Title: And the Oscars Go To...

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're going to talk more about the Oscars now, some of the politics at the Oscars, and just a lot about the films and what kind of a year this has been as reflected by major motion pictures. Hollywood's biggest night, obviously, delivering plenty of memorable moments, some expected, some surprising. Anora, as you probably know by now, was the night's big winner, taking best picture, and best director for Sean Baker, while Mikey Madison scored best actress for her breakout performance. One unlikely New York City neighborhood got a shout-out, not usually where films are made in New York.

Notable, Conan O'Brien made his Oscars hosting debut. As always, there were a few speeches that went beyond the usual thank yous into political territory. With us to break it all down and hear a few clips and maybe take a few phone calls from you, Dana Stevens, film critic at Slate and a co-host of the Slate Culture Gabfest, that podcast, and the author of Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century. Hey, Dana, welcome back to WNYC.

Dana Stevens: Hey, it's so great to be here. I always love doing your show.

Brian Lehrer: What did you think? Did you like the Oscars as a TV show last night?

Dana Stevens: I really did. In fact, I think that my primary experience of it was just as a nice spectacle and some very welcome, mostly escapist entertainment. I usually find the Oscars telecast to be somewhat excruciatingly long and to have some moments that are hard to sit through, but I have to say maybe I'm just really welcoming a break in the grim news. I had a lot of fun during the show last night.

Brian Lehrer: How about you, listeners? What did you think of the show as a TV show? What did you think of any of the winners, surprised or not? 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692, call or text, with Dana Stevens. Yes, Anora took home top prize, continuing a strong year for independent cinema. Producer Alex Coco here in this 15-second clip accepting that award.

Alex Coco: We made this movie for $6 million, shooting all on location in New York City with about 40 crew members. They're all back in New York. This is for you, guys. Thank you so much. We made this movie independently. If you're trying to make independent films, please keep doing it. We need more. This is proof.

Brian Lehrer: Can you talk about that word and that category? What made this an independent film?

Dana Stevens: Well, it was not backed by any major studio. It was something that the producers had to put together the financing for, quite simply. That is getting to be a thinner line than it used to be, what's an indie film versus a studio film, because streaming has changed the landscape so much, but Anora certainly qualifies as an independent film, as does The Brutalist, another movie that took home a lot of awards last night. Different as those two movies are, they both share that scrappy spirit of putting together something on as shoestring a budget as the producers can.

Anora also has the distinction of being the lowest-grossing film ever to have won Best Picture. I really hope this brings more people to it. It was, I think, very popular on the indie art film circuit, but maybe this will be a breakthrough where really mass audiences will start going in. It is a very crowd-pleasing movie. I think it would do well in just about any movie market.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and best director followed the same path. Sean Baker is now an Oscar-winning filmmaker. Do these things together say anything about where the Academy's taste is heading or is it just 2024/2025?

Dana Stevens: I don't know. It's always hard to make big predictions. I think in general, the expansion of the Academy, which happened a while ago now, but this attempt that the Academy has made to get both more diverse and more international and just plain bigger, like there are just a lot more voters than there were 10 years ago, has taken the Oscars in some interesting directions.

If you think about Parasite winning in, I believe it was 2020, for a 2019 film, that was a lot of records, but among them, the first time an international film has done so well in so many categories. I think the same thing is happening with indies. It isn't just a game for the big five studios the way it was in the classic Hollywood period, and to me, that's all to the good.

Brian Lehrer: Mikey Madison won best actress for Anora, a major moment for a performer who wasn't necessarily a household name. She shouted out the neighborhood in Brooklyn in which the film is set.

Mikey Madison: Thank you, Breton Beach, for lending us your beautiful backdrop and incredible community.

Brian Lehrer: Did that make you smile? Dana, I think you're a New Yorker, right?

Dana Stevens: Oh, yes, not born here but very happy to have become a New Yorker in the course of my life. Of course, if you've been to Brighton Beach, Coney Island, and you know that area, the movie does such wonderful things with it as a setting without ever romanticizing or making it cutesy. It's not local color in the movie. It really, truly is a setting that feels very lived-in and real. It was nice that she shouted that out.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned The Brutalist as another indie film that, obviously, had a Best Picture nomination and got a lot of love. Adrien Brody took Best Actor for his role in that, and he's already an Oscar winner, but this felt like a different kind of role for him. What stood out to you about his performance?

