In Changing Times A Triumph For Original Films & Warner Bros.

David Zaslav almost sounded like Martin Scorsese in his effusive praise of cinema and what his Warner Bros Discovery studio achieved Sunday night at the Oscars.

When I spoke to him at the Governors Ball he couldn’t be more enthused and pumped right after WBD took home a leading 11 Oscars including Best Picture and five others for One Battle After Another, four Oscars with Sinners including Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan and Best Original Screenplay for Ryan Coolger, and another for Weapons supporting actress winner Amy Madigan (and it is 12 if you add in the Sound Oscar Apple won for F1 which Warners distributed).

“What a night we had,” he told me while holding court with Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy at the crowded WBD celebratory corner of the ballroom. When I said it must be especially sweet that all the winning movies were originals, he was even more thilled. “I can tell you probably two of those three films might never have been made were it not for them, ” he said indicating his leadership team and the belief the studio had in those movies. “I think Weapons probably would have been made, but not (Sinners and One Battle After Another).” Of course he believes that is a tribute to De Luca and Abdy, and added the deal, controversial in some corners of the business, that Warners made was right in retrospect, notably Coogler’s for creative ownership of Sinners with rights reverting to the filmmaker after 25 years. “Look, yes we made that deal but it’s important because we want to be in the Ryan Coogler business, the Michael B. Jordan business, the Paul Thomas Anderson business ” he said not sounding at all like a studio head that is in the midst of merging all of WBD with Paramount/Skydance in an astronomical financial deal that will put David Ellison in charge of two of Hollywood’s legacy studios if it eventually gets the green light.

De Luca and Abdy didn’t sound too worried about the future when I caught up with them there as well. De Luca said it was a night that couldn’t have been more perfect. When someone came up to Abdy and suggested they might have a good year with the 2026 slate too, she simply asked, “what could possibly be better than this?”

What is also really significant, and perhaps game changing, is that One Battle After Another, Sinners, and Weapons all amassed these wins and record numbers of nominations (in the case of Sinners) without setting foot at a film festival, not the usual path these days to winning Oscars although Oppenheimer also proved it wasn’t necessary in 2023.

As for those acting wins, nobody doubted Jessie Buckley would be up there winning Best Actress for Hamnet, but there was genuine suspense and unseasonable twists and turns of late in the other three races, though I wound up correctly calling all of them as well as the Best Picture/Director/Adapted Screenplay wins for One Battle After Another, plus in the latter film the Best Supporting Actor win of the absent Sean Penn who in turn skipped BAFTA and the Actors Awards which he also won. In fact post-Golden Globes (where he did show but lost) the only appearance he has made since getting Oscar nominated again was with me on stage at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival where he, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Benicio Del Toro were honored last month with the Hammond Cinema Vanguard Award.

Penn, deservedly if you ask me, is now a member of the three acting Oscars club, a rare circle to be in that only includes Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Ingrid Bergman, Daniel Day Lewis, Frances McDormand, and Walter Brennan (in the early years before they switched supporting trophies from plaques to statuettes). Katharine Hepburn got four but nobody has caught her yet. Reports say he is in Europe, possibly on his way to Ukraine but no one has confirmed that as of press time. It is interesting that media is so shocked a winner, especially someone tipped to win, doesn’t show up. However until the modern age of Oscar campaigns it was not at all unusual to see acting winners as no-shows. In 1966 for instance only Walter Matthau was present to get his Supporting Actor award, while the other three skipped the ceremony. In recent years the most notable absence was 2020 winner Anthony Hopkins in the drastically scaled-down Covid-affected ceremony.

As for Best Actor Michael B. Jordan it was momentum that came late in the game after his big win at SAG’s Actor Awards right in the middle of Oscar voting and following the classy way he handled that unfortunate N-word incident at BAFTA while presenting there. One-time front runner Timothee Chalamet, after winning precursors like Golden Globes and Critics Choice saw a change in his fortunes slipping significantly in the oddmakers world. Jordan hadn’t been on the campaign trail because he was in Europe directing and starring in The Thomas Crown Affair, but made up for lost time beginning with a very warm evening when he given this year’s American Cinematheque Tribute in late November reigniting attention on the dual roles for the film that opened way back in April. That started the ball rolling and brought more of a spotlight on his remarkable work as twins Smoke and Stack in Sinners. He is now only the second person to win an Oscar playing twins, the first being Lee Marvin exactly sixty years ago for Cat Ballou.

It was a huge moment, as was the first award of the evening to Madigan who waited 40 years for her second nomination to come, and finally her first win. Ironically that first nomination came in 1985 for a movie called Twice In A Lifetime. Twice, indeed! Never say never, and she couldn’t have been more gracious about a long overdue honor and a character that deserves a prequel pronto.

