• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, March 11, 2024

From President Biden on Thursday night to Al Pacino at the Oscars on Sunday, America’s oldsters have had quite a couple of days.

Pacino, 83, was given the honor of announcing the Best Picture Oscar winner at the conclusion of “The 96th Oscars” Sunday night on ABC and seemed to forget to read the list of nominees.

Instead, he went straight to the opening of the envelope, and mumbled the name of the winning movie “Oppenheimer” so unintelligibly that viewers watching at home could be forgiven for not quite hearing which movie won.

The messy Best Picture announcement was not quite on par with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty announcing the wrong winner in 2017.

But Pacino’s announcement, while not quite a flub for the ages, was the most puzzling moment in an Oscar show that had about the usual number of highs and lows.

The Best Moments included two musical performances, one comedy bit, and two moving acceptance speeches.

Only Vladimir Putin could fail to be moved by the speech given by Ukrainian journalist/director Mstyslav Chernov as he accepted the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for “20 Days in Mariupol.” 

The film, seen on PBS’s “Frontline” last fall, was made in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol in the first weeks after the Russian invasion in February 2022.

“This is the first Oscar in Ukrainian history, and I’m honored,” Chernov said. “Probably I will be the first director on this stage to say I wish I’d never made this film. I wish to be able to exchange this [for] Russia never attacking Ukraine. …

“[With this documentary] we can make sure that the history record is set straight and the truth will prevail, and that the people of Mariupol, and those who have given their lives will never be forgotten, because cinema forms memories and memories form history,” he said.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s win for Best Supporting Actress for “The Holdovers” was the night’s most moving acting award, in part because she beat out such favorites as Emily Blunt in “Oppenheimer” and Jodie Foster in “Nyad.”

The award was much deserved for Randolph’s performance as a prep school cafeteria manager whose son died in Vietnam.

“Barbie” star Ryan Gosling’s performance of the Oscar-nominated song “I’m Just Ken” from “Barbie” was a showstopper.

But the song that won for Best Original Song was “What Was I Made For?” written by Billie Eilish, 22, and her older brother and collaborator, Finneas O’Connell, 26.

It was the second Oscar for this sister-brother team after their win in 2022 for the title song of the James Bond movie “No Time To Die.”

Their performance of “What Was I Made For?” Sunday night on the Oscars may have been the most elegantly produced segment in the entire show as Finneas accompanied his sister on an upright piano and provided backup vocals as both of them were silhouetted against a warm, purple background.

Surprisingly, much of the comedy written for the show fell flat -- surprising because the Oscar shows hosted by Jimmy Kimmel have traditionally set a high bar for comedy writing.

Bits just didn’t come together such as the repartee between co-presenters Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer as they feigned a mix-up over the male strippers known as the Chippendales and “Chip ’n’ Dale,” the famed cartoon chipmunks. The bit was terrible enough to make you wince. 

So was the tussle between Emily Blunt and Gosling over the rivalry between “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” last year as they both vied for box office supremacy. 

In both comedy bits, the hearts of the participants were just not in it, and everyone watching at home knew it.

Even Kimmel’s opening monologue lacked his usual bite. One of his attempts at comedy falls into the “puzzling moment” category.

That was when he made a joke about Robert Downey Jr., eventual Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner for “Oppenheimer.”

The joke went something like this: Addressing Downey, who was seated in the audience, Kimmel said something like, “Is that an acceptance speech in your pants or is your penis just shaped like that?”

Like network sitcoms reviewed here that are too numerous to count at this point, this jolting penis remark came just minutes into the Oscar show, leading a jaded TV columnist to wonder who let the sitcom writers into the Oscar writers’ room.

One comedy bright spot was provided by John Mullaney, stellar stand-up comedian and presenter for Best Achievement in Sound.

He gave a rambling bit on the old baseball movie “Field of Dreams” that was hilarious, leading a still-jaded TV columnist to wonder if he wrote it himself.

The most conspicuous new gimmick at this year’s Oscars was the appearance of former Oscar winners who paid tribute to this year’s nominees in four categories -- Best Supporting Actor and Actress, and Best Actor and Actress.

For example, the five former Best Actor winners who appeared together on stage were Nicholas Cage (“Leaving Las Vegas”), Matthew McConaughey (“Dallas Buyers Club”), Brendan Fraser (last year’s winner for “The Whale”), Ben Kingsley (“Gandhi”) and Forest Whitaker (“The Last King of Scotland”).

They then each addressed one of this year’s nominees such as Cage honoring Paul Giamatti, Best Actor nominee for “The Holdovers.” 

Sustaining this bit over four acting categories required 20 former Oscar winners in four different segments, which all seemed overlong.

But at the same time, the Oscar show as a whole did not feel that way, even though it clocked in at just shy of three-and-a-half hours.

Perhaps the reason the show did not seem as draggy as usual was because the start time this year was an hour earlier than usual -- 7 p.m. Eastern instead of 8.

It ended a few minutes before 10:30, which may have been the earliest end time for an Oscar show in modern TV history. 

And it left a spare half hour before the local news for an episode of “Abbott Elementary,” which Kimmel promoted throughout the show.

Speaking of promotions, Tequila Don Julio made a high-profile in-show appearance as Kimmel sidekick Guillermo, security guard from “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” showed up to attempt to drink a tequila toast with every single member of the theater’s audience.

Kimmel dissuaded him from this, of course, but nevertheless appeared to take a gulp of tequila himself from one of Don Julio's distinctive, signature slender bottles that he held in his hand before going on with the show.