Dana Stevens: It's funny to say that it's a different kind of role because I agree with you, and yet in a way you could say, "Well, it's a very similar role." The Pianist, the movie that he won for the last time so long ago now, was also about a Holocaust survivor. He also had to learn an accent and do some similar character work for it, but they are very different movies. To me, knowing Adrian Brody's own story, that he is in fact the descendant of Hungarian immigrants and his mother's family came over from Hungary because of the Holocaust, I think this was the role he was born to play in The Brutalist.

I think The Brutalist, a movie I really like but probably would not myself have wanted to win Best Picture, won exactly the categories that it stood out the most in, his performance, the beautiful score by Daniel Blumberg. That was a nice moment that that won too, and the cinematography because it's an innovative format that it shot on and it's just an absolutely gorgeous-looking film.

Brian Lehrer: Adrien Brody is from Woodhaven, so Woodhaven and Brighton Beach, at very least, outer borough, names represented.

Dana Stevens: Outer borough Oscars.

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] I'm thinking about these two independent films rising in the way they did. The whole thing is kind of silly in a way. Any awards, shows on any of-- the Grammys, the Tonys, any of them, that works of art are in a competition with each other, and in this case, these two independent works of art, one of them is going to win and one of them is going to-- the whole thing is silly in a certain way. Does it have a value in your opinion as a film critic?

Dana Stevens: Yes, I've come around on this. I think that before I was a film critic, or maybe in my early years as one, I would have been a little bit more scoffing at the Oscars. There is an inherent silliness, which I have to say that Conan O'Brien understood and played with perfectly in his framing as a host because he, himself, is such a silly comedian and he managed to poke fun at the Oscars without making fun of any individual.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, wait, let me play the clip that you may specifically have in mind there. This is one moment from his monologue that felt on brand for him and maybe is exactly what you're referring to.

Conan O'Brien: I loved Anora. I really did. Yes, I loved Anora.

[applause]

Conan O'Brien: Yes, yes, true story. Little fact for you, Anora uses the F-word 479 times. That's three more than the record set by Karla Sofia Gascón's publicist.

[laughter]

Brian Lehrer: Now, I know I didn't get that reference, so was that a little inside Hollywood burn?

Dana Stevens: Yes. That might just be for people who have been following the Oscar campaign pretty closely, which is that Emilia Pérez, which set the record for the most nominations, I believe it had 13 nominations, it did end up winning two Oscars, but that movie really shot itself in the foot during awards season by not keeping much of a muzzle on its star, Karla Sofia Gascón, who, I'm not on Twitter anymore, but apparently tweeted a bunch of quite offensive things to various ethnic groups during the course of Oscar season and really won a lot of opprobrium for that movie, which is also a movie about transness.

It has a trans heroine, and yet, I'm going to note that neither of the two acceptors of awards for Emilia Pérez last night said a single word about trans rights in their speeches, which I thought was one of the most ungracious moments of the show, but, yes, that's what Conan is referring to in that joke.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. We're going to play a clip now where politics were spoken because one of the most talked about moments of the night came when the team behind No Other Land won Best Documentary Feature. Their acceptance speech was powerful, touching on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the role of storytelling in times of conflict. The film is about the West Bank. We're going to play a clip of the Israeli co-director. There was one Israeli, one Palestinian co-director. They both speak. Here's a little bit of the Israeli co-director, Yuval Abraham.

Yuval Abraham: We made this film, Palestinians and Israelis, because together our voices are stronger. We see each other. The atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people, which must end, the Israeli hostages brutally taken in the crime of October 7h, which must be freed. When I look at Basel, I see my brother, but we are unequal. We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Basel is under military laws that destroy his life and he cannot control.

Brian Lehrer: I want to say one thing to our listeners. I said it earlier in the hour when we were doing our Oscars quiz. We did our series again this year. This is our category, Best Feature Length Documentary. Dana, I don't know if you know that series that we do on the show, but I joke, let everybody else talk about the entertainment films. We, being a nonfiction radio show, we invite the directors of the Best Feature Length Documentary nominees every year. The only ones who couldn't make it this year, as it turns out, were the directors who wound up winning for No Other Land.

The issue was, they wanted to stick to the standard of having both the Israeli and the Palestinian director on together, as they did last night, to make the joint statement for both of their peoples that they were trying to make. Unfortunately, one of them had a personal situation that made him unavailable. Just acknowledging that to our listeners in case anybody noticed that the one film that was missing from our series was the one that won. Now that we see that that issue seems to have been resolved by their joint presence at the Oscars, we're going to try to get them on after the fact. Dana, do you follow the full feature-length documentary category?

