The Oscars

The Longest Red Carpet in History

Every spring, I find myself parked in front of the television, bracing for a marathon. It’s an annual tradition, a ritual as reliable as the turning of the seasons, except this one involves significantly more tuxedoes and, historically, quite a bit more forced laughter. Seventy-four "seasons" in, and *The Oscars* remains television’s strangest, most enduring endurance test. It is a show about a show, a recursive loop of industry self-congratulation that manages to be both deeply cynical and, against my better judgment, genuinely moving.

I suspect the show’s longevity comes from its chaotic inconsistency. Most series would have been canceled by now for being this bloated, this obsessed with its own internal politics, yet we keep tuning in. There’s a specific kind of tension in the air—even through the screen—that you just don't get in other awards ceremonies. It’s a high-stakes performance of humility. Everyone in that room is effectively auditioning for the next role, proving that they can lose with grace or win with just the right amount of tearful gratitude.



The production design is usually immaculate—the lighting, the sweeping crane shots, the geometry of the stage—but the real action almost always happens in the reaction shots. That split second where the camera lingers on a face just before a winner is announced. It’s a masterclass in involuntary muscle control. Watching the nominees, you see the cracks in the armor. They're trying so hard to look magnanimous while their hearts are pounding through their ribs. It’s the closest we get to seeing the human condition laid bare in a room that cost millions of dollars to light.

There is a strange, paradoxical exhaustion that sets in around the third hour. The pacing, almost by design, starts to drag, and yet, I can't look away. I’m waiting for the glitch. I’m waiting for the moment when the carefully constructed artifice slips—a stuttered speech, a presenter skipping a line, or a genuine, unscripted display of raw emotion that cuts through the corporate sheen. That’s the only part that feels honest. The rest is just a very expensive, high-gloss business meeting.



Critics have spent decades bemoaning the run time. *The New York Times* has run enough post-mortems on the ceremony to fill a library, and they’re rarely wrong—it’s always too long, and it’s always flabby in the middle. Yet, there’s a comfort in that bloat. It feels like an old friend who talks too much at dinner. You know they’re going to repeat themselves, you know they’re going to focus on the wrong details, but you stay because the context is everything.

I’m reminded of how the late Roger Ebert used to approach this. He didn't treat the show like a piece of cinema to be critiqued on its technical merits; he treated it like a cultural barometer. He saw it as a family reunion where everyone is slightly drunk, hyper-aware of the seating chart, and terrified of their uncle. That framing makes the whole experience much more palatable. It’s not a film; it’s a family drama with a very high budget.



Why do we keep showing up? Maybe it’s not for the winners. It’s for those fleeting instances when the script falls away. In a town built on illusions, these little fractures of reality are the only things that stick. We aren't really watching an awards show, not deep down; we're watching a community try to convince itself that what it does—this strange, light-projected magic that consumes our lives—actually matters.

I find myself wishing, every year, that they’d just cut the fluff and let the movies speak for themselves. But then, I suppose that would defeat the point. We don't watch to be efficient. We watch because we want to see the people who make the stories we love, just for one night, try to tell a story about themselves. And for three or four hours, I’m usually willing to believe them.