For this year's Oscars, our film critic is focusing on the positives

Editor's Note: This story is an excerpt from WBUR's weekly arts and culture newsletter, The ARTery. If you like what you read and want it in your inbox, sign up here.

One of my favorite Oscar moments occurred during the 2002 ceremony when Robert Altman and David Lynch both lost the Academy Award for Best Director to Ron Howard for “A Beautiful Mind.” As the industry audience rose to its feet honoring a favorite son for the kind of strenuously mediocre biopic that collects trophies by the truckload, one of the cameras caught Altman and Lynch huddled together in the aisle, the two mavericks comforting each other with wry smiles. Lynch later recollected that when Howard’s name was announced, Altman called him over, pulled him close and said, “It’s better this way, David.”

In retrospect, it seems absurd that two era-defining geniuses like Altman and Lynch could lose to Howard, a middlebrow company man who makes perfectly serviceable entertainment for your parents. Even the Academy seemed to realize they’d goofed, with Altman and Lynch going on to receive honorary lifetime achievement Oscars in 2006 and 2019, respectively. (Altman’s was back when the Academy still cared enough about film history to include these things in the broadcast, and I remember having friends over that night for the expressed purpose of “watching Bob get an Oscar.”) Yet at the same time, it was still nice to see them nominated, with the Academy’s endorsement no doubt motivating a lot of viewers who wouldn’t have otherwise gone out to see “Mulholland Drive” or “Gosford Park.”

This is the conundrum any serious movie fan faces with the Oscars. It’s an insular trade organization that makes historically questionable choices; a silly popularity contest run by people with terrible taste. But it’s also a glamorous evening devoted to celebrating cinema, the one night a year when it seems like everyone in the world wants to talk about movies. That feels more and more precious these days, as the prominent place movies once held in the collective imagination is being increasingly crowded out by the twin scourges of streaming television and staring at crap on your phone.

So, I’m choosing to focus on the positives. I’m overjoyed that its six Oscar nominations have prompted more people to check out “Anora,” my personal favorite film of 2024. Writer-director Sean Baker’s raunchy, class-conscious screwball comedy would have been unthinkable as Best Picture nominee a few years ago, but recent efforts by the Academy to expand and internationalize its voting body have led to largely less embarrassing slates of nominees, occasionally embracing hip little indies like Baker’s alongside industry-anointed biopics and big budget juggernauts. We serious cinephiles can hate on the Oscars all day, but three-and-a-half-hour historical dramas like “The Brutalist” don’t play in multiplexes without those nominations. Whatever brings more eyeballs to something as innovative and necessary as “Nickel Boys” is a force for good, overall.

Admittedly, awards season can be a grind. Kicking off with the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals in late summer and dragging out through the Oscars in March, it’s half a year of relentless lobbying and campaigning and I’m sure the seemingly endless flood of precursor awards shows and announcements must be numbing for casual viewers. (You’d be amazed by how few of the “critics” who vote in these critics group awards review movies. I imagine the studios must prefer it this way, as they get all the prizes and adulation with none of the actual, you know, criticism.)

For every unexpected delight of the season, like Timothee Chalamet performing Bob Dylan rarities on “Saturday Night Live” — I wonder how many teenage girls streamed the “New Morning” album that Sunday — there’s a flameout like “Emilia Perez” actress Karla Sofía Gascón being exiled for her spectacularly offensive social media posts. (For the record, “Emilia Perez” doesn’t deserve to lose because of its star’s terrible tweets. It deserves to lose because it’s a very bad movie. Also, it’s a Netflix movie, so it should be up for Emmys, not Oscars. Steven Spielberg was right when he tried to nip this nonsense in the bud six years ago.)

As a movie fan, I’m just rooting for the Academy to pull together a broadcast that doesn’t openly insult nominees in the craft categories. Fingers crossed, here’s hoping they can get through the show without anybody announcing the wrong winners or assaulting one of the presenters onstage. And if a film or performance you love doesn’t go home with the gold, remember what seven-time loser Robert Altman said to four-time loser David Lynch. Sometimes it’s better this way.