Oscars 2024: The academy let itself off the hook.

Oppenheimer may be a movie about “the most important fucking thing that’s ever happened in the history of the world,” but by the time the 96th Academy Awards drew to a close, its crowning achievement already felt like an anticlimax. Instead of surprise, the show had spectacle, including a dazzling production number built around Barbie’s “I’m Just Ken,” performed by a pinked-out Ryan Gosling and several of the movie’s living dolls, with a guitar solo by Slash and, after Gosling and his microphone waded into the audience, backing vocals from Greta Gerwig, Margot Robbie, and America Ferrera—and Emma Stone. “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present,” he said, reading carefully from a printed speech, “not to say ‘Look what they did then,’ rather ‘Look what we do now.’ ” He and his producer James Wilson, he went on, “stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people—whether the victims of Oct. 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization.” Although several celebrities sported red cease-fire buttons on the red carpet, that would stand as the ceremony’s only other clear reference to the conflict. “This is painful to watch,” says director Mstyslav Chernov, who shot the film while working as a video journalist for the Associated Press, “but it must be painful to watch.” Related From Slate With Oppenheimer’s Win, Christopher Nolan Has Done Something Not Even Spielberg Managed Mariupol won Best Documentary, an intriguing pick considering how the film’s skepticism about the power of its own images clashes with the Oscars’ historic triumphalism.