Every year, the best actors and actresses come from around the world to witness the Academy Award ceremony commonly known as “the Oscars”. Families huddle around their TV screens to discuss who the winners are going to be in each of the major categories. And let’s just say, there was a lot of “discussing” this year at the 97th Academy Awards. Here is how it went.
Anora
I can guarantee you that no one had any idea what this movie was about before watching the Oscars. Only when the film won the Directing category and Best Actress in a leading role did it debut its name onto the world stage. It also embarked on a long and heated debate online about whether the movie even deserved to appear on the Oscars. Many people argued that the plot of the story was uninteresting, difficult to follow, and did not generate the cinematic mood that an Oscar film needed. Moreover, countless net citizens believed that Mikey Madison should not have won the Best Leading Actress award because of her lack of experience/talent compared to other competitors such as Demi Moore and Cynthia Erivo.
Emilia Pérez
After winning Best Supporting Actress, the film and the actress Karla Sofía Gascón faced a lot of backlash. First, the movie was accused of “recycling trans-stereotypes, tropes, and clichés”. Then, Gascón was criticized for her social media posts that targeted Muslims, China (Covid-19), and the murder of George Floyd (called him a “drug addicted swindler”). Despite these accusations, the movie still was very successful at the Oscars and gained the attention of the film industry (in a good or bad way).
The Use of AI
The tech sector has been booming recently because of the rapid advance of AI. Some films were accused of using AI to tweak actors’ lines and movie shots. For example, in the film The Brutalist, there were lines that required the actor to mimic a certain accent (Hungarian). Many people believed that AI was used to tweak the actors’ voices in order to change their English accents into Hungarian accents. This allegation was denied many times, but still remains a heated topic online.
