Can the Oscars end already? The audience is leaving

You probably remember it, who doesn’t? The summer cinema in the village, at night, with everyone freshly showered, our hair still wet, the smell of aftersun lotion and our cushion brought from home to provide relief from the very hard chairs. And the film that didn’t start on time; half an hour later, when we’d already finished our sandwich — also brought from home — still nothing. And everyone would start chanting “Let it start now, the audience is leaving...” There was a general feeling of “since we’re already here, we might as well stay and wait, but we’re going to be back home really late, and why isn’t the movie starting, what’s going on, how much longer do we have to wait, please?”

Now the feeling is the opposite. And it’s not just about how long, very long, infinitely long the films of the last few years are (this year I have checked out practically all of the releases and none, as much as I may have liked them, would have left my personal editing room without a half-hour cut). It’s also about the movie about the movies. What a long awards season this has been. We’ve been in it since, what, summer? Before that, probably. In fact, we were in it in May, when the actresses of Emilia Pérez won prizes at Cannes, when Anora took home the award for best film, and the magic word was already being said out loud: Oscar.

For years, the film awards season has been organized in such a way that the big prize falls at the end of other awards of greater or lesser importance that trickle down until, normally, early March, when the golden gentleman is handed out. At the beginning of January there are the Golden Globes, which some of us cheesily used to call the anteroom to the Oscars. But these days we live in a labyrinth of anterooms, halls and other spaces from where, once you enter, you cannot leave. It is a system which, in order to maintain itself, has no choice but to generate an immense wheel of media noise that involves the entire enormous industry, which does not stop talking about itself for months and months.

It’s no longer just Emilia Pérez and Karla Sofía Gascón’s tweets, which are on their way to becoming the parable of the prodigal son 2.0 style, with Gascón pardoned by Daddy Netflix to make her longed-for walk down the red carpet as a nominee at the last minute, after two convenient weeks of silence that coincided with the voting of the academics. The point is that almost no one has been spared from some form of controversy, however small it may be. From the use of artificial intelligence in the post-production of The Brutalist, to supposedly improve the Hungarian accent of its protagonists, to the lack of an intimacy coordinator in the very sexual Anora.

The thing is that controversies are being looked for everywhere, from any situation or any past beyond a bit of scrolling on X. Fernanda Torres, the star of I’m Still Here, wore blackface in a comedy skit from 2008. It’s not that it was more justifiable back then than it is now, but you have to go back 17 years to a clip of seconds in a bid to disqualify one of the most brilliant, subtle and elegant performances of the season.

Of course, Torres came out and apologized in a statement. The opposite would have been unacceptable. That also nipped the stumbling block in the bud, just the opposite of what happened with Gascón. Although the Spaniard did apologize, her words, suggesting that there was something more to it, that it was all part of a campaign against her, did not end up redeeming her. Of course Jacques Audiard had to come and attack her harshly, perhaps too harshly, so that the people could see the blood that the lashes were leaving. And Audiard himself has also had his share of controversy, of course: an old video in which he was heard saying that “Spanish is a language [...] of the poor, of migrants.” But this exhausting season of videos, tweets and resurrected problems is about to end on Sunday, it is almost here, we are touching it with the tips of our fingers. Let it end already, the audience is leaving.

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