LOS ANGELES — The 93rd Academy Awards were held in a train station, at tables, before a masked audience the size of a wedding — and they ended with a film about people who live in vans taking the biggest prize in cinema. “Nomadland” won Best Picture on Sunday night, and its director Chloé Zhao became the first woman of colour, and only the second woman ever, to win Best Director.
The film, made with real-life nomads playing versions of themselves alongside Frances McDormand — who won her third Best Actress award — had dominated the season from Venice, where it won the Golden Lion, onwards. Its portrait of Americans living on the road after the Great Recession landed, in a pandemic year, with new force.
The ceremony at Union Station was the industry’s most deliberate break with its own tradition: no host, a cinematic shooting style, acceptance speeches without an orchestra playing winners off. It produced a striking list of winners: Daniel Kaluuya took Best Supporting Actor for “Judas and the Black Messiah”, and Yuh-jung Youn, 73, became the first Korean performer to win an acting Oscar, honoured for “Minari”.
But the night closed awkwardly. Producers had rearranged the order so Best Actor would come last, expecting a posthumous win for Chadwick Boseman. Instead the award went to Anthony Hopkins, who was not present, for “The Father” — and the show simply ended.
Even so, the headline belongs to Zhao, a Beijing-born filmmaker working with tiny budgets and non-actors, now holding the job’s highest honour. Hollywood’s door, on this evidence, has opened a little wider.
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