In Memoriam: James Tolkan

In early 2016, I had serendipitous back-to-back movie-viewing experiences. First, I watched the previous year’s “Bone Tomahawk,” S. Craig Zahler’s western-horror hybrid. Most people might remember it for so much gruesome violence, but I remember it most for a scene in which a gunslinger semi-squabbles with a saloon pianist over the price of playing a few songs. When you first see the pianist, slumped at his chosen instrument, head on the keys, you think for a moment that he might be dead until he pops to something like hungover half-life, epitomizing the film’s off kilter sense of humor by essentially living, so to speak, the old joke from “Ishtar: “Not dead, just resting.” The pianist was played by James Tolkan. The next movie I watched, a few days later, was 1973’s magnificent neo-noir “Friends of Eddie Coyle” in which Robert Mitchum plays a glorious sad sack career criminal informing to an ATF agent who finds himself in the crosshairs of The Man. Lo and behold, Tolkan turned up as the contact man for The Man, playing opposite the much taller Peter Boyle but lording over him in his air anyway. I could not remember the last time I had seen the then-84-year-old Tolkan in a new-to-me movie and yet, here he was in two of them, 42 years apart, both one-scene walk-offs in which he left an unmistakable footprint, and both evocative of a career as rich and varied as his life. (Contrary to the famous line about his character in “Back to the Future,” one wondering if he ever had hair, Tolkan did have hair in “Friends of Eddie Coyle” just as he had hair two years later as one Napoleon Bonaparte in Woody Allen’s “Love and Death.”)

Indeed, in reading Tolkan’s backstory upon learning of his death at the age of 94 on March 26th, as I did in this 2021 interview with the military news website We Are The Mighty, I could not believe just how much it felt like a novel. He was born in Michigan, but his family moved to Chicago where he quit school at 15 to work for the Chicago Northwestern Railroad (“which I hated,” he told We Are The Mighty) until his family relocated to Arizona where he re-enrolled in high school, graduated, and earned a football scholarship at Eastern Arizona College before joining the Navy where he made some waves as a boxer. Prior to shipping out, however, he was discharged on account of a heart condition and wound up in Iowa where he drove a cattle truck for a while, eventually attended the University of Iowa on the GI Bill and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in drama. He then literally took a Greyhound bus to New York, he would tell We Are The Mighty, with 75 bucks in his pocket to try and become an actor. He started on the stage, understudying Robert Duvall, appearing in several Broadway productions, including 1973’s “Full Circle” opposite Leonard Nimoy. In reviewing it for The New York Times, Clive Barnes would write: “James Tolkan had a marvelous scene as a recaptured prisoner, a Jewish ex‐professor from the concentration camps.” Tolkan starred in the first Broadway production of “Glengarry Glen Ross” in 1984, which I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know, and when I read this, I thought to myself, I swear, “I bet he played Dave Moss,” and turns out, he did, because can’t you hear him saying, “We’re just talking”?

“Glengarry Glen Ross” was also his last play on Broadway perhaps because in the 80s, Tolkan’s movie career blossomed, the supreme force of his 5'6" presence accentuated on the big screen, and though he was always in support, never a lead, he frequently bettered what was already good and still left a mark in what wasn’t. I saw 1987’s “Masters of the Universe” for my 10th birthday party at the Valley 3 in West Des Moines, Iowa and the only memory I retain has nothing to do with He-Man or Skeletor but Tolkan on the other side of the galactic portal as Detective Lubic. (He also co-starred in 1986’s “Armed and Dangerous,” one of the John Candy comedies of the era that my mom, my sister, and I would rent over and over.) Tolkan probably had more screen time total in that critical and box office bomb than he did in the back-to-back box office champs of 1985 and 1986, but demonstrating his gift for conveying authority, he rendered himself a Hollywood immortal, nevertheless, on account of those two movies. In the former, “Back to the Future,” he was Principal Strickland, though Tolkan did not play him as an educational leader so much as a cruel and cocky antagonist to our hero, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), like an ex-drill sergeant-type coach who became a principal for lack of a better idea. Strickland unforgettably dresses Marty down in a monologue that Tolkan delivered with such committed fury he seemed to conjure the camera’s movement, drifting closer and closer to the two men as Tolkan leans in so close to Fox that their noses practically touch. 

