The Best & Worst Of The 2021 Academy Awards

It was an Oscars ceremony unlike any other, but even the stripped-down version of the 2021 Academy Awards had its share of highlights and lowlights. Here’s our list of the best (and worst) moments – and yes, Daniel Kaluuya talking about his parents having sex made the list. How could it not?

Anyways, let’s start things off with the only Oscar topic anyone will want to talk about for the next few days.

Worst: Best Actor Switcheroo

Let me be perfectly clear – there is nothing wrong with Anthony Hopkins winning Best Actor for “The Father.” If you skipped that film during the award season because it seemed like typical Oscar bait, you missed a performance (and a production) that is as unconventional as it is distressing. Hopkins gave an Oscar-worthy performance, even in a year where Chadwick Boseman was the runaway favorite across the board.

But whether the Academy was gambling on a Boseman win or not, switching Best Actor with Best Picture upends years of precedent and managed to undercut the power of both wins. Boseman might’ve deserved an Oscar, but Chloé Zhao and company deserved more than a million audience members doing game theory over their acceptance speeches to try and figure out what this meant for the Best Actor category.

Best: Yuh-Jung Youn’s Acceptance Speech

The best Oscar moments are the ones that cannot be scripted when a flustered award winner stumbles into an accidental moment of profundity. Of course, if you’re award-winner Yuh-Jung Youn, you may as well stumble into four or five. From her gentle teasing of presenter Brad Pitt to her good-natured shade about the mispronunciation of her name and ending with her joke about being forced to work by her children, Youn added candor and charm when the broadcast needed it the most.

Worst: That “Da Butt” to In Memoriam Transition

How well the Questlove trivia skit landed probably depends on your appreciation of all things Glenn Close, but it’s hard not to feel kind of weird about the fact that the only place they could think to add that segment was right before the In Memoriam section. At best, it’s a bit of tonal whiplash that did not need to be – but with things already running long, it probably could’ve been an easy cut.

Rule of Three aside, cutting a few minutes off that skit would have also allowed the producers to slow down the edit on the In Memoriam section just a little more. In a year marked by loss, the In Memoriam section needed to stand for empathy more than ever – and speeding through some of the lesser-known Hollywood artists becomes the wrong kind of commentary on the losses of 2020 as a whole.

Best: “Husavik” Performance

The decision to air the Best Original Song performances during the Oscar pre-show may have been a necessary evil this year – it is hard to see them fitting into the more casual format that the Academy adopted – but that doesn’t mean they weren’t deeply missed. As we noted in our roundup, the songs are often a much-needed blast of energy during the middle hour of the broadcast.

That said, it probably didn’t matter when “Husavik” was played – it was going to bring down the house. While all of the other performances were pre-recorded atop the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Molly Sandén and her backing choir of children recorded in the actual town of Husavik, adding a nice dash of spectacle. When your song doesn’t need to be performed live, you should have some fun with it – and that’s exactly what the “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” performers did.