Jamie Lee Curtis wins best supporting actress
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Well well well. This is unexpected, but bodes well for the dominance of Everything Everywhere All at Once tonight.
Key events
The Whale wins best makeup and hairstyling
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Which makes it officially better than the fatsuit in The Batman and the fatsuits in Elvis. Well done, everyone. This might be the only Oscar that The Whale wins tonight, but it’s also the first speech that gets played off. This is partly because the winners took about ten minutes to actually get to the stage, but at least the duck has now been broken. A special acknowledgement to the woman who was just about to speak when she got played off, for briefly looking like she was literally being electrocuted.
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Jennifer Connelly and Samuel L Jackson are here to present the makeup and hairstyling Oscar. This category is essentially Battle of the Fatsuits, so strap in.
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Now for a musical performance of This is a Life from Everything Everywhere All at Once. This is noticeably one of the awards that EEAAO isn’t tipped to win, and it isn’t hard to see why. I once spent a holiday in a flat above an Estonian off-licence, and this song sounds exactly like the noise that the drunk people made standing outside it at 3am.
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Oh, it didn’t get danced off. Is it bad that I want someone to get danced off soon?
All Quiet on the Western Front wins best cinematography
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All Quiet on the Western Front won’t win nearly as many Oscars as it did Baftas, so James Friend’s speech really has to land. It’s very humble and heartfelt, and I guarantee that it will be danced off any second.
An Irish Goodbye wins best live action short
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Oh god, this is delightful. There isn’t really a speech so much, but instead the directors urged everyone in the auditorium to sing Happy Birthday to the film’s star James Martin. It’s likely to be the purest feel-good moment of the entire ceremony and, since Ke Huy Quan won an award, that’s really saying something.
Navalny wins best documentary feature
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The most timely, and probably urgent, winner of the night. The speech, as expected, speaks out strongly against Vladimir Putin. Alexi Navalny’s wife also speaks, to tell her imprisoned husband to stay strong. God, imagine trying to dance that speech off.
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Now for documentary feature. Kimmel reminds us that this is where all the punching happened last year. Anyway, this is probably the strongest category of the night, so everyone shut up.
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One way that the ceremony is speeding things along tonight: onscreen QR codes. Want to know the backstage stories of the hair and costume nominees? Scan the QR code onscreen. If anyone actually does this, please let me know. I’d do it myself, but hell hasn’t quite frozen over yet.
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There is now a musical performance by Diane Warren and Sofia Carson. It’s a less a performance and more the result of a botched experiment to fuse the Oscars play-off music with a Live Laugh Love wall decal. The song just finished and, with a gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you how it went.
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Jamie Lee Curtis tells us that she is hundreds of people, which seems hard to believe, but never mind. She is her directors. She is her agent. She is her own husband, and everyone she has ever worked with or met or seen or thought of. On the plus side, this means that everyone in the audience has also won an Oscar, so now we can all go home.
Jamie Lee Curtis wins best supporting actress
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Well well well. This is unexpected, but bodes well for the dominance of Everything Everywhere All at Once tonight.
Ke Huy Quan wins best supporting actor
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Of course he does. This was one of the foregone conclusions of the night. Quan has been winning people over all awards season with his enormous comeback story. DeBose burst into tears announcing his name. The audience gave him a standing ovation. And his speech is a very good reflection of that. “This is the American dream!” he shouts through tears. Very very hard to argue with this one.
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Troy Kotsur and Ariana DeBose are here to present the supporting categories. Kotsur is doing most of the introduction, which is clearly killing DeBose, who just wants to rap. Let her rap, you cowards.
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I’m not saying you should be expecting the Oscars to go long this year, but half an hour has already passed and only one award has been given out. At this rate, this will be the first liveblog ever to be completed by a disintegrating skeleton.
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