The next year Tolkan appeared in “Top Gun” as commanding officer of the USS Enterprise. Though he was credited onscreen as “Stinger,” that name is never said aloud, because why would it need to be given how Tolkan breathes immense life into the character all on his own in dressing down Maverick and Goose (Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards, respectively) the same way Strickland dresses down Marty McFly, coining an unlikely and profane synonym for worst case scenario along the way: “flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit outta Hong Kong.” The whole sequence, really, is nothing more than an exposition drop, explaining Maverick’s backstory and the origin and purpose of Naval Weapons Fighter School, but Tolkan does not merely sell it with maximum gusto, he transforms it into an unapologetically juicy slice of pure verbal entertainment. As much as any scene of aerial combat, Tolkan turns and burns. And at the end, when Stinger dismisses Maverick and Goose, then stops them, then wishes them luck, the way he watches them go, shoving a cigar in his mouth as he does, it’s eerie just how Tolkan effects the countenance of a school principal who know he’s gonna see those two crazy kids again after class real soon.

The Rip

Given the success of “Knives Out” and its subsequent sequels whose exclusive rights were scooped up by Netflix, Joe Carnahan’s “The Rip” feels like a smart Netflix hybrid, a mash-up of a crooked cop crime-thriller and an Agatha Christie drawing room mystery. It begins with Miami police Captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco) being murdered by masked men, setting in motion a federal interrogation of Velez’s specialized Tactical Narcotics Team (TNT, as if subliminally communicating its desire to be a TNT Movie by Netflix) in an effort to determine who might be responsible. After all, rumors abound that certain cops are taking those eponymous Rips - seizures of drugs, guns, or money - for themselves, and the Feds wonder if a TNT somebody might be responsible. This introduces us to the whole crew, including Velez’s second-in-command, Lt. Dane Dumars (Matt Damon), and Sergeant J.D. Byrne (Ben Affleck) with whom she was in a relationship. After this inquisition, the TNT quintet pulls up camp chairs outside headquarters to vent, a nice touch, making them seem like heavily armed boys and girls in an Old Milwaukee commercial. This is when we also meet DEA Agent Matty Nix (Kyle Chandler), rolling around in an armored vehicle that you know is going to turn up again by movie’s end. Indeed, Dumars get a crime-stopper tip via his phone about a Rip and enlists his team to go investigate, setting the mystery in motion. 

At first, “The Rip” generates genuine dread and tension as the team arrives at the home at the end of a caul-de-sac and craftily talks its way inside, discovering an immaculately kept crawl space hiding significant contraband in the form of a lot of money. As a couple team members sledgehammer the wall to get at the barrels containing the cash, Dumars and Byrne interrogate the homeowner, Desi (Sasha Calle). It’s an electric scene in which the sound of the sledgehammer echoing throughout the wall underlines her increasing stress while the cross examination of Damon and Affleck’s characters puts their effortless chemistry on full display. And when the amount of the money is revealed, the tension escalates, especially when a couple cops from the district turn up outside, not-so-subtly implying that TNT is not wanted here. What ensues evokes both “Rio Bravo” and “Assault at Precinct 13” but with some nifty modern flourishes, like a streetlight blinking in morse code and ghost stories of entire blocks like this one bought up by Colombian cartels. 

Yet rather than yield an external threat, the menace comes from within, and from this point forward, “The Rip” becomes as talky as it does action-packed, cop against cop as TNT tries to ferret out where this money came from, who wants, and what they’ll do to get it. This, however, transforms “The Rip” into something more character driven and the characters never amount to much Velez’s death is supposed to hover over everything, but we never spend sufficient time with her for the character to be anything other than a device, while the electric presence of Teyana Taylor as Det. Numa Baptiste is figuratively sidelined for almost the entire movie. Carnahan falls back on Damon and Affleck’s shared history to fill in character where this none otherwise, but Dumars and Bryne’s feints toward the dark side of the force never feel believable. Indeed, Dumars has a tattoo on each knuckle, not unlike the priest played by Robert Mitchum in “The Night of Hunter” having love and hate tattooed on his knuckles. Those, however, were competing ideas, evoking an ambiguity that “The Rip” mostly forgoes in any real or interesting way. One of Dumars’s tattoos, in fact, is a question that the tattoo on the other knuckle answers, effectively solving “The Rip’s” riddle long before it’s solved. What, you thought Boston’s favorite sons were a couple Bad Apples (TM)?

