For those of us who prefer our movie stars to recite lines of dialogue rather than left-wing talking points, the 1972 Academy Awards represented something of a high point. That year, Ben Johnson won Best Supporting Actor for his incomparable performance as Sam the Lion, the weathered old cowboy in The Last Picture Show.

At the end of his speech, Johnson said, “Now what I’m about to say probably will stir up a lot of conversation around the country. There’s something I’d like to leave in everyone’s minds throughout the world.” Although Johnson was best known as a member of John Ford’s stock company —  and thus an undoubted political conservative — at that moment, he held the audience in the palm of his hand. What was he going to talk about? Vietnam? Nixon? Finally, he spoke: “This couldn’t have happened to a nicer feller.” That was what was going to “stir up” everybody — it was a joke. 

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Although this year’s edition of the Oscars, which aired on ABC on March 15, was hardly in the class of the 1972 installment, there was at least one moment that recalled Johnson’s witty, graceful sendup of stars commandeering the ceremony to climb atop their soapbox. In presenting the Best Actor winners, Adrien Brody perfectly, if perhaps unconsciously, echoed Johnson’s remarks from more than 50 years earlier.

“I do have something very important to say,” said Brody, who, last year, said plenty of what he regarded as “important” stuff when he won Best Actor for The Brutalist. This time, though, the “important” thing he had to say was simply this: “And the nominees for lead actor are . . .” The joke was the high point of the night.

In case you weren’t watching, Michael B. Jordan won for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. And, indeed, there is reason to suppose that many, many people were not watching the Oscars this year. Notwithstanding Brody’s invigorating if fleetingly observed sense of........

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