Review: The 2021 Oscar Movie

It was supposed to feel like a movie. The director is an iconic film nerd — he releases a detailed annual log of films and shows he watches, and re-edits great movies to study them better — plus he made the one film everyone rewatched last year, Contagion, the one we seem stuck inside. We learnt that Mikkel EG Nielsen, who won Best Editing for Sound Of Metal, had kids named Mingus and Ella, after the great jazz musicians, and that Emerald Fennell, who won Best Original Screenplay for Promising Young Woman, a film she directed in 23 days while pregnant, wrote her first Oscar speech at age 10, thanking Zack Morris of the sitcom Saved By The Bell as her “very supportive husband.” Hosts? With presenters like King, Don Cheadle, Laura Dern, Bryan Cranston, Riz Ahmed and Harrison Ford — who delighted Nomadland director Chloé Zhao just by saying her name — Soderbergh put together a smashing crew, arming them with backstories about the nominees: the films they grew up on, their first jobs in the industry. Most of all, I’ll remember the words, like Yuh-Jung Yeon — the veteran Korean actress who won Best Supporting Actress for Minari — asking presenter Brad Pitt why he didn’t show up during filming, and calling herself luckier than her fellow nominees.