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Outfit (1973)

The 1973 crime-thriller “The Outfit” is based on a novel Richard Stark’s celebrated Parker series, yet in changing the character’s name to Earl Macklin, writer/director John Flynn is essentially remaking the role in the no fuss no muss air of his lead actor Robert Duvall. As the movie opens, Earl is released from prison to find his brother Eddie (Edward Ness) has been killed by a crime syndicate called The Outfit. Turns out, Earl and Eddie robbed a bank that was a front for The Outfit some years back and now that syndicates wants revenge. Rather than go on the run or wait around to get offed himself, Earl enlists his old cohort Cody (Joe Don Baker) to go on the offensive, working their way from Outfit goon to Outfit goon, and eventually all the way up to the man on top, Mailer, appropriately played by the dude of dudes, Robert Ryan, evincing the air of someone who has necessarily strained so much from his life as necessary protection that he has also strained out any sense of joy. He watches professional football games with the air of a man who has no interest in the game itself, just the money he wagered on it.

Like all the women in “The Outfit,” Mailer’s trophy wife Rita (Joanna Cassidy) is only half-acknowledged, but the script at least half-acknowledges that all the women in “The Outfit” are half-acknowledged. That includes Earl’s girlfriend Bett (Karen Black) whose presences mostly ensures that 70s audiences wouldn’t get the wrong idea since the real romance is between Earl and Cody. Indeed, Duvall and Black sculpt a genuine lived-in relationship as two guys getting too old for this kind of life but unable to part ways with it, nonetheless. That way of life involves some traditional action, a few shootouts and the like, but “The Outfit” surprises in just how much drama and tension it mines from moments in-between, like Earl and Cody having a stare down with two men from whom they hope to acquire a getaway car, a scene sculpted from nothing but pure attitude. Time and again Flynn’s script seems to set Earl up for an action hero wisecrack only for the character to decline, as if too serious for such childishness, echoed in Duvall’s turn. “The Outfit” never cuts loose until the last possible second, after Earl and Cody have completed their getaway, falling into a spate of laughter, as if the once the job has been completed, then, and only then, are dudes allowed to rock. 

Eephus

The Major League Baseball glossary explains the roots of the Eephus pitch are in Hebrew, the word eefes loosely translated to nothing, as described by a teammate (Maurice Van Robays) of the pitcher (Rip Sewell) who first regularly threw it: “Eephus ain’t nothing.” Carson Lund’s 2025 movie that takes the pitch’s name for its title is not nothing, either in a Seinfeldian sense or more broadly, but I have never seen a movie that so implicitly captures the deliberate, relaxed rhythms of a baseball game quite like this one. That is because unlike virtually all other baseball movies, which tend to climax a larger narrative through a game while sprinkling in snippets of other games via montage, “Eephus” just is a baseball game: one recounted from beginning to end. It’s as if Lund and is co-writers Michael Basta and Nate Fisher adapted Arnold Hano’s “A Day in the Bleachers” but instead of recounting Game 1 of the 1954 World Series between the New York Giants and Cleveland Indians are recounting a fictional 1990s New England rec league game between the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint. 

There are a multitude of players, but “Eephus” proves less interested in developing their personal stories then in demonstrating how they all relate to one another in the context of the game. There are hits, and outs, and runs, but the camera is just as often pointed away from home plate, toward the fielders, and the base runners, eavesdropping on their between-pitch chatter and conversations in the dugout. The result of the game does not even seem to matter all that much, evoked in how one player arrives to the game late and another departs early, committed to a prior engagement. Even the umpire bails early, forcing a spectator to step in and call balls and strikes, albeit from the stands. This makeshift arbiter taken in tandem with a couple young people in the bleachers wondering what all the fuss is about and a vendor outside the stadium quietly suggest that the only thing holding the nature of any game together, really, is the collective importance we impress upon it. 

