Opinion There are no losers this Oscar season

Complaining about Oscar winners is as much an annual ritual as obsessing over who wore what on the award ceremony’s red carpet (or champagne carpet, as it was this year). Indeed, 2023 may be one of those rare years when there is almost unanimous agreement over the winners: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, which won seven awards was a favourite in most of the categories it was in, while few cavilled at the honours won by All Quiet on the Western Front (the anti-war movie was a shoo-in, considering the Russia-Ukraine conflict which has just completed one year), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Women Talking.

But the day after the Oscars is a good time to reflect on the also-rans. For Indian cinema lovers, the biggest miss is likely to be the Documentary Feature award that eluded All That Breathes, one of the most impressive documentaries to have emerged from this country in recent times. Mournful tweets from around the world also expressed disappointment over the searingly poignant The Banshees of Inisherin not winning even the Original Screenplay award and Austin Butler losing the Best Actor trophy for his chameleon-like turn in the biopic Elvis.

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There is some consolation in remembering that an Oscar win doesn’t always guarantee classic status. Who, after all, remembers How Green Was My Valley, the movie that beat Citizen Kane for the Best Picture award in 1941? And is the power of Morgan Freeman’s performance in The Shawshank Redemption diminished by his loss of the 1995 Best Actor trophy to Tom Hanks (for Forrest Gump)? There is also the relief of knowing that none of the choices this year come close to being considered a travesty of the process: Recall, for example, the hue and cry that greeted the hamfisted Crash winning Best Picture over Ang Lee’s sublime Brokeback Mountain. The quality of this year’s nominations shows in the fact that even the so-called losers have enriched the collective cinematic legacy.