‘Oppenheimer’ closes out awards season with Best Picture and 6 more Oscars

The Academy has to be pretty happy with this year’s Oscar ceremony. A popular movie won Best Picture. There was some late suspense with Best Actress. The show ended before 10:30 p.m. And no one got slapped.

Oppenheimer was the big winner of the night, taking home Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing and Best Original Score. At long last, Christopher Nolan’s work as a director has been honored by the Academy.

With Best Actress being the penultimate award of the night, the race between Lily Gladstone and Emma Stone wasn’t solved until the final moments of the ceremony. If my Oscar pool was any indication, Gladstone was expected to win, and based on the look on Stone’s face when her name was announced, the Poor Things actress expected Gladstone too.

I would’ve loved the show’s new earlier 7 p.m. ET start time back when I was working at a daily newspaper and we worried about whether the Oscars would wrap up in time for print deadline. As as parent with a toddler whose bedtime starts at 7, though, Oscar viewing got pushed to the background. (I did manage to learn that my Oscar pool ballot had been eliminated three categories in. My chance at a threepeat died quickly.)

Ryan Gosling brought down the house with his performance of “I’m Just Ken.” Part of me almost expected the show to keep this one until the end. (Hey, there’s precedent for the Oscars not ending with Best Picture. Remember the year they held onto Best Actor thinking Chadwick Boseman was going to get a posthumous win?) I loved seeing Gosling with Greta Gerwig, Margot Robbie and America Ferrera during this performance.

Best Picture

• American Fiction
• Anatomy of a Fall
• Barbie
• The Holdovers
• Killers of the Flower Moon
• Maestro
• Oppenheimer
• Past Lives
• Poor Things
• The Zone of Interest