Oscars 2021: The 11 Best, Worst And Weirdest Moments From The Ceremony

The strangest awards season in recent memory came to a close on Sunday night, courtesy of the 93rd Academy Awards.

Like most ceremonies of the past year, the Oscars had to get creative amid the coronavirus pandemic, resulting in an in-person event that took place at Los Angeles' Dolby Theatre and Union Station... and, unfortunately, was kind of a bore. (Hardly any movie clips? At the Oscars?!)

In the list below, we've gathered 11 of the three-hour broadcast's best and worst moments, including some very curious production choices that turned cinema's biggest night into one looong acceptance speech. (That's how it felt, at least; read our full review of the show here.)

But the evening wasn't entirely without its highlights: Numerous winners, like Nomadland director Chloé Zhao, made Oscar history with their victories, while Daniel Kaluuya's off-the-cuff acceptance speech, an unexpected shout-out to Saved by the Bell and an appearance from a certain Supernatural vet, among other moments, brightened the proceedings. And just when the Oscars were getting a little too sleepy, Glenn Close stood up and shook what her mama gave her. (Yep, you read that right!)

Scroll through the list below to see all the moments we've singled out from this year's Oscars, then drop a comment with your own picks from the ceremony!

For the third straight year, the Oscars had no formal host, but we would have been perfectly content with opening presenter Regina King emceeing the entire show. After strutting into the ceremony in a gorgeous periwinkle gown, King 1) smoothly played it off when she nearly tripped on her dress, 2) gave a poignant reminder that "no amount of fame or fortune" changes the urgency of fighting for civil rights, and 3) oozed with charm and warmth as she told anecdotes about the evening's first nominees. As if we needed any reminding, King once again proved she's an absolute queen.

Upon winning Best Screenplay for Promising Young Woman, the film's writer/director — and The Crown star — Emerald Fennell revealed that the only acceptance speech she'd ever written in her life was penned when she was 10. "I mostly thanked Zack Morris from Saved by the Bell," she joked. "Unfortunately, he hasn't been as much a part of my life as I'd hoped."

Something we really weren't expecting: Supernatural alum Misha Collins in the audience during the awards ceremony. (We seriously questioned if we were seeing things or had discovered a doppelgänger.) But the actor's presence started to make a lot more sense, knowing that Collins' friend Darius Marder wrote and directed the Best Picture-nominated Sound of Metal.

Near the end of his acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actor, Judas and the Black Messiah's Daniel Kaluuya marveled at the very miracle of life, noting that "my mom, my dad, they had sex" and created his existence. Cut to the Dolby Theatre, where we got the hilarious visual of Kaluuya's embarrassed sister putting her head in her hands, while his baffled mother wondered aloud, "What's he talking about?!" (Watch the moment above at 3:45.)

We can overlook the winners' seemingly interminable acceptance speeches on Sunday night; everyone deserves their moment, after all! But we can't forgive the Oscar producers for squandering nearly every opportunity they had to liven up the proceedings with exciting visuals. Instead of showing clips of the nominated films, presenters (like Don Cheadle, pictured) typically gave long-winded praise to each nominee; all of the Best Original Song performances, which would have at least broken up the monotony, aired during the pre-show; and sheesh, we didn't even get to see photos of the nominated clothing in the Best Costume Design category. In a year when many of these films flew entirely under the radar, the Oscars strangely seemed to have no real interest in promoting them.

Actually, we take it back: Some of these speeches were simply too long, like the one that followed My Octopus Teacher's victory in the Best Documentary Feature category. A tragic waste of in-house DJ Questlove, who could have cued up some excellent and fitting play-off music (but wasn't allowed to, as he told Variety).

When Nomadland's Chloé Zhao made history as the first woman of color to win a Best Director Oscar, she did so with a short-and-sweet speech full of hope and wisdom. "People at birth are inherently good," she said of a poem from her youth growing up in China. "Even though sometimes it might seem like the opposite is true ... This is for anyone who has the faith and courage to hold on to the goodness in themselves and to hold on to the goodness in each other."

Additional history makers included Ma Rainey's Black Bottom's Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson, who became the first Black women to win an Academy Award for hair and makeup; and Minari's Yuh-Jung Youn, who became the first Korean actor to win an Oscar.

Why the face, Tenet production designer Kathy Lucas? Second thoughts about the bland biographical anecdote you submitted for Halle Berry to read?

If it's not the Super Bowl, it's not great for the commercials to be more exciting than the show. But in the midst of an overall snoozefest on Sunday, new trailers for Steven Spielberg's West Side Story and Jon M. Chu's In the Heights gave the broadcast some jolts of excitement it so badly needed.

What's worse, that someone misspelled "Achievement" at all, for this placard? Or that it was for a category about editing?

Seeing Glenn Close do "Da Butt" is not something we knew we needed to see. But now that we have, the song will never be the same. Was this whole moment scripted? Probably. But that doesn't take away from this being one of the best and funniest moments in Oscars history. Eight Oscar losses for Close? Pish posh. Do "Da Butt."

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