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At 207 minutes into Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony, host Conan O'Brien began stage-whispering to the attendees in the first row awaiting the night's biggest trophies.
"We're almost there," he encouraged the theater full of famous people - but also, the people watching from home. "We're almost there!"
But then it was still 15 more minutes before "One Battle After Another" took home best picture, with Paul Thomas Anderson making his third trip to the podium that evening, after also winning best director and best adapted screenplay - each time finding ever more people he'd previously forgotten to thank.
The Oscars are a celebration of a magical art form that promises to sweep us into another reality, packaged in a telecast that perpetually leaves us with numb butts. For years, the Academy Awards have resolvedly, optimistically chased a sub-three-hour running time. Would Sunday be the night? Oh, honey, of course not.
You can't blame a man like Anderson for reveling in the kind of professional nirvana that only, say, Michael Phelps could possibly identify with. And yet the ceremony was, again, an illustration of the Oscars' enduring tug-of-war between self-consciousness and self-aggrandizement.
There's always a host (an O'Brien, a Kimmel, a DeGeneres) who tries to make it plain that we all agree that this crowd in the Dolby Theatre is too rich, too beautiful, too thin and too blessed, and that the ceremony has been too long for far too long. ("Our next presenter heroically saved last year's Oscars from running short," O'Brien quipped as he brought out long-winded 2025 best actor winner Adrien Brody.) But at the same time, the show is unwilling to cut anything that would cut minutes, and the Oscars would also like us to know that it is doing essential, perhaps even holy work in recognizing all those sound techs, set designers and, for the first time last night, casting directors.
Honoring "something of beauty," as we heard presenters and honorees intone through the night. The "rarest quality," a thing that "connects us as humans across borders."
"I don't know where any of us would be without our storytellers," academy president Lynette Howell Taylor announced, and the answer is that we'd be in bed two hours ago.
I do take her point. I believe her point. But sometimes, just for fun, I like to imagine literally any other industry holding such a public display of congratulations for its own work. I like to imagine turning on the television to watch fast-food employees clasping their salted hands in a giant auditorium as the cameras zero in on five individuals - casting by Wendy's, Burger King, McDonald's, Five Guys and Chick-fil-A - and a voice-over announces, "And the winner for best fry cook …"
One issue with asserting that movies connect all of humanity is that, according to a Pew study conducted in summer 2025, only about half of Americans had even seen a movie in the theater in the previous year. The rest of us presumably waited until "Marty Supreme" was available on demand and then spent a week watching it in increments of 30 minutes until we nightly passed out on our sofas. Either that, or we decided that it was just going to be more of a "Mormon Housewives" kind of year. We are who we are.
Starting in 2029, the Oscars won't even be on broadcast television anymore. They're moving to YouTube, which O'Brien reminded us of in some of the night's best bits. In one, he previewed what a streaming version of the ceremony might look like, interrupted at random intervals by parody low-rent ads starring Jane Lynch dementedly hawking "the flashlight that killed bin Laden." In another, he promised to speak in a language that would attract a younger audience, launching into a monologue about hostmaxxing and brainrotting, before landing on "six-seven."
What are the Oscars going to do? What are any of us going to do? Old models are failing, revenue streams are depleting, AI is coming for us all. If the Oscars were going to be better, they'd be better by now; they've had 98 years of practice, after all. But while producers have occasionally tweaked the ceremony - two hosts, no hosts, veteran hosts, newbies - nothing has been revolutionized.
I spent more than a decade covering the ceremony on deadline - sometimes on-site in Los Angeles, sometimes from The Washington Post's newsroom - but when that tour of duty ended, I took a break for a while. Sunday was the first time in 16 years I'd watched like a regular person in my living room, and what surprised me was how little had changed. Opening monologue, musical number, closeup on Leonardo DiCaprio, gentle joke.
"Have they done In Memoriam yet?" my visiting mother asked, settling down on the couch midway through. As if on cue, Billy Crystal appeared on screen to honor his beloved friend Rob Reiner.
"Wait is it STILL on?" a friend messaged, and like clockwork, the cast of "Bridesmaids," who had reunited for the 15th anniversary of their 2011 film, were up onstage pretending to read a note written by the child actor from "Hamnet": "I'm tired and I want to go home. This show is very long, and there's no pizza."
On Sunday, the answer to What are the Oscars going to do? was mostly: Enjoy it while it lasts. Celebrate what is important to you. Find ways to delight, such as bringing in Misty Copeland to show all these subtle screen actors what true stage presence looks like. Find ways to stir emotion, such as when Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman to win an Academy Award for cinematography and invited every woman in the room to stand up.
But mostly, enjoy it while it lasts. Go nostalgic, by reuniting Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman from "Moulin Rouge!," by having Barbra Streisand sing a few bars to an image of Robert Redford. Go over budget. Go over time. Sooner or later you'll be replaced by artificial intelligence, so who cares if you blow past three hours, 3.5 hours, closer to four hours? What are they going to do? Banish you to YouTube? Since that's happening anyway, enjoy it while it lasts.
Make them play you off the screen.
(COMMENT, BELOW)
Previously:
• I think I know why everyone's lost their minds over Taylor and Travis
• 02/23/23: Don Lemon returned with an apology in a can
• 06/02/22: The trial of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard was too much and not enough
• 03/30/22: The misguided chivalry of Will Smith
• 02/03/21: AOC compares the talking points of her GOP colleagues to the tactics of an abuser
• 11/10/20: The end of Trumpism? Yeah, keep dreaming
• 11/09/20: America's confused obsession with Mary Kay Letourneau
• 07/09/20: The debate over schools reopening isn't about education. It's about how parents are quietly losing their minds
• 07/06/20: Ghislaine Maxwell allegedly turned an intuitive female bond into a tool for abuse
• 06/10/20: The world is messy and hard to control. Take help, and give it, where you can
• 05/21/20: Knock, knock: Who's there? Answering the door is no joke during pandemic
• 04/15/20: Don't wave away frivolous pleasures. Those are also 'essential' in hard times
• 03/20/20: Pandemic, panic and toilet paper mathematics
• 01/13/20: Meghan Markle just flipped the princess fantasy on its big crowned head
• 01/08/20: In court, powerful men have a lot to gain by looking helpless
• 10/18/19: Does Mayor Pete sound assertive or ... shrill?
This time, it's not just female candidates beset by archetypes and associations
• 09/18/19: The messiness and meaning of Caroline Calloway
• 08/29/19: Andrew Luck, ultimate male?
• 08/12/19: Epstein did not deserve to keep his 'allegedlys'
• 08/02/19: The Dems' 2020 'Wife Guys'
• 01/09/19: R. Kelly, Kevin Spacey, Louis CK: How pretending to be bad boys helped them get away with being bad men