The producers of Sundays Oscars promised the pandemic ceremony would be something different: a movie. It sounded corny, but after the longest and strangest awards season ever and months of Zoom acceptance speeches, it seemed like it could be a fun experiment.

And it was a lot of fun until it wasnt, delivering a twist ending that was, in fact, befitting of a movie, albeit a deeply unsatisfying one. In by far the biggest surprise in recent award show history, Anthony Hopkins won the Best Actor Oscar for The Father. All through awards season, the single most certain prediction that movie fans and awards season prognosticators could make was that the Best Actor trophy was expected to go to the late Chadwick Boseman for his towering final performance in Ma Raineys Black Bottom.