The cliched analogy for what just happened to Jessie Buckley takes in the word “coronation”.
Her win at the 98th Oscars was more predictable than that suggests. There is, for incoming monarchs, always the possibility of a republican insurrection or the discovery of a pretender. The Kerrywoman had, for close to six months, seemed, in her campaign for best actress, as unstoppable as the advance of spring.
That is how events played out at an Academy Award ceremony that was otherwise unusually at home to uncertainty on Sunday night.
“It feels like some kind of crazy alchemy that all of these things are colliding on a day like today. My daughter got her first tooth this week,” Buckley, who was nominated for playing the bereaved mother Agnes Shakespeare in Chloé Zhao’s film Hamnet, said in the press room after the ceremony.
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“I woke up with her lying on my chest, snuggling me, and I felt, like, what a gift to get to explore motherhood through this incredible mother and then to become one myself. To receive this recognition of the incredible role mothers play in our world on this day is something I will never, ever forget.”
No wonder her fellow nominees Rose Byrne and Kate Hudson, resigned to their fates, looked so relaxed as Adrien Brody read out the winner’s name.
Buckley belatedly closed out some unfinished business with Oscar. Barry Fitzgerald won Ireland’s first supporting-actor prize in 1945. Brenda Fricker won best supporting actress in 1990. Daniel Day-Lewis won best actor on the same night as Fricker. Now Ireland finally has a best-actress winner.
For the first time in some years, two films seemed, as the ceremony kicked off, equally likely to take best picture. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another had more awards silverware on the shelf, but Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, with 16 nods, broke the all-time record for most Oscar nominations.
On the night, One Battle After Another, a sprawling adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, managed to resist a late surge from Coogler’s vampire flick, taking six prizes, including best picture and best director. Sinners won four Oscars, including, for Michael B Jordan, best actor. Jordan, who plays twins in Sinners, passed out a faintly forlorn-looking Timothée Chalamet, who once seemed an unbeatable favourite for Marty Supreme.
The win, it should be clarified, had nothing to do with Chalamet’s much chewed-over remarks about opera and ballet being things “no one cares about” any more. That story came too late to alter the result. The wind was just behind Jordan.
“I stand here because of the people that came before me: Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, Forest Whitaker, Will Smith,” the actor said from the stage.
The most hotly contested of the categories was up first. Over the past few weeks, best supporting actress had evolved into a three-way marginal: Wunmi Mosaku, for Sinners, Teyana Taylor, for One Battle After, and Amy Madigan, for Weapons.
The veteran Madigan ended up taking it for her role as a witchy menace in that fine horror flick. “I want to thank my beautiful daughter, Lily, her husband, Sean, and of course, all the dogs,” she said before moving on to Ed Harris, her husband of many years. “But the most important is my beloved Ed, who’s been with me forever. And that’s a long-ass time.”
One of the biggest ovations of the evening went the way of Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who, nominated for Sinners, became the first woman to win the best-cinematography Oscar.
Her speech was one for the ages. “I really want all the women in the room to stand up,” she said. “Because I feel like I don’t get here without you guys. I really, really, truly mean that. I felt so much love from all the women on this whole campaign.”
Sean Penn, winner of best supporting actor for One Battle After Another, continued his habit, during this awards season, of not turning up to accept his statuette. He now joins the select club of actors with three Oscars (though he apparently loaned one to Volodymyr Zelenskiy).
There was a moment of genuine excitement in, of all categories, best live-action short, with only the seventh ever tie in the awards’ history. As Conan O’Brien, the show’s host, quipped, The Singers and Two People Exchanging Saliva sharing that award must have ruined “ruined 22 million Oscar pools”.
The show itself, punctuated by properly funny quips from O’Brien, combined predictable slickness with a few genuinely storming moments. The spectacular staging of I Lied to You, the nominated song from Sinners, deserved the thunderous standing ovation it received.
There was maybe a little too much comedy between the gongs, but O’Brien confirmed himself as the best host this side of Bob Hope and Billy Crystal. “It’s the first time since 2012 there are no British actors nominated for best actor or best actress,” he remarked in the opening monologue. “A British spokesperson said, ‘Yeah, but at least we arrest our paedophiles.’”
Such political references were rare (as usual in the modern Oscars), but Javier Bardem, presenting best international film to Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, began with “No to war and free Palestine.” The remark seemed to go down well in the room.
Matt Berry, the British comic actor, was an unexpected choice for announcer, but fans of Toast of London will have been delighted to hear him occasionally give in to his famously eccentric enunciations. Nobody else days “Los Angeleeees” with quite that mannered insanity. Invite him back.
