Frances McDormand (left) and director Chloe Zhao, after their Oscar wins for “Nomadland”. Photo: GETTY IMAGES

The day finally arrived, Oscars time. The final day of awards season, the near 18-month long marathon to get here finally over. I love the Oscars, have since I was a child. When I woke up this morning I was so happy to finally have it here.

And yet, it was the worst Oscars I’ve ever seen. And that’s saying something, because I was watching when “Crash” and “Green Book” won Best Picture in their respective years. This was truly the worst Oscars I’ve ever witnessed. Not because the winners were bad, oh no. It was the show itself, which was truly horrendous.

It actually started off strongly. Before the show, Steven Soderbergh (director of “Traffic”, “Ocean’s Trilogy”), who was producing this years’ awards alongside Stacey Sher (“Traffic”, “Erin Brokovich”) and Jesse Collins said it will “look like a movie, not a television show.” And to begin with, it did.

There was an opening credits with Regina King walking into Union Station, owning the awards and being one of the most charismatic people on the planet. I even heard someone in the room yell: “YAS QUEEN”, which is a hard yes from me. It was great. It was different to the usual awards pomp and it felt fresh. Then the rest of the night happened.

I’ve been told to keep this to a strict 1200-word limit because apparently my last article was too thorough. Therefore, let me just say I had a lot of issues with tonight’s show, so much so that my notes are about 2500 words. If you want more salt, ask me in 50 years, because I’ll still be salty about it then.

The quality most notably lacking in this years’ Oscars were the clips. There were almost no clips from any of the films being awarded. It’s an awards show for films, for God’s sake, it’s a visual medium! But there were clips for only a minority of categories.

At first, I thought maybe it was just a time issue, but then they didn’t have any problem letting the first few speeches run for 500 years or having the presenters wax lyrical about movies that inspired the nominees, which they were seemingly doing because there were no clips to show.

It was a bizarre and simply stupid decision on behalf of everyone who produced the Oscars. The Oscars as a telecast have always been a marketing exercise on behalf of film studios rather than a real appreciation for films.

The people making them, voting on them and being awarded sure appreciate films. But the producers’ jobs were always to show the audience at home what they could see in theatres, or now, on streaming services. The lack of clips not only undermines the Oscars for the artists being awarded, but it fundamentally fails at its primary purpose, which is to advertise these films to people who may not otherwise watch them.

If it had been so throughout the entire show, no clips at all, it still would have been awful but more understandable. But because there were clips for certain awards such as Best International Feature Film, Best Animated Feature Film and Best Picture, yet no clips for any of the acting categories, screenplay, editing or even cinematography, the show felt incredibly uneven.

The teleprompter script even had Halle Berry say: “Some of us don’t understand cinematography,” but then proceeded to neither explain nor show what cinematography was to the audience before the Oscar was handed out.

Which brings me to the worst win of the night. And that was “Mank” winning cinematography over “Nomadland”. Dear Lord.

In my last piece reviewing the nominations and tipping the winners, I wrote:

“This should be a landslide victory for Richards. ‘Nomadland’ is the most beautifully-shot film of the season. The landscapes are another character in the story, and if the Oscar goes to anyone else, I will be flipping tables furious. ‘Mank’s’ over-performance in nominations could translate to a win here, but overall, I don’t think it should win. It’s a film entirely on digital that’s been shot in black and white but then made to look as if it’s shot on film stock with fake cue marks dispersed throughout. It looked too glossy and fake and if it somehow wins instead … yeah, not happy, Jan.”

And then it fucking won. So I don’t think I really need to restate how I feel about that. I have no tables to flip currently, but I did yell so loudly I woke my dog up. So there you go.

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For what it’s worth, Erik Messerschmidt, who won for “Mank”, is generally a great artist and fantastic at his job. His work on “Mindhunter” was brilliant. But the mere fact that he’s credited on “Mank” as “photographed in hi-dynamic range by…” but they then put in all that work to make it look “old timey”, is, frankly, a joke.

That, in my opinion, was the only bad win of the night. Overall, the 93rd Academy Awards were actually quite well deserved by everyone who won. It’s amazing that there’s only one win I’m truly angry about.

Emerald Fennell winning Best Original Screenplay? Love to see it. Chloé Zhao winning Best Director and Best Picture and being only the second woman to win Best Director and the first woman of colour to do so? Iconic.

Daniel Kaluuya winning Best Supporting Actor and then accidentally talking about his parents’ sex life on international television? Entertaining as hell and also very well-deserved. “Sound of Metal” winning both Best Sound and Best Editing? Beautiful. Youn Yuh-Jung finally getting to meet Brad Pitt and just being “luckier” than everyone else in her category? A shining light in an otherwise dull-as-piss ceremony.

The winners are nothing to complain about, except for the one I just, you know, complained about. But this was truly a disastrous year when it came to the Magnum Opus of Awards Season. Best Picture and Best Director are always some of the last Oscars to be presented. Always. It heightens the suspense and helps build to a dramatic climax. Anyone who’s ever worked in any kind of creative storytelling medium knows that your story is going to need a climax. And if I say climax one more time this might start to sound like an “Orgazmo” joke.

These Oscars had no dramatic ending. In fact, they barely had an ending. They put Best Director an hour into the show instead of towards the end for reasons I cannot fathom. It undercut Zhao’s historic win and took the wind out of the show’s sails.

It is a ground-breaking historic win and it was just treated with little to no reverence. There wasn’t even a standing ovation. Now, I’m sure that doesn’t bother Zhao, but it bothers me. Because she deserves every single accolade she’s been given for “Nomadland”.

It only got worse from there. They moved Best Picture, literally the biggest award of the night, to before Best Actor in a Leading Role and Best Actress in a Leading Role.

One can only assume it’s because the producers thought the outcome was a given. That Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis would win those awards respectively. And that would create their big climactic moment, much like “Parasite’s” win last year being prolonged by the audience in the Dolby Theatre, which created the big climactic moment.

But then, neither Boseman nor Davis won. Frances McDormand won her third Oscar for acting, which was richly deserved and then gave a 30-second speech because she’s Frances McDormand and she can do that. And then Anthony Hopkins won for “The Father” and because it’s the middle of the night in the UK and he’s in his 80s, he wasn’t there to accept. So it was just done.

It was like “lol okay bye then, I guess?” The most awkward, least dramatic, least climactic Oscars I’ve ever witnessed. They took a big gamble on assuming Boseman’s narrative would pull him through and create their moment. And they lost. So instead of ending on a high note, celebrating the historic win of “Nomadland”, it ended on a bum note and me playing the producers the world’s smallest violin.

I assumed this year would be a real celebration of the resilience of cinema given the pandemic, the altered release strategies, the changes to traditional modes of filmmaking and the fact that Soderbergh was producing gave me hope.

And for a while, I had some. Speeches weren’t being played off, people were allowed to finish saying what inspired them and who they had to thank. But ultimately, because the Oscars are a flashy marketing exercise, artistic appreciation gave way to commercial consideration. And there wasn’t sufficient credit given for one’s art by the audience. As the audience could not see what was winning, you just had to assume it was good as the camera focused on a group of awkward creatives.

I love films. I love everything about them and everything that goes into them. This year’s Oscars did not. Truly a travesty of a telecast that undermined some otherwise worthy wins and historic moments.

As Tina Fey and Amy Poehler had memorably put it during the Golden Globes a couple of months back, this all could have been done in an email.