David Walsh and the 2024 Oscars

Given David Walsh's deeply favorable response to Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer from his initial review of the film forward to his consideration of the movie's reception earlier this month, it was only to be expected that it would be prominent in his piece on this year's Academy Awards.

As it happened Walsh devoted the first eight of his article's paragraphs to the significance of Oppenheimer's popular, and critical, success, and their connection with the political reality of the time--and only then turned to the broader ceremony. Still, it seemed significant there too. As Walsh remarked in a ceremony dominated by the reception of Oppenheimer (and where Poor Things, to which Walsh had also been favorable, also had a strong showing so that, as Walsh noted, the two films took eleven of the seventeen awards), "[t]here was less garishness and self-involvement on display than usual," and "the identity politics fanatics . . . relatively quiet after" as on the "whole, the awards ceremony left the viewer with the impression of great social and psychological tension bottled up."

While Walsh's annual coverage of the Oscars is an annual tradition I cannot recall him writing anything comparable about the event in the past--the subtitle of his 1999 piece ("Hollywood at its Worst") summed up his attitude toward the matter, and the last words of the item's first sentence (a "celebration of conformism, vulgarity and mediocrity") left no doubt whatsoever about exactly what he meant, with that description pretty much consistently applicable to every ceremony since down to last year's ("The 'safe,' 'familiar' and 'reassuring; 2023 Academy Awards: tedious, self-involved and distant from the population"). Even the more than usually charged March 2006 ceremony (recognizing cinematic achievement in the year of films like Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck, the film adaptation of John le Carré's The Constant Gardener) struck Walsh as "a sad and painful affair," in which the limitations of any liberal or left tendency in Hollywood were all too clear. Those limitations seem to have been much on Walsh's mind again in Tuesday's piece--but all the same his reading and expectations of the situation seem very different, such that where two decades he thought of the fickleness of even the well-intentioned in Hollywood, it may well be that he sees Hollywood not bumping up against those limitations, but possibly beginning to surpass them, with all that implies.