This year, the Oscars are too late

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.

The 98th annual Academy Awards will be held this Sunday, March 15, which is at least a month too late. We’re almost through with the first quarter of 2026 and we’ve been talking about last year’s movies for so long people are starting to lose their minds. The most obvious example of this is the current conflagration surrounding Best Actor frontrunner Timothée Chalamet’s comments on a CNN and Variety town hall with Matthew McConaughey. The “Marty Supreme” star expressed a perfectly reasonable worry about movies losing the mass audience and becoming a niche art form like opera and ballet, which are currently kept alive by a donor class.

But because scolding, pearl-clutching and performative outrage have replaced baseball as America’s national pastime, everyone has decided to act like they’re really mad about this. Chalamet’s been taken out behind the rhetorical woodshed by op-ed writers, TikTokers and Doja Cat. The ladies from “The View” called him a “vapid” little pipsqueak slagging off the fine arts.

What all these people seem to be willfully ignoring is that Chalamet’s mother and sister are both professional dancers and that the actor grew up in a federally subsidized artists’ housing complex near Lincoln Center. He knows better than most about the struggles of the fine arts in our current attention economy, and if half of the folks pretending to be offended on behalf of ballet and opera actually patronized their local operas and ballets, Timée’s comments wouldn’t have caused such a stir. As the saying goes, a hit dog’s gonna bark.

I don’t believe for a second that there are this many upset ballet and opera fans online. I think people are just tired of Timothée Chalamet. He’s been promoting “Marty Supreme” nonstop since last October’s New York Film Festival premiere and, even as a big fan of the film, I’d be happy to never hear a word about it again. There was a similar PR meltdown last week when “Hamnet” star and Best Actress shoo-in Jessie Buckley had to issue an apology for mean things she said about her boyfriend’s cats. Everyone has clearly run out of things to talk about with these films so we’re grasping at straws to keep the content mills churning through Oscar night.

The Gotham Awards are the first to announce their nominees in October. That means there are nearly six months of predictions, promotional events, precursor ceremonies, sit-down interviews and gala rubber chicken dinners before the Oscar envelopes are finally opened in March. We spend half of the year on year-end awards. No wonder everyone’s a little tetchy. This is unsustainable.

It doesn’t help that there aren’t any real Oscar controversies this season, with a by-and-large extremely respectable list of nominees. The Academy should be given credit for the way it’s righted the ship these past few years, after a disastrous run when they had presenters reading from the wrong envelopes during the ceremony and being assaulted onstage. It was an era of such eye-rolling contempt for movies and the people who make them that one year the Academy couldn’t even be bothered to give out the craft awards during the show. (And this film fan couldn’t be bothered to watch.)

As a critic, it is my solemn duty to complain about the Oscars and I’ve been doing so ever since “Chariots of Fire” beat “Raiders of the Lost Ark” when I was six years old. Friends never tire of reminding me how I tried to throw the TV out our dorm room window when “Pulp Fiction” lost to “Forrest Gump.” So it almost pains me to say that the Academy has pretty good taste these days. “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Oppenheimer” and “Anora” comprise a seriously cool streak of Best Picture winners, and this year’s slate is awfully strong — with one notable exception. I’ve received more reader feedback for my review of “Hamnet” than anything I’ve written in my 11 years at WBUR, almost all of it in overwhelming agreement. (My favorite was from a woman in Amherst planning to dump the guy she saw it with because he’d loved the film. Let me know how that worked out, Sarah.)

“Hamnet” is the kind of schlock that would have swept the Oscars in years past, especially in the middlebrow fraud era when forgettable pap like “The King’s Speech” and “The Artist” took home the gold. This year, “Hamnet” looks like it will have to be content with a prize for Jessie Buckley’s Olympian sob-a-thon, unless there are enough cat people among the voters to cause a surprise upset.

Were I a betting man, I’d put my money on “Sinners.” Ryan Coogler’s raucously entertaining gangster vampire musical would have been unthinkable as an Oscar contender just a decade ago, but this year blew past the record held by “Titanic,” “La La Land” and “All About Eve” to become the most-nominated film ever with 16 nods. It’s an incredible underdog story for a movie that was so under the radar I couldn’t get anyone here interested in running a review when the film first opened last April. Yes, April. We’ve been talking about “Sinners” for darn near a whole year.

As much as these movies and artists deserve their accolades, it’s also time for the conversation to move on.