The field is scheduled to be torn down after this game, though it is not making away for something like a Kmart or a Walmart, however, but a school, shading this finality with melancholy rather than anti-capitalist fury. What, precisely, will become of these teams is never explicated, and all the men playing would rather not talk about it, and as the game stretches on, nine innings giving way to extras, day ceding to night, forcing the players to turn on their car lights and aim them at the field, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot fuses with Roger Angell’s The Summer Game and the latter’s observation that “baseball time is measured only in outs” takes on the absurdist quality of the former, making it truly feel as if “the end of this game may never come.”

My All First Weekend of the 2026 NCAA Tournament Team

My full-time devotion to college basketball has been dwindling for years, but it bottomed out this season. Due to a confluence of the Winter Olympics taking up my attention for two weeks, the ever-lengthening college football season preventing the formerly neat turning of the calendar from one sport to the other at New Year’s, and life and all that it entails, I hardly watched any college basketball in 2025-26. And yet, there is something to be said for coming into the first weekend of the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, the best part of America’s best sporting event, with few expectations and little prior knowledge, just ready to be surprised and captivated. And boy, was I. Granted, this first weekend had less upset-laden madness than so many Marches past, a continuation of a new but troubling trend, but to paraphrase noted metaphysicist Stevie Nicks, when it was good, reader, it was very, very good. A few notes by way of a team.

For the fourth time in five NCAA Tournaments, Akron’s Zippy was the best mascot of March.

My All First Weekend of the 2026 NCAA Tournament Team

 

Rob Martin, High Point / Nick Boyd, Wisconsin. I enjoy the three-point revolution in basketball, and High Point is committed to it, what with a player who essentially only shoots three-pointers. But High Point versus Wisconsin was my favorite kind of basketball, nevertheless, where the playground version merges with the one played inside a gym as two teams space the floor and let their respective point guards try and break down the defense by attacking the rim, again and again. Boyd had 27 points and 6 assists in a magnificent losing effort while Martin put up an equally magnificent 23 points and 10 assists before outdoing himself in his own losing effort against Arkansas in the second round with 30 points and 5 assists. Objectively, he was outplayed by his Razorback counterpart, Darius Acuff Jr., who finished with 36 points and 6 assists. But the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament is not about future NBA lottery picks like Acuff but comets like Martin who invoke fleeting wonder*. And just as Martin’s lilliputian counterpart Max Abmas once momentarily transformed Oral freaking Roberts into a school worth rooting for, so, too, did Martin give what seems to be a furniture empire-infused finishing school for rich kids a glint of the old Cinderella story. That is the magic of March Madness™.

*Honorable Mention: Francis Folefac of Siena, freshman and Kinesiology Major, whose team damn near became only the third sixteenth seed to topple a one, mighty Duke, and who was absolutely fearless in repeatedly going right at Cameron Boozer, widely expected to be the top pick in the NBA Draft. Vaya con Dios. 

Tyler Tanner, Vanderbilt. As good as Wisconsin v High Point was, the best game of the first weekend of the 2026 NCAA Tournament was the second-round tilt between fourth-seeded Nebraska and fifth-seeded Vanderbilt. There was an edge to this one, born, I suspect, of desperation fueled by two teams who rarely find themselves on such a stage. Indeed, Nebraska, having only won its first NCAA Tournament game ever but 48 hours earlier, had literally never been in this position and to win their second game they had to fight off the Commodores’ jitterbugging, pickpocketing, trash-talking point god Tyler Tanner who early in the second half hopscotched past, I think, three defenders in the lane while keeping his dribble to get off a scoop shot that did not go in but still made me think, “Was that that the best missed shot I’ve ever seen?” Little did I know! Trailing 74-72 with 2.2 seconds left, Tanner launched a 60-foot shot that did not just do everything but go in, no, it did go in...and then came back out of the basket, the greatest March Madness™ buzzer beater that was not. If I had not seen it, I might not have believed it, and though I was rooting for Nebraska, and though I was ecstatic that they won, I confess, Tyler Tanner won my heart. You will never convince me that the bad juju incurred from four years of the Scott Frost football era at Nebraska did not cause the hand of fate to intervene in that missed shot. 