Dana Stevens: Oh, yes, absolutely. It was really important this year I think that this movie win. The Oscars would have felt very wrong to me if No Other Land had not won because, in addition to being an exceptional documentary, it has this unique-- it has a milestone. It set a milestone that is a negative milestone, which is that it's the first Oscar-winning documentary or Oscar-winning film, I believe, not to have US distribution. There are some theaters that are showing it now through independent distribution, but there's nobody who's releasing this film to America across the country.

That's really shameful when you look at the content of this film and the sense that their truth is not being heard. The movie is all about trying to get a platform for this man, Basel Adra, who spoke right before Yuval Abraham, the clip that you played, whose villages and the whole area that he comes from are being systematically destroyed. Them having this platform is so important. It's really what the film is about, is getting this message and this truth out to the largest possible number of people. Hopefully, the Oscar will shame some distributor into actually picking up No Other Land, and I really hope it does.

Brian Lehrer: For what it's worth, since I watch a bunch of these documentaries every year, I thought it was an especially strong year for the documentary nominees with the films about Ukraine, the Japanese journalist who had trouble getting the justice system to take her rape allegations seriously, the one about the Native American schools in Canada, and the one about American jazz musicians in the Congo in the 1960s, which I love, in addition to No Other Land.

Dana Stevens: Yes, all of them strong. When I say that I really, really wanted No Other Land to win, it doesn't have any-- there's no shade thrown on those other documentaries, which are all excellent. I especially among them recommend a couple that you just mentioned, Black Box Diary, the Japanese film about the rape victim, and Sugar Cane, which is an extraordinary film about Native American schools and the discovery of bodies at those schools, not unlike the Nickel Boys story, in fact. Any of those would have been a worthy win. It's just the fact that No Other Land is so hard to see that made me glad that it got that platform.

Brian Lehrer: Right. By the way, I should mention that No Other Land, I know it was playing the other day at Film Forum in Lower Manhattan, maybe it still is. Yes, my producer just confirmed it's still there. Shelley in Westport, you're on WNYC. Hi, Shelley.

Shelley: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I've been curious because we've all come to use the term actor for the performer, and then we still wind up with the Best Actress award. These are the most creative people in the world. I would think they would have a better way of handling that.

Brian Lehrer: Right, male actor and female actor, because she's right, right, Dana? The industry now, they'll use the word actor for both males and females, but when you get to Oscar night, it's best actor, best actress.

Dana Stevens: Yes. I have to say that, personally, I don't find the word actress an insult, but I do understand that some people might prefer for it to be more gender-neutral. There's also talk about trying to create a gender-neutral acting category, which is something that some critics groups already do. That has its own pitfalls because seems like there's a great likelihood with most voting bodies that men would just wind up winning those awards most of the time since they tend to have more leading roles, and they're just better represented in the industry as a whole.

I guess it would depend on how individuals like to be called. I know a few actors who don't mind the term actress at all, so that as a category name doesn't bother me. I think the argument could be made that a gender-neutral category would make sense. For example, where do you put a non-binary performer? Right now there isn't any place to put that person.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, I'm told that in addition to Film Forum, No Other Land is playing at BAM. There's that. One more call. We mentioned Woodhaven, Queens, having a presence, Brighton Beach, obviously, through Anora, having a presence and being mentioned on stage. One other local New York reference coming from Phil in Manhattan, and then we're out of time. Phil, Hi.

Phil: Hi, Brian. Of the five candidates for best-acted, two of them went to the same New York City High School, LaGuardia High School. That's Adrien Brody and Timothée Chalamet.

Brian Lehrer: Ha. The high school that trans people in the arts, Dana, actually places people in very successful careers, at least sometimes.

Dana Stevens: I have a personal response to that, which is that my daughter is a LaGuardia graduate, and she is now in her first year at Juilliard, so go LaGuardia, you get those actors out there. I hope maybe one day I'll be reacting to her Oscar speech on your show.

Brian Lehrer: Dana Stevens, film critic for Slate and co-host of their podcast, The Slate Culture podcast, and author of Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century. Thanks for today, Dana.

Dana Stevens: Thanks. It was a pleasure, Brian.

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