Ties are also rare, but not quite as rare as one of the winners blurted out accepting her Live Action Short Oscar for Two People Exchanging Saliva which tied with The Singers. She said it had only happened three times to her understanding. Uh, no. This tie was the seventh time in Oscar history, the last being in 2013 for Sound Editing (now combined into the single Sound category) for Zero Dark Thirty and Skyfall. Of course the most memorable was in 1969 when Barbra Streisand and Katharine Hepburn tied for Best Actress. I thought presenter Kumail Nanjiani was incredibly smooth in handling this when opening the envelope. “It’s a tie. This isn’t a joke. It really is a tie,” the comedian assured the audience and then went on the methodically say exactly how it would be presented, with one acceptance speech taking place before the second winner was announced. It was so smooth that when I ran into him as he stood in line to get food at the Governors Ball I asked him if he might have been tipped off. “Did they prep you for a tie?” I wondered? He explained they regularly simply tell presenters how to handle it if there should be a tie. “I loved it. It’s more fun to be off the cuff like this. It makes it interesting,” he said as he dipped into the Apple Struedel with Caramel Sauce and other desserts laid out.

Warners had a very big night, but so in fact did Netflix tying their own best Oscar record with seven wins including two for Sony Pictures Animation’s groundbreaking KPop Demon Hunters with a “Golden” song performance that literally lit up the room (everyone was given wrist lights for the performance of it), and three for Guillermo del Toro’s passion project, Frankenstein. The great del Toro got plenty of camera time on the Oscars since he got thanked a lot by the winnners of Production and Costume Design, as well as the Makeup and Hair team. He was in and out of the Governors Ball just as I was arriving but stopped long enough to tell me he thought it was a lovely night, beautifully done, and he couldn’t be more pleased. Netflix also had two richly deserved short film awards including The Singers, and the emotionally devastating All The Empty Rooms which chronicled the sad aftermath of young students killed in school shootings. All the parents of the kids who tragically lost their lives and depicted in the film were at the Academy Awards Sunday night, and one of them was up on stage making a heartfelt plea to stop this unthinkable violence . Congratulations to director Joshua Seftel and Steve Hartman, the CBS correspondent who came up with the idea for the original CBS news segment, and subsequent film. I first met them on the trail at the Telluride Film Festival when the movie premiered over Labor Day, and now all the way to the Oscars.

As for the show, perhaps the biggest suprise was that there weren’t any major surprises in the end. On our sister site Gold Derby I got 21/24 categories right ( I had changed one of my Deadline predictions Sunday morning to Documentary Feature winner Mr. Nobody Against Putin -a BAFTA winner too – and it paid off). The show itself (at least from my vantage point in the Parterre section on the ground floor of the Dolby Theatre) was eloquent, with the most stunning production design I have ever seen at an Oscar ceremony, and contained another perfect hosting turn by Conan O’Brien right from the opening inspired tape bit where he is dressed as Madigan’s Aunt Gladys chased by a bunch of little kids inserted through most of the Best Picture nominees and into the theatre.

Brilliant. It was inspired no doubt by what Billy Crystal used to do as host, and O’Brien himself when he hosted the Emmys. The fact that there was no attempt to thwart political jokes and opinions was refreshing, a promise made to me by the producers Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan about letting the participants say what is in their heart and minds, but unfortunately there were a few too many attempts to play off some of the speeches, notably the one for Best Song, that ended awkwardly. Just let them talk (well maybe not Adrien Brody who made fun of his own loooooong acceptance speech last year while presenting this year).

Speaking of Crystal, his heartfelt tribute to best friend Rob Reiner was beautiful followed by the reveal of so many stars who, like him, appeared in Reiner’s movies. In fact the whole In Memoriam segment was a touch of class which also included Rachel McAdams, and ended with Barbra Streisand’s memorable tribute to her The Way We Were co-star Robert Redford and a tiny bit of that Oscar winning theme song. However, there are always omissions but to leave out the iconic French star Brigitte Bardot??? C’mon folks. And this came on top of last year’s shocking omission of another French icon, Alain Delon. Both coincidentally were outspoken in their later years for rather extreme right wing views, but that can’t be the reason, can it? To Bardot and Delon you are remembered in this column, if not at the Oscars, with great respect for two immortal film careers.

Of course it is almost impossible to do an Oscar show and not get a lot of gripes, but still this one had a nice easygoing feel to it, and additional evidence of that was the Governors Ball afterward was still packed two hours after it started, a good sign for an event that often has people rushing off quickly to Vanity Fair and other parties. In fact the Sinners crowd was still celebrating even when I finally left, and so were many others before heading off into the night.

So another Oscar year is in the books. On to the 99th (!) and hopefully a movie year that is as good as this one turned out to be, and that the studio responsible for so much of it is somehow still standing proud and independent come the next Academy Awards. But that is One Battle to talk about on another day.

Congratulations to all the winners and nominees. It’s been fun. See you down the road.