The Oscars Promised To Be A Movie, And Boy, Did It Have A Twist Ending

Anthony Hopkins’ shocking Best Actor win over Chadwick Boseman gave the Academy Awards a chaotic conclusion to what was already an unusual ceremony.

The producers of Sunday’s Oscars promised the pandemic ceremony would be something different: a movie. It sounded corny, but after the longest and strangest awards season ever and months of Zoom acceptance speeches, it seemed like it could be a fun experiment. And it was a lot of fun — until it wasn’t, delivering a twist ending that was, in fact, befitting of a movie, albeit a deeply unsatisfying one. In by far the biggest surprise in recent award show history, Anthony Hopkins won the Best Actor Oscar for “The Father.” All through awards season, the single most certain prediction that movie fans and awards season prognosticators could make was that the Best Actor trophy was expected to go to the late Chadwick Boseman for his towering final performance in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” The Oscars producers clearly wanted to keep viewers on their toes until the very end, switching up the awards order and putting Best Picture not at the very end, but prior to Best Actress and, finally, Best Actor. As the show went on, viewers and reporters speculated that the change in the awards order was building toward Boseman’s posthumous win, and potentially a tribute to him to conclude the ceremony.