Oscars Deliver a Landmark Winner and a Messy Brawl of a Show

thewrap.com:

longer than last year’s show, which unlike this one presented all 23 categories live. The producers’ mainstream tendencies peaked with “fan favorite” and “best moments” Twitter polls that were essentially hijacked by Zack Snyder fans to go in a direction that the Academy surely never envisioned (which is one reason why they were a bad idea to begin with).

And the jokes were completely overwhelmed by the fact that Will Smith took exception to a Chris Rock punchline aimed at his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, and went on stage to strike Rock and then scream obscenities at him.Those things turned an Oscars show that came in with high stakes into an awkward and confusing affair that had some great moments but didn’t solve any of the problems it was supposed to be tackling. (We’ll see how it did with solving the ratings problem on Monday.)But it also provided an historic win, and an unusual win in a lot of ways: “CODA” was the first Sundance movie to take the top prize, the first to not be nominated in either the Best Director or Best Film Editing categories at the Oscars, the second in which the film’s director was not even nominated by the Directors Guild of America and the first winner since 1932 to have less than four total nominations.Statistic after statistic said that Sian Heder’s crowd-pleasing drama about a child of deaf parents who wants to become a singer could not bring down “The Power of the Dog,” “Belfast,” “West Side Story” and other films that ticked more of the usual boxes for Best Picture winners.