Oscars - The performance of goodness

---

Yes, I watched them.

With no expectations and no enthusiasm. In fact, fully aware that I would regret it.

The idea of not watching the Oscars was especially appealing—so rationally impeccable it had become seductive. But in the end, thanks to insomnia, I decided to watch them.

It turned out to be more exhausting than expected.

“I warn you, tonight could get political,” host Conan O’Brien announces at the start of the ceremony. And, indeed, it did.

O’Brien—a sort of coked-up Pippo Baudo trying to do stand-up—is predictable and completely harmless. Little joke about AI. Little joke about fucking Trump. Little joke about the Epstein Files. How awful stand-up becomes when it turns into a rosary, a liturgical checklist of words and topics that comedians now seem to think they simply cannot avoid.

But let’s get to the point.

I’m not interested in commenting on who won what, or in sharing my personal tastes. What matters to me is a thought that stayed with me after watching the show.

Let’s begin with a bit of context.

Over the past few months, public opinion has repeatedly stressed how political this year’s edition was. As if people didn’t say that every single year.

Obviously, the Oscars, like the Venice and Cannes film festivals, have always been sites of political tension too—and inevitably so, I would add—because they occupy such a central place in the media landscape that every gesture and every word instantly resonates. In truth, though, more than political spaces, they are occasions where declaring your alignment with the issues of the world is no longer an act but a compulsory passage, almost a posture. Not so much ethical as aesthetic. Glossy. Geopolitical, social, gender and racial disputes enter the conversation as elements of set design; they become an integral part of the rhetoric of entertainment and spectacle: moral alignment as an accessory, as embellishment, something you wear with the same ease and the same superficiality as a carefully styled haircut or a blazer chosen for the evening.

An Ethical Selection for walking the Red Carpet.

Anyone who works in film knows this well: for years now, productions have operated within ever tighter ethical parameters.

Crews are expected to meet gender-inclusion criteria, often with at least near parity in their composition, while Hollywood and platforms like Netflix enforce increasingly rigid policies on ethnic representation too, with percentages to be respected both on and off set, right up to the awards themselves. None of this is incidental; it is structural. It affects working conditions, access to funding, and the evaluation process behind national and international grant schemes. The same is now true of the ecological question: the sustainability of filming—which involves far from negligible costs—has become a necessary requirement. The film industry now functions within a very specific ethical perimeter.

This year’s Oscars were no exception.

The chaos of the geopolitical situation forced people to ask whether it was even safe to greenlight the event. But the show must go on. We’ve got to hand out these statuettes no matter what.

So there were unprecedented security checks, celebrities shadowed by security men more than ever, and exclusion zones that turned the Dolby Theatre into a bunker hosting a sealed-off party where, with ritual stubbornness, the industry celebrates itself.

That stubbornness was described and defended as an act of resistance: a partisan Hollywood refusing to bend to the dominant political climate, and instead doubling down on cinema as a tool capable of creating an alternative space—more human, more sensitive—in opposition to the daily noise of public discourse. It is a narrative that works, at least on the surface, but one that nevertheless shows more than a few cracks.

One of the most tense media moments came offstage, when Motaz Malhees, actor in The Voice of Hind Rajab, announced that he could not attend the ceremony because he is Palestinian, marking his absence through a social media story: “You can block a passport. But not a voice.”

Alongside that, there was no shortage of gestures and displays of solidarity during the ceremony itself. From Javier Bardem’s little revolutionary pin telling us “No to war” to another little pin, reading “ICE OUT,” worn by Polish costume designer Małgosia Turzańska, nominated for Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet. One might say that little is still better than nothing. But that is not really the problem in itself. The question is how a revolution of lapel pins is supposed to have any effect—or even resonate at all, raise awareness, show solidarity, use whichever verb you like—within a context that, a few minutes earlier, awards a documentary about Russian regime propaganda—Mr. Nobody Against Putin—and then immediately follows it with a gag about Channing Tatum’s underwear in Magic Mike.

The final effect is a show without continuity and without friction, a jumble of incompatible elements and registers that, rather than merely feeling out of tune, become revealing.

And this is precisely where something becomes clear: it is not the presence of politics, in itself, that is problematic, but the way everything else—cinema, beauty, judgment, feeling, even writing and technical choices—ends up being subordinated and sacrificed to a higher level that presents itself as more urgent, more necessary. A superior importance that imposes itself as the sole measure and the dominant criterion.

And so what presents itself as philanthropy—as openness, sensitivity, social critique—gradually slips into something else: a form of political utilitarianism that no longer asks films simply to be, but to serve a purpose, to prove their usefulness.

Listening to the speeches, reading the public debate, leafing through articles in magazines of varying authority and by critics of equal inconsistency, a fairly clear tendency emerges: the value of the nominated films is being justified more by what they represent than by what they are.

Let me be clear. The point is not to decide whether the films are good or bad, nor to make personal rankings. For instance, One Battle After Another is, in my view, a tremendous film, and Paul Thomas Anderson remains one of the three greatest directors working today. But that is not the ground I’m interested in here. Let’s get to the heart of the issue.

What I noticed is that films like Sinners or One Battle After Another were framed—even before being analyzed, and perhaps even before being seen—as political devices.