Robbie Avila, Saint Louis. Avila was not a surprise, exactly. I have been hearing about this guy for several years now, first at Indiana State and then down the road at Saint Louis University where he transferred when his Indiana State coach took the gig. After all, in his 6'10" height, 240 lbs, and rec specs, he has become folk hero with a multitude of colorful nicknames like Cream Abdul-Jabbar and Milk Chamberlain. It was not, however, until his team’s first round game against Georgia that I finally sat down and watched him play. And though his team was no way, shape, or form just him, he was the spark plug. He knocked down threes and had a soft touch around the rim but as much as anything, it was his passing, out of the high post and all manner of long and short outlet passes to his speedy guards that kept the Billikens’ motors permanently revved en route to a 102-77 eating of Georgia’s lunch. More than that, though he might appear a plodder in his build, he was incredibly nimble on his feet, running up and down in the court all game long in a manner reminiscent of Newman’s unlikely agility in sprinting after Kramer when the latter is hurrying down the street with the Risk board (it’s a long story) in a sixth season episode of “Seinfeld.” Ultimately, Saint Louis could not hang with top-seeded Michigan in the second round but even in losing by almost as many as they beat Georgia by, they put on a rattling good show, and who is the official best team is of no concern to this movie blog writing about basketball anyway. The Saint Louis Billikens win our Rainbow Heart Syrup national championship.  

Saint Louis Center Robbie Avila on the fast break.

Tavion Banks, Iowa. Banks is my preferred college basketball type, an anomaly that makes pedantic NBA scouts cringe, a power forward with a shooting guard/small forward combo’s 6'7" height who might be emblematic of the current nomadic incarnation of college basketball by going from Northwest Florida State College to Drake University to, finally, the University of Iowa but also demonstrates that for many, frankly, the college experience is circuitous, not linear. The whole Hawkeye plane felt like it was made out of Banks-like characters and after cement-mixing Clemson in a first-round game that was fun, really, only if you had a rooting interest in Iowa, they ousted defending champion Florida in a seismic second-round upset by paradoxically pulling the high-flying Gators into the glorious muck of their slow-paced swamp where Banks and his undersized, outgunned mates wrestled them to a one-point defeat and reached the second week of the tournament for the first time since 1999. Former Iowa Hawkeye running back and momentary Heisman Trophy candidate Tavian Banks, still fourth on the school’s all-time rushing list, undoubtedly assumed his place as the foremost Tavian Banks in Hawkeye lore was assured, but as Tavion Banks goes to show, history is always being revised. 

Sixth Man: Dion Brown, Saint Louis. Speaking of 1999... I think the best college basketball regular season game I have watched in the last five years, if not more, was a random mid-February one between two teams with losing records, the Syracuse Orange and the Boston College Eagles, both of whom fired their coach this year, and which I watched only because I sought a college basketball game while My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife did the NYT crossword and she prefers that if I watch a game, it’s one with a good mascot, which Syracuse has in the form of Otto the Orange. He’s an orange! Lo and behold, a triple-overtime spirited rec league-feeling game broke out and reminded me of the January and February Saturdays of my youth when I would get deeply involved in the doubleheaders of old Big 8 and Big 10 games on the central Iowa local affiliates between middle-of-the-pack teams while a syndicated re-run of “The Breakfast Club” on another channel that also seemed to air every weekend underlined these precious reprieves from school. I digress. That Boston College team had this guy who was dead ringer for Prince. And as I watched Saint Louis turn Georgia into gruel, I thought, “Wait, that guy looks a little like Prince.” It was him! Dion Brown, who has trimmed his hair, unfortunately, and does not look quite as much like Prince as he previously did, and who, it turned out, transferred to Saint Louis from Boston College where he had transferred from University of Maryland, Baltimore County, lending an appropriate figurative wail to the last 4 days of basketball, “a wonderful trip through time where laughter is all you pay.”

SID (Sports Information Director): Hailee Steinfeld, State Farm Commercial. It’s just a version of captive consumerism, surely, but I saw that “Livin’ on a Prayer” State Farm commercial about 456 times during the last four days and Steinfeld’s double-take reaction shot to the over-aggressive lunacy of Keegan-Michael Key and Danny McBride really started to feel like an impeccable summation of suffering through the global madness unleashed by one deranged lunatic.  

