Middlebrow’s big night
Derek Robertson
The death of the monoculture has been greatly exaggerated.
Yes, the Academy Awards, along with every other major televised American awards ceremony, have experienced a massive decline in viewership from their peak (although this year’s Oscars telecast did see a 12% bump from the 2022 edition, possibly due to a slap-curious new audience). But what Sunday’s ceremony revealed is that the irreversible fracture between elite institutions and the vox populi, or the shattering of American cultural consciousness into a trillion algorithmically curated multiverses, has not yet happened.
The decline of the Oscars over the past several decades as a part of pop, or mass, culture has reflected the widening gap between “prestige” culture (where supposed high art lives) and the mass culture (where the blockbusters that produce the profits that fund prestige cinema are generated). Yet the very presentation of this year’s Oscars embodied the fusion of these two worlds. It revealed the predictably (yet excruciatingly slowly) narrowing distance between America’s critical apparatus and an unkillable desire to remain in permanent adolescence.
The zeitgeist remains a universe, not a multiverse, united in the form of the feel-good fantasia presented by Everything Everywhere All At Once, the 2023 Best Picture award winner which has now smashed records as both an unlikely box-office success and a dominant Oscar play that won seven awards in total. The dominance of Everything Everywhere All At Once — a visually hyperactive riff on wuxia action and alternate-universe sci-fi wrapped around a maudlin, chewy center of domestic angst — represents a merging of two realms. It’s a film that in all but corporate ownership bears the artistic qualities and worldview of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it has won a level of critical prestige those crude commercial products (knock on wood) never will.
Who better to represent the closeness of high and low culture than Jimmy Kimmel? Kimmel’s cultural arc is a curious, and at this point well-documented, one: A comedian who got his start on the early 2000s’ proudly neanderthal The Man Show, Kimmel has gradually reformed himself into an acceptable member of polite Hollywood society as the host of television’s second-longest-running late-night program after the somehow-unkillable Bill Maher.
Kimmel’s performance as host was pretty good as far as these things go. It was at least familiar, with an opening monologue that gently skewered the attendees while reserving his sharpest barbs for those either not present or not at risk of actually winning anything (Tom Cruise and the bizarre Damien Chazelle misfire Babylon, respectively).
Where Kimmel truly made his mark was by daring to make light of the signal controversy from last year’s ceremony: Will Smith’s public self-immolation by way of rushing the stage and decking previous host Chris Rock for a joke about his wife. “We know this is a special night for you. … We want you to feel safe. And most importantly, we want me to feel safe,” Kimmel said. “So we have strict policies in place. If anyone in this theater commits an act of violence at any point during the show, you will be awarded the Oscar for best actor and permitted to give a 19-minute-long speech.”
I mean, fair enough. For breaching the absolute most basic taboo of public life, Smith was awarded with, well … the Oscar for best actor and an eight-minute acceptance speech. (Allow Kimmel the exaggeration — it felt that long.) We’ve come a long way in the intervening year. While at the time, the event was greeted by a wave of reverse pearl-clutching on Smith’s behalf, and a stern censure of anyone who dared criticize him or make light of such a flatly absurd incident, it’s now the subject of not just Kimmel’s fun but also much of Rock’s own Netflix-dominating new stand-up special. Call it a “vibe shift.”
This is not so simple as a struggle between “wokeness” and some nebulous opposing forces, however. Kimmel can get away with his riffs simply because time has dulled the issue’s culture war intensity, not to mention how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is likely rather indulgent of anyone willing to defend its rapidly fading institutional augustness. He’s also able to get away with it through his skill at tweaking the status quo just enough to maintain some respectability while genially emceeing the ceremony’s most moronic, cynical gambits, like its numerous in-show advertisements or a costumed “Cocaine Bear” pestering activist Malala Yousafzai (no, seriously).
On the other hand, what’s wrong with a little fun? Since the unofficial end of the COVID-19 pandemic, American culture has lost some of the tetchy near-psychotic censoriousness and rancor that marked that period. One of the biggest signs of this phenomenon was the wild record-breaking box office success of Top Gun: Maverick, a sequel to a more than three-decade-old film that was released before much of the audience for the current film was even born. Like its fellow best picture nominee in Everything Everywhere, Top Gun: Maverick features a world-class movie star and is buffed to a sheen, stridently nonideological, and maudlin as all hell.
Unlike that film, it didn’t take itself very seriously. The new Top Gun installment was pure escapist filmmaking with a gossamer-thin veneer of American patriotism that made it an unlikely unifying force in a country desperately thirsty for them. Everything Everywhere, despite an endless parade of “zany” visual gags like hot dog fingers, sentient rocks with stick-on googly eyes, and an omniscient everything bagel, takes itself deadly seriously. The combination of its style and tone recalls nothing so much as Orson Welles’s infamously biting comments about Woody Allen. Welles accused him of having “the Chaplin disease. … That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge. … He is arrogant. Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited.” (To belabor the comparison, witness director Daniel Kwan declaiming onstage that his “impostor syndrome” was at an “all-time high.”)
The prevailing meme in years past has been that Hollywood is obsessed with awarding films that celebrate the awe-inspiring power of artists and moviemakers to move the world. Think of last decade’s best picture winners, including The Artist, Birdman, and Argo. No more: Stephen Spielberg’s The Fabelmans and Todd Field’s Tar, two legitimate masterworks in that vein, were shut out of any wins despite their numerous nominations. The kind of film that reliably dominates the Oscars these days is middlebrow genre fare: Mad Max: Fury Road, The Shape of Water, and now Everything Everywhere All At Once, all impeccably crafted but really featherlight amusement park attractions.
Defining the relative merits of the middlebrow is beyond the scope of an Oscars telecast review and arguably my faculties as a critic. Suffice it to say that Everything Everywhere All At Once, and the ceremony that inducted it into cinematic history, embodied it. They asked nothing of viewers while promising them everything. They were “bold” without confusing anyone or hurting anyone’s feelings. They flattered our sensibilities while aiming squarely for our sentimentality. The dividing critical line in American culture right now might be how long it takes before all that comfort and flattery wears you out. For my part, if we aren’t going to have true art, I prefer fighter jets.
Derek Robertson co-authors Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.