Fiona Mountford

The Oscars championed the average over the excellent

  • From Spectator Life
Jessica Chastain wins best actress (Getty)

For a number of years now, as the streaming revolution ramps up and our watching habits become ever more fragmented, the Oscars have been locked in a desperate struggle against plummeting viewing figures and waning public interest. This is obviously a situation that Will Smith wanted to try and remedy – and not simply by winning the Best Actor award for his work in a classic all-American story of triumph over adversity. His fierce portrayal of Venus and Serena Williams’ maniacally driven father in King Richard was deservedly popular yet incredibly, less than half an hour prior to picking up this gong, Smith had climbed impromptu onto the stage at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angles to sock presenter Chris Rock squarely in the face.

‘Keep my wife’s name out of your f*king mouth’, he said, twice, after Rock made a rather off-colour joke referencing Jada Pinkett Smith’s alopecia. The clip of this will be watched by millions more viewers than the Oscars themselves and the debates around it will rumble on endlessly. Yet strip away the Smith shenanigans and what is left is an Oscars that celebrated the average over the excellent.

Chastain’s performance majored on flamboyance rather than interior depth in a film that sank without trace upon its release in this country

The finest artistic decision of the night was the awarding of Best Director to Jane Campion for her austerely beautiful revisionist Western The Power of the Dog. Smith-gate will ensure that few column inches are dedicated to the fact that, for the first time in Oscar history, women have triumphed in this category in consecutive years (Chloe Zhao won last year for Nomadland). Despite Campion’s victory, The Power of the Dog lost out in the Best Picture category to Coda, a crowd-pleasing tale of the struggles of the sole hearing member of a deaf family.

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