Some Drivel On...Quantum Hoops

“Quantum Hoops” (2007) does not conclude with a blooper reel, a la so many comedy movies, but begins with one instead, or what might as well pass for one, a montage of the Caltech basketball team failing all over the court. After all, at the time Rick Greenwald’s documentary was shot in the mid-aughts, the woebegone Beavers had not won a game since 1985. (They would eventually end the streak at 310 games on February 22, 2011.) That’s failure on a mathematically improbable scale, as “Quantum Hoops” tells us, and perhaps operating with a mathematician’s mind, it explains the logic behind chronicling such long-running failure while giving a pass to the cosmic absurdity. The whole movie assumes the low-key, even nonchalant, air of its narrator, David Duchovny, a 20-year losing streak treated as something like a passing sun shower. I did not need it to drill all the way down to the very essence of the human condition, necessarily, but when one former Caltech hoopster noted that the 1960s passed on campus with nary a peep of the noise from the outside world, I might have liked at least one follow-up question.

Though “Quantum Hoops” nominally chronicles the Beavers’ 2005-06 season, Greenwald eschews embedding with the team, so to speak, by recounting each game, checking in with the players before and after, or even, really, seeming to go into the locker room at all. Given the described workload of basketball and academics and barely having time to sleep, maybe that would have been impossible, but it makes the approach feel impersonal despite so many talking head interviews. Instead, Greenwald opts for broad overview of both Caltech as an institution and of the basketball program. But because there seems to be virtually no footage of the hardwood team’s past glories and agonies, this overview essentially just consists of past players and coaches remembering them aloud, which only goes so far. It also underlines the lack of visual flair overall, utilizing clips that do not really enhance what's being said, only occasionally underscoring the action, mostly just coming across like something to fill the screen.

No, Greenwald is content to let talking heads do most of the walk for him. And they are chipper bunch, granted, from the current and former players to current and former coaches to Gregg Popovich, formerly head coach of Pomona-Pitzer, who lost to Caltech in 1980. He mentions a chill that went through his body when he realized he was going to lose to the sport’s most woeful program, yet even by the end of his interview, the famously acerbic Hall of Famer is waxing inspirational in a way that mirrors the Explosions in the Sky-like music. If the Caltech players feel sorrow, they never really express it, hardly show it, and when one-time coach Gene Victor does allow a brief admission that it was “hard” to lose so much, he fails to expound, probably because he wasn’t even asked to. There is no room for wallowing. In accordance with a university like Caltech, everything is framed as a learning experience.  

The Show Goes On: the 98th Academy Awards

The run-up to the 98th Academy Awards was frequently cited by Oscar prognosticators as perhaps the most unpredictable ever, at least among three of the acting categories (Jessie Buckley had Best Actress locked up virtually from the beginning). Yet, the awards season has become so long, that by the time of the actual Oscar ceremony itself, that unpredictability had looped back around, transforming so much surprise into predestination. Not even Sean Penn eschewing showing up at the ceremony to collect his Best Supporting Actor trophy for “One Battle After Another” was all that surprising. “Frankenstein” collected three Oscars, “Sinners” earned four, and “One Battle After Another” won six, including Best Picture, Best Editing (Andy Jurgensen made a two-hour-and-forty-minute feel like one, tops), and the inaugural Oscar for Best Casting. I would have voted for “The Secret Agent” in the latter, but Cassandra Kulukundis was no less deserving. For casting newcomer Chase Infiniti, yes, and for all the impeccably chosen faces comprising The Christmas Adventurers Club, certainly, but also for getting Eric Schweig back into the masterpiece-making business. I hope Schweig was there last night. If there was a true surprise at the 98th Academy Awards, it was Best Live-Action Short ending in a tie between “The Singers” and “Two People Exchanging Saliva.” It warms my jaded heart that the Olympics still allows ties, and it turns out, the Oscars warms it for allowing them too. 

