Lots to talk about with last night's Academy Awards telecast, which had a lot of highlights and some frustrating parts, Let's get straight to the ups and downs:
Good: Conan O'Brien
Can Conan just host this as long as he wants to? Not since Billy Crystal's original run in the Nineties has a host seemed this comfortable in the job, and this clearly happy to do it for a while.
Conan had a higher overall batting average last year, though I'd lay some of his missteps on the production rather than him, including several moments where he didn't seem to know he was on camera. Whoever decided to end the show with a parody of a One Battle After Another scene — that had Conan's longtime pal and collaborator Jim Downey reprising his role from the film — it felt poorly timed. (The idea of the gag was good; it just didn't work as the last moment, after the movie itself had just had such a celebration.) But the opening montage, with Conan made up as Amy Madigan's Weapons character, inserting himself into various nominated films while being chased by the Weapons kids, was delightful. His monologue was pointed where it needed to be, both in terms of mocking the industry (suggesting Netflix boss Ted Sarandos wasn't happy to see so many people in a theater, rather than alone where he could monetize them) or the current lousy state of the world (pointing out that Britain seems much more eager to prosecute high-profile pedophiles than our own country at the moment).
This kind of high-profile hosting role often seems thankless, but the level of fun Conan is having with it is infectious.
Bad: Presenter banter