The Oscars Are a Lost Cause

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.