It’s a good film because it deals with American racism.It’s a good film because it’s a metaphor for contemporary America.

That’s the point: it seems to me that the “why” is in danger of replacing the “how” and the “what.” And this is not just about the way films are made or read; it points to a deeper shift, one that has probably already happened, in the way we think about and consume the cinematic experience.

As obvious as it may sound—or worse, like some out-of-date abstraction—cinema remains a language: what matters is what is being told and how it is being told. The “why” belongs to another order of discourse, the order of interviews and biographies. It is not the film. Or rather, it is not what makes the film a subject in its own right. There are all sorts of philosophical digressions one could go into here. The entire twentieth century, after all, made this point with some insistence. Adorno perhaps said it better than anyone else: the personal, psychological or historical motives that contribute to the birth of a work are only one part of the story, not its organising principle. They cannot be elevated into the dominant criterion without distorting the overall balance, without crushing what the work actually does: form, content, the construction of language, material conditions, tools, and the interplay among all these elements. All of that together is what produces experience.

The risk, then, is not so much that cinema becomes “politicised”—that has always happened, in one way or another—but that it is emptied out, reduced to the vehicle of a discourse external to it, one that ends up preceding it, steering it, and in the end almost replacing it.

Let me try to explain more clearly.

Take Sinners. The feeling is that it is not just the theme that shapes the film, but something more pervasive: a political intention, a rhetorical ambition, an ideological framework that do not merely pass through it, but end up determining it, moulding its narrative structure, the way the story takes shape, even its staging choices.

Here one senses cinema shifting. Once conceived as an autonomous construction, as a language, it now seems to be retreating. Not because the film lacks qualities—it would be too easy to dismiss it that way, by listing the photography, the costumes, the soundtrack—but because all those elements, though present, seem to be arranged hierarchically beneath something that precedes and directs them. The characters and the subjects begin to look like pieces on a board, moved and arranged in order to transmit a message.

A message that is, to be clear, entirely legitimate. Cinema can be political; it always has been, and at times in the highest possible way.

But the feeling here is different. It is no longer a content that generates a political reflection; it seems instead to be a political reflection that determines the content in advance, setting its direction and its limits before the film has even had the chance to happen.

Perhaps, as Europeans, we also pay the price of a certain legacy—precious, but burdensome—that allowed us to think of film as something that can be deeply political without being explicitly so, capable of leaving a mark, of settling slowly, of working on consciousness without having to constantly display its civic intent.

So what is the result? That aesthetic judgment is entirely replaced by a moral verdict. The question is no longer whether a film holds together, whether it works, whether it finds a necessary form, but whether it stands on the right side.

In that sense, the Oscars functioned like a magnifying glass: cinema increasingly seems to be turning into an industry of virtue. Films are no longer good or bad, but important or useless.

The final scene of Sinners—the one in which Michael B. Jordan, triceps front and centre, wearing a plumber’s tank top turned into a uniform, guns down a dozen white people and blows them apart—is, in the end, perfectly consistent with that framework: a didactic, artificial image so overloaded with symbolism that it stops being symbolic at all, an image persuasive enough for the Academy to hand the statuette straight to Michael.

The winners’ acceptance speeches only confirmed the same dynamic, intertwining personal recognition and moral positioning.

• Joachim Trier, awarded for Sentimental Value, focused above all on children, invoking the collective responsibility adults bear toward them and urging people not to support politicians who fail to take that duty seriously.

• Michael B. Jordan, accepting Best Actor for Sinners, structured his speech around inheritance: he invoked figures such as Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, Forest Whitaker and Will Smith, calling them “ancestors” and acknowledging the role they played in opening a path.

• Jessie Buckley, by contrast, oriented her speech toward a more intimate and symbolic register, dedicating the award to women and motherhood.

Finally, Ryan Coogler stressed his own place within a broader history, reminding the audience that he was only the seventh Black director ever nominated for an Oscar, and choosing to celebrate those who came before him, recognising their impact on cinema and on his own trajectory.

Each person situates themselves, defines themselves, claims a belonging or expresses solidarity with someone else. Each seems compelled to declare a position, to recognise themselves within a category or, conversely, to assume responsibility for someone else’s.

As though stepping onto that stage now automatically required the display of a codified identity and sensibility, more than the expression of an artistic experience. It really did feel like watching the Oscars for Best Guilt Complex. Who would have thought that political correctness would lead to political reward.

Perhaps the most revolutionary gesture, in light of all this rhetoric, would simply be to keep making films. Good films.

Refusing an Oscar, as Sean Penn did—with all the risk of it looking petulant and theatrical—remains the most relevant and most alive thing that happened all night. The only gesture, in the end, that was truly political.

At four in the morning, turning off the TV, I found myself thinking how nice it would have been to see Michael B. Jordan or Jessie Buckley react to their win in full Sal Da Vinci style: a yell, a half-blasphemous collapse to their knees, eyes bulging out of their heads and hands clasped toward God—or perhaps toward Diego Armando.

Because, really, unruliness and raw truthfulness remain infinitely more political attitudes than this fragrant, immaculate performance of goodness.

---

Oscars - The performance of goodness