped through photographs of the artists lost over the past year.

History Made This Time

• Chloe Zhao is the first woman of color to ever win a directing Oscar.
• Anthony Hopkins is now the oldest Oscar winner in any acting category at 83 years old.
• Frances McDormand is now the second person to ever win Best Actress three times, joining Katharine Hepburn, who has four.
• Yuh-jung Youn is the first Korean performer to win an Oscar in an acting category.
• Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson became the first Black women to win an Oscar in the Best Makeup and Hairstyling category for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
• Emerald Fennell’s win for Best Original Screenplay is the first time a woman has won that category since Diablo Cody won for Juno.

Major Takeaways

Even during a pandemic year, Netflix couldn’t win Best Picture.

But what probably will be remembered most was the show’s disappointing ending, a result of the risky decision to switch up the order of categories. The ceremony was clearly gearing up to end with best actor front-runner Chadwick Boseman taking home the trophy for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” which would have allowed for a touching tribute after Boseman died last year at age 43.

Instead, it ended with the late actor losing to Anthony Hopkins for his role in “The Father.” Hopkins didn’t attend the ceremony, anticlimactically leaving the show without a final speech.

The Oscars had a very scaled-down red carpet, but quite a few ensembles still made an impact — Stanfield and Zendaya, especially.