‘Anora’ snags major Oscar wins for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress

The 97th Longform Content Awards — sorry — the 97th Academy Awards are now in the books. The ceremony had something for everyone. Whether you liked songs from Wicked, Adam Sandler yelling “CHALAMET!” one final time during awards season or speeches about, um, a winner’s wife now having to get pregnant, this year’s Oscars probably had you covered.

In my head, though, I keep comparing it to last year’s Oscars — an impossibly unfair comparison when we had the thrill of the Barbenheimer battle then, which culminated in six wins for Oppenheimer and Ryan Gosling bringing down the house with an electric performance of Barbie’s “I’m Just Ken.”

Anora was this year’s big winner, scoring major wins for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (sorry, Demi Moore!), Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing.

The Oscars kicked off with a musical number featuring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo performing songs from Wicked. I wonder if we’ll see its sequel, Wicked: For Good have this big of a presence at the Oscars (and pretty much everywhere else) next year.

It also turns out that it’s not hard to be a normal Oscar host. After we watched Jimmy Kimmel hold down the fort the past two ceremonies, Conan O’Brien took the reins this year. My only complaint? Where was Paul Rudd and his clip from Mac and Me? Seriously, though, O’Brien is a legend and the best kind of Oscar in that he has nothing to prove and nothing to lose.

The show wrapped up before 11 p.m. on the East Coast, which meant I had the ability to wrap up this special edition of Popculturology and send it your way before it got too late. (And if you’re on the West Coast, I hope you enjoy the rest of your afternoon.)

A few key moments

• “Let’s get crackin’ on those kids”: It’s become standard now that the Oscars kick things off with Best Supporting Actor, and Kieran Culkin’s acceptance speech reminding his wife that she promised him they could have a fourth kid if he won as Oscar set a high bar for the night.
• Go with the Flow: I guess I need to see Flow now that it beat my beloved The Wild Robot for Best Animated Feature.
• “The building holds it”: The CinemaStreams pretape was very SNL-esque, especially with the closing note that it was sponsored by the Sackler family and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
• Still Dune it: Dune: Part Two scored wins for Best Sound and Best Visual Effects — nice wins, but the sequel should’ve had so many more. Over the year since it premiered, I think it got lost just how fantastic Dune: Part Two. A masterpiece. An all-timer.
• Even Better Things: In the night’s biggest upset, Anora’s Mikey Madison won Best Actress over The Substance’s Demi Moore. I’ve liked Madison since her days in Pamela Adlon’s Better Things, but her win cost me a win of my own for my Oscar pool …