‘Nomadland’ wins Best Picture, Director and Actress at the Oscars

The austere and elegant drama Nomad was the top winner of the 93 Academy Awards on Sunday, with the capture of Best Picture, Best Director for Chloé Zhao and Best Actress for Frances McDormand.

The victories culminated in an Oscars ceremony modified for the Covid-19 pandemic, with the ceremony held in front of a small live audience after a year in which the film industry was devastated by film closures and to delay film premieres.

Zhao was the first woman of color and the second woman to win the top management award. The awards for Nomad too marked a triumph for Walt Disney and the Hollywood establishment, as streaming company Netflix missed some of the biggest awards.

McDormand, who starred Nomad and co-produced the film with Zhao, and begged viewers to return to theaters. “Please watch our movie on the biggest screen possible,” he said.

The Oscars included several historic victories, after years of criticism that the awards did not recognize diversity, especially during the #OscarsSoWhite campaign in 2015. Yuh-Jung Youn became the first Korean woman to win Best Supporting Actress for her role in Threatening, while Daniel Kaluuya won the award for best supporting actor for Judas and the Black Messiah.

The biggest upset of the night was reserved for the final award, with Anthony Hopkins winning for best actor The father. The award was expected to be awarded posthumously to Chadwick Boseman, who died at the age of 43 of colon cancer last summer, for his performance in Ma Rainey’s black background.

The film industry has been disrupted for the past 14 months cinema closures, the turbocharged switch to transmission and increasingly icy relations between the US and China.

Zhao, who was born in Beijing and went to a boarding school in the United Kingdom, cited by The classic of the three characters, a Confucianist text almost universally studied in the Chinese school: “This is for anyone who had the faith and courage to remain in the goodness of themselves,” he said in his acceptance speech.

But his remarks – and almost all of the Oscar coverage – were censored in China, the world’s largest revenue-generating film market. Beijing ordered local media not to cover the subsequent event Don’t split, a documentary on the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, was nominated for best short documentary.

Zhao faced a backlash from Chinese nationalists in March after finding a 2013 interview in which he appeared to say “there are lies everywhere” in China. The controversy led to the cancellation of the release of Nomad in the country.

Actress Regina King opened the ceremony by invoking the verdict in Trial of Derek Chauvin last week. The former Minneapolis police officer was convicted on three counts of murder George Floyd, an incident that sparked global protests over racial injustice. “If things had gone differently in Minneapolis, I would have changed my heels for hiking boots,” he said.

Mia Neal, who became the first black woman to win an Oscar for best makeup and styling Ma Rainey’s black background, said: “one day it will not be unusual, it will not be groundbreaking, it will be normal.”

The night was one disappointment for Netflix, however, which fell short in the higher categories.

The streaming giant has long been looking for an award for best film and has entered Sunday’s ceremony with two nominees: Mank, which got the most nominations at 10, and The Chicago Trial 7. The first, a black-and-white tribute to old Hollywood, earned honors for cinematography and production design.

It was unclear whether consumers will choose to watch feature films through broadcast services or return to cinemas as the pandemic manages to subside. Ted Sarandos, co-executive of Netflix, told analysts last week that the company “wasn’t really changing the way we make movies by the way we watch movies.”

The Oscars ceremony, as with the Grammy Awards in the music industry last month, took a strong move away from tradition. The event took place on an impromptu stage at Union Station in Los Angeles and the show largely shunned the rehearsals of movie clips and the high musical performances of the nominees typical of previous years.

Oscars will not be available until the end of the week, but there will be pandemic-era awards and major sports championships, including the Grammys and super Bowl, have fallen to historic lows.