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Who do the movies truly belong to? The question was on my mind as I watched the 96th Academy Awards on Sunday, March 10. The themes of this year’s most prominent films included similar questions about possession and ownership of the narrative, and it felt like the structure of this year’s glitzy awards shows posed similar queries. The spectacle was a largely entertaining affair.

This is my first year writing the annual “Oscar on the Oscars”—originally created by Oscar Kim Bauman ’23 back in 2021—so I closely watched the entire show in order to gather as much information as I could to bolster my article. Despite a few minor hiccups (I’m looking at you, Al Pacino), the show appeared to go off without a hitch and was quite engaging. The post-show headlines will talk about Ryan Gosling’s heart-stopping, pants-dropping, house-rocking, earth-quaking performance of “I’m Just Ken” in conjunction with Mark Ronson, Slash, and a slew of other Kens from “Barbie.” However, it was the more subtle, emotional moments addressing the underlying question of ownership that made this year’s Academy Awards uniquely special. 

The Academy introduced a new format for handing out the four Actor and Actress Awards. Each nominee was honored by former recipients of the award, receiving a quick, sweet speech about their exploits in this year’s films. In previous years, the nominees that did not win the ultimate award were somewhat left to the wayside. This new feature rectified that shortcoming, with all five nominees having an individual moment to be honored by the Academy and those in the building. These moments were the most special of the entire show. Seeing Jamie Lee Curtis, last year’s recipient of the Best Supporting Actress award, talk about her friend Jodie Foster was an especially beautiful sequence. In the end, Da’Vine Joy Randolph took home the award for her performance in “The Holdovers” (2023), giving a heartfelt, tearful acceptance speech that further set the emotional tone for the rest of the show. 

Four-time host Jimmy Kimmel perhaps detracted from this feel at times, forcing some jokes and turning to his sidekick Guillermo for a not-so-subtle product placement advertisement for Don Julio Tequila in the middle of the show. However, Kimmel proved to be an adept marshal, keeping the celebration on track and preventing any of the insane slip-ups that have dominated the headlines about Oscars past. Some of the gimmicks were quite funny, specifically John Cena’s naked adventure to center stage (during this part of the show, I wrote “his body is insaneeeee” in my notes). And then there was John Mulaney’s stand-up cameo, where he summarized the plot of 1990’s Best Picture winner “Field of Dreams” (1989) in a way that got the whole audience chuckling. 

The Oscars was not devoid of mentions of current events. In past years, the show often felt like Hollywood’s escape from reality: A night to honor those who have achieved great things in the film industry while ignoring the happenings outside. While the Academy perhaps wanted to structure this year’s show in a similar manner (Kimmel’s and others’s pre-written bits remained light and fluffy), two of the most poignant speeches referenced the wars currently afflicting many people across the globe. Mstyslav Chernov, upon accepting the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for his film “20 Days in Mariupol,” (2023) directly referenced the war in Ukraine, essentially saying he would gladly exchange his award for Russia’s invasion to have never occurred. 

“I wish to be able to exchange this to Russia never attacking Ukraine, never occupying our cities,” Chernov said during his speech. “I wish to give it all the recognition to Russia not killing tens of thousands of my fellow Ukrainians. I wish for them to release all the hostages, all the soldiers who are protecting their lands, and all the civilians who are now in their jails.” 

Similarly, when Jonathan Glazer accepted his Oscar for Best International Feature for “Zone of Interest,” (2023) he spoke of how the dehumanization depicted in his film still impacts the world today, specifically in the Israel-Hamas conflict. 

“Whether the victims of October the seventh in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?” Glazer asked during his speech.

Both Chernov’s and Glazer’s comments in their speeches were not unexpected, as they related to the content of their movies: Chernov’s documentary was about a Ukrainian city besieged by invading Russians and Glazer’s was about a family living on the outskirts of Auschwitz during World War II. However, these two moments were far more impactful than the small red pins that Billie Eilish, Mahershala Ali, Mark Ruffalo and other attendees wore to protest Israel’s invasion of Gaza. 

In sum, this year’s Academy Awards raised the question of who Hollywood—and movies in general—truly belongs to. This concept reflected an underlying question in many of this year’s most notable films: Who can claim ownership of certain narratives? “American Fiction” (2023) questions who can claim the narrative of what it means to be Black in America, “Poor Things” (2023) explores who owns the narrative of sexuality, “Barbie” (2023) does the same with the patriarchy, and “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2023) revisits the dark heart of our nation’s past to illustrate how indigenous history has been stripped away and exploited. Similarly, “Oppenheimer” (2023), this year’s major winner of the Academy Awards (Christopher Nolan’s epic biopic took home seven Oscars) is structured to show the competing perspectives of the movie’s protagonist and Lewis Strauss as the two men struggled to control the narrative of the nuclear bomb’s inception and its aftermath.

These questions of ownership carried into the 96th Academy Awards. Who truly owns Hollywood, and the movies? Is it the Academy? Is it the actors and actresses themselves? Is this the moviegoers? Perhaps it should be the behind-the-scenes workers whom Kimmel shouted out early in the show for their steadfast loyalty during the contentious 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. 

“The Teamsters, the truck drivers, the lighting crew, sound, camera, gaffers, grips,” Kimmel said of the workers.  

This year’s Academy Awards gave a rather decisive answer, I believe. By focusing on the nominees themselves, and sacrificing many of the spectacles and gimmicks that have been so prevalent in shows of the past, the ceremony clearly was meant to honor those who make and star in the movies. It is these people that truly own the industry. 
Oscar Ashley can be reached at oashley@wesleyan.edu.