O’Brien brought the monologue home with some more somber commentary on the “very chaotic and frightening times” we find ourselves in, times he said make the Oscars “particularly resonant” as they bring together art from dozens of countries and languages around the world. “We pay tribute tonight to not just film, but the ideals of global artistry, patience, resilience, and that rarest of qualities today: optimism,” O’Brien said. It was sincere, if circumspect.
Then there was Jimmy Kimmel, who cracked a joke about Melania Trump’s documentary: “And there are also documentaries where you walk around the White House trying on shoes.” He also dinged CBS: “There are some countries whose leaders don’t support free speech,” Kimmel said. “I’m not at liberty to say which. Let’s just leave it at North Korea and CBS.”
And there was director David Borenstein, who helmed Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which won the Oscar for best documentary. The film, he said, “is about how you lose your country. What we saw when working with this footage is that you lose it through countless small, little acts of complicity: when we act complicit when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities, when we don’t say anything when oligarchs take over the media and control how we can produce it and consume it, we all face a moral choice. But luckily, even a nobody is more powerful than you think.”
The political atmosphere of the evening reflected the substance of the films nominated, the biggest of which were highly political. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is an Antifa-inflected fever dream, an epic in which left-wing activists fight an authoritarian government cracking down on immigrants and dissidents. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a horror set in the Jim Crow south, from a director whose breakout was the brilliant and deeply political film Fruitvale Station.