The ninety-sixth Academy Awards will be announced this evening in Los Angeles, and The New Yorker will be there to cover the prizes, the speeches, and the celebrations. Here on our live blog, we’ll share our critics’ takes on the nominees, the surprises and controversies of the ceremony, the awards themselves, and more. Starting at 5 P.M. E.T., the staff writer Rachel Syme will train her tasteful eye on the red carpet: the styles, the snafus, the memorable moments. At 7 P.M. E.T., the ceremony—hosted, again, by Jimmy Kimmel—will begin inside the Dolby Theatre, and the culture writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz will weigh in as the evening unfolds. Michael Schulman will provide dispatches from the auditorium. You’ll find some of them here, and you can follow The New Yorker’s Instagram account to catch them all.
What does the evening portend? “Oppenheimer” enters the night as the favorite for many of the major awards, including Best Picture; Best Director, for Christopher Nolan; and Best Actor, for Cillian Murphy as the titular scientist, the so-called father of the atomic bomb. The race for Best Actress appears to be a showdown between Emma Stone, as a lab-created woman learning about the world in “Poor Things,” and Lily Gladstone, who could become the first Native American woman to win an Academy Award, for her performance in “Killers of the Flower Moon” (a film based, we might add, on a book by the New Yorker staff writer David Grann.) Although the Academy overlooked “Barbie” in two major categories—neglecting to nominate Margot Robbie, as the title character, and Greta Gerwig, the director—Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera look to be contenders for Best Supporting Actor and Actress, and the movie earned not one but two nominations for Best Song.
Stick with us throughout the night as winners are named, speeches are delivered, and no slaps are heard (we hope) around the world. Check back tomorrow for more dispatches and analysis by Schulman and the magazine’s movie critics, Justin Chang and Richard Brody. To make sure you never miss a Hollywood profile or review, sign up for our Movie Club newsletter, and get the best of The New Yorker’s film coverage delivered to your in-box.
