As it happened Oscars 2024: Oppenheimer sweeps Oscars, while Ryan Gosling wows audience as Ken

As Stone took to the stage to accept her Oscar, she realised she was experiencing a wardrobe malfunction. “My dress is broken,” she joked, as presenters Charlize Theron, Michelle Yeoh, Jessica Lange, Sally Field and Jennifer Lawrence moved to help her.

Backstage, however, Stone was showing off a fixed gown.

“They sewed me back in,” she joked. “I genuinely do think I lost it during [Ryan Gosling’s performance of] I’m Just Ken. That number blew my mind. I was going for it, and things happened.”

Poor Things nabbing four awards made it the second most successful film of the night. Was Mark Ruffalo unlucky not to win best supporting actor? For sure, but how could anyone begrudge Robert Downey Jr in Oppenheimer? (And, as is so often the case, you could argue that his win was as much a career- and lifetime award as it was a nod for this particular performance. But hey, that didn’t help Nyad’s Annette Bening any, so it’s not a hard-and-fast rule that applies consistently or universally, so maybe it’s not a rule at all.)

Was Yorgos Lanthimos, one of the most innovative and thrilling and risk-taking directors around, robbed? Was Aussie Tony McNamara robbed for his brilliantly funny and inventive Poor Things screenplay? Probably, but also not. You can argue the toss as much as you like on these things, but I can’t think of another year in which the awards fell so much in line with how they were expected to go, or how I thought they should.

One point of divergence, perhaps, was best documentary. I will argue until the cows come home that Four Daughters is thematically and formally inventive, tells an incredibly powerful story, and should have won the prize. But I’ll also acknowledge that 20 Days in Mariupol is a piece of work that speaks to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine with incredible power and urgency, and its win makes sense as both statement and reward.

So, just to address the numbers, let’s wrap.

Oppenheimer: Seven wins from 13 clearly makes it the big winner.

Poor Things: Four from 11, including best actress and production design, is a very decent showing.

The Zone of Interest: Two wins (best international picture and best sound design) from five is a good result for an incredibly challenging film.

Maestro: Cursed by the perception that he simply wanted it too much, Bradley Cooper (nominated as producer, actor and writer for the biopic of conductor Leonard Bernstein) went home empty handed. The film won none of the seven awards for which it was nominated ,and is surely the second-biggest loser of the night.

Killers of the Flower Moon: And, perhaps surprisingly, the most overlooked film of the night belongs to Martin Scorsese. His Killers of the Flower Moon was up for 10 awards, and won precisely zero. At least he’s had plenty of practice at being overlooked: the 81-year-old director may be one of the most revered figures in the business, but he has been nominated 16 times as producer, director or writer, winning just once (for The Departed in 2006, as director).

And finally, the ceremony itself: Over in 3½ hours. That’s not much longer than some of the nominated movies (Killers of the Flower Moon runs for 3 hours and 26 minutes, Oppenheimer an even three hours). If for no other reason, Kimmel and co. deserve some sort of award for that.

Perhaps the only slight surprise (the closest to umami that the vanilla show got) was American Fiction’s win for best adapted screenplay. It was gunning against some hard-hitters, including Oppenheimer and Poor Things, yet it managed to clinch the win for its interpretation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure. That was a refreshing break from and otherwise predictable show.

It may have been vanilla, but you know what? I still enjoy that flavour. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with picking the safe choice.

The 30-second advertisement ends with the national flags of the US, UK and Australia, directing those interested to this website. 

But those who visit the site get the message “this page has been decommissioned” and are directed to the homepage to explore career options.

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AUKUS has a much lower profile among the general public in the US than in Australia. The airing of the advertisement comes almost exactly a year since the three nations announced the so-called “optimal pathway” for Australia to acquire a fleet of nuclear-submarines by purchasing at least three Virginia-class submarines from the US and developing a new SSN AUKUS submarine in collaboration with the UK.

Even the show’s host Jimmy Kimmel did his best work when he stopped trying to milk the A-list audience for mediocre awards telecast gags, and instead leaning into something real: the many months of bruising industrial action which had battered the entertainment industry as its workers sought to get a fairer deal from the studios which make billions off their labour.

“We were able to make a deal because of the people who rallied beside us,” Kimmel said. And the audience responded, turning a light wave of laughter into a standing ovation.

And then there are those moments, wrought out of glitter, nonsense and imagination, that become the moment that steals the show. He offered nothing political, nothing substantial and nothing of any real meaning, and yet somehow Ken – alias actor Ryan Gosling – became the biggest moment of the night.

Maybe in Hollywood you have to look for something meaningful among the nonsense, and maybe there is a life lesson in something as bland and plastic as Barbie’s occasional boyfriend Ken.

Am I Kenough? I am Kenough. And Ryan Gosling is Kenough for all of us.