On Sunday night in Los Angeles, when the 98th Academy Awards are presented before a global audience, Ireland will be well represented. Jessie Buckley is the frontrunner for best actress for her memorable performance in Hamnet, while Maggie O’Farrell shares an adapted screenplay nomination for the same film. Richard Baneham is nominated for visual effects on Avatar: Fire and Ash. John Kelly’s The Retirement Plan is in contention for best animated short. Dublin-based Element Pictures, a fixture at the event, are there again with Bugonia, and Wild Atlantic Pictures are co-producers of Blue Moon, nominated for original screenplay and best actor.
Irish cinema has reached the point where such a level of representation is no longer remarkable. But this year’s awards come at a moment of flux and uncertainty for the international industry as a whole and for Hollywood in particular, where the future of traditional cinema exhibition remains in doubt, anxiety about the encroachment of AI grows, and the acquisition of Warner Bros by Paramount has added fresh unease.
While this year’s nominations recognise work from Norway, Brazil and elsewhere, three American films dominate the conversation. Each, in its own way, explores the psyche of the United States at a moment when that subject is a pressing concern for the rest of the world. Whether it is the dark seam of racism running through the country’s history in Sinners, political tension erupting into violence in One Battle After Another or the reckless pursuit of wealth and status in Marty Supreme, this year’s crop offers differing metaphors for the American condition.
The Oscars are, of course, ridiculous. Voters more often than not get it wrong, preferring the ponderous and worthy over the comedic and strange. Winners’ speeches oscillate between the banal, the lachrymose and the list-based.
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And yet, Oscar night remains a potent celebration of an artform that, despite its current travails, still has the power to enthrall audiences and transport them to new and previously unimagined worlds.
