The Oscars Were Safe, Conventional and Old-Fashioned, Which Made Them an Ideal Vehicle for One Movie’s Triumph: TV Review

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Just as the Coca-Cola company, after smudging a perfect product in 1985 with the New Coke, brought that product back and called it Coca-Cola Classic, the 95th Academy Awards telecast made a game attempt to rectify the mishaps of the past few years — the ratings slippage, the pared-down-like-a-skeleton-in-a-train-station 2021 edition, the debacle of The Slap — by bringing back something that we might call Oscar Classic.

It was safe, it was familiar, it was tasteful, it was reassuring. It didn’t rock the boat, it didn’t overstay its welcome (actually, that marks sort of a break from Oscar Classic), and it left you feeling that the world’s preeminent awards show, all doom-saying punditry to the contrary, is still, on balance, a very good thing.

It was clear that the evening would be ruled by a certain traditional spirit as soon as you heard Jimmy Kimmel’s opening monologue, which featured a mild reference to The Slap and one joke that got a rise out of the audience (a line about how much money “Babylon” lost).

But apart from Kimmel’s gentle ribbing (on Tom Cruise and James Cameron skipping the ceremony: “The two guys who insisted we go to the theater didn’t go to the theater”), Kimmel ruffled few feathers and avoided all edge.