Unpredictability, however, does not in and of itself make for a good Oscar show and the 98th was plenty good, fun and dumb, heartfelt and affecting in equal measure. Conan O’Brien returned as host after last year and can return next year, as far as I’m concerned, so ably has he filled this role; to paraphrase Sydney Pollack in “Michael Clayton,” he’s found a niche for himself. He’s good at his gig because he excels at taking the piss out of what he has just genuinely exalted and lets us in on the joke without making the whole thing a joke, not least because he really seems to love movies. The best bit of the night was sending up streaming movies that require dialogue to continually restate the plot for so many people listening as much as they are watching by recreating a scene from “Casablanca” as so comical exposition with a game Sterling K. Brown in the Dooley Wilson role. Honestly, he could have turned that into a recurring bit throughout the show. How about Conan and Jennifer Lawrence as “McCabe & Mrs. Miller?” True, the scripted banter between presenters was even worse than usual, which caused so many of those moments to drag, but then again, enlisting Nicole Kidman to present Best Picture was perfection. I know, she was there with Ewan McGregor to celebrate the 25th anniversary of “Moulin Rouge,” but I saw it more as Kidman’s Pure Camp as AMC ambassador taken to its apex. She should be grandfathered into the role of Best Picture presenter for life. Kidman is here! Sit up straight!

Even if the outcomes skewed inevitable, how can you be bored when history is made? Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman and, by extension, the first woman of the color to win the Oscar for Best Cinematography for “Sinners.” Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor for the same movie and referenced the five Black men that won Best Actor before him, as well as Halle Berry, the only Black woman to win Best Actress, placing his victory in a historical context. No-show Penn joined the three-timers club, going to show once again that even if nobody seems to like him, everybody seems to like his acting. If Paul Thomas Anderson earning Best Director for “One Battle After Another” was not historical, it was momentous, one of our foremost modern auteurs finally, deservedly winning an Oscar. And when he mentioned his fellow nominees, I took heart in knowing that even if Ryan Coogler won Best Original Screenplay for “Sinners,” that someday he will win for Best Director too. Nothing filled my heart with joy as much as Amy Madigan winning Best Supporting Actress for “Weapons.” At first, I really thought hers was just a happy-to-be-nominated deal, but somewhere along the way, momentum built, maybe because 40 years between nominations in a business where for women it can feel like it’s getting late early, as the sage Yogi Berra once said, she demonstrated that no, nuh uh, it’s never too late. Plus, it was an important, oft-forgotten reminder that she and Ed Harris are one of our Top 5 Celebrity Couples: not quite an indie Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, but something in that vein. 

As if taking presenter Jimmy Kimmel’s words to heart about documentary filmmakers being the truth-tellers, the winners for both documentary short and feature were the ones who most openly acknowledged the current political realities of our tumultuous world. Well, them and Javier Bardem who in presenting Best International Feature with Priyanka Chopra literally said “No to war and free Palestine” with what appeared to be a smile on his face. He wasn’t making light of anything, of course, but to my eye, appeared to be demonstrating how easy it is to simply say something while cheerfully communicating to multitudinous bad faith actors he knew were lying in wait: Come at me, bro. Whining about people being woke is just another way to bury your head in the sand. 

The one detail that even good iterations of the show have gotten wrong in the past, this version got right - the in-memoriam segment. Maybe losing so many vital names of the industry snapped the producers into focus, but for once they forewent yoking some other performer or performance to the segment and just let the segment speak for itself, buttressing it with brief commentary on some of the biggest names: so many tear-filled faces for Rob Reiner, Rachel McAdams testifying to Diane Keaton and her fellow Canadian Catherine O’Hara, and Babs on Bob (Barbra Streisand’s ode to Robert Redford). It was the first in-memoriam I can recall that truly let us linger on the names and faces and think about what they meant. It was heartrending, and wonderful, and in a way, made me even madder that the Honorary Academy Awards are shunted to their own ceremony months earlier. Why on earth would the Oscars not want Tom Cruise receiving his first Academy Award at the actual ceremony? That is to take nothing away from his fellow honorary award recipients Debbie Allen and Wynn Thomas, but my God, this is Tom Cruise; he was literally name-checked in this year’s Best Picture!  

Cruise has left significant footprints on the history of cinema and so, too, has Paul Thomas Anderson. It’s why it was so moving to see him finally be recognized by the Academy. Is “One Battle After Another” really his best movie? God, I don’t know and I don’t know that I can think of a more boring question today. In speaking after winning Best Picture, in fact, Anderson sort of summarized that point and the point I was trying to make on Friday by literally naming all five Best Picture nominees from 1975. “There is no best among them,” he said. “There is just what the mood might be that day.” I don’t know how my mood is going to be tomorrow, or the next day, or next month, or Oscar Sunday next year, but after that show last night, I gotta tell you, in a way I did not see coming, it’s pretty good. I guess there was some sort of surprise after all.