Name: Free Expression on the Weekend: The Oscars with Kyle Smith
Uploaded: 2026-03-11T20:54:00Z
Duration: 6 min 32 s
Description: Ahead of the Oscars, Free Ex’s Jack Butler sat down with Wall Street Journal film critic and Free Expression columnist Kyle Smith to talk about the under and overhyped films, plus why Timothée Chalamet should act more like Christopher Nolan.

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Ahead of the Oscars, Free Ex’s Jack Butler sat down with Wall Street Journal film critic and Free Expression columnist Kyle Smith to talk about the under and overhyped films, plus why Timothée Chalamet should act more like Christopher Nolan.

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260313/619312ab-89cf-4f1e-bb01-300cb7a819c6/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Free Expression on the Weekend: The Oscars with Kyle Smith

Welcome to "Free Expression on the Weekend." I'm Jack Butler and I'm here with "Free Expression" columnist Kyle Smith to talk about the Oscars. Well, thank you Kyle for joining us. Who else to talk about this, but with the "Wall Street Journal's" film critic and a "Free Expression" columnist? Is there anything that you think is just totally overlooked?

I kind of feel that way about "Blue Moon," which I saw at the Telluride Film Festival. And I just thought it was a really terrific film. It's about Larry Hart, who's this alcoholic songwriter who worked with Richard Rogers, and it captures him at the moment in his career when Richard Rogers has dumped him and moved on to Oscar Hammerstein as his new partner. And Larry Hart, who's played by Ethan Hawke, who was a, Larry Hart was a very small, hard-drinking Jewish gay man. Ethan Hawke is none of those things, but I think he inhabits the character brilliantly. And this script very incisively develops both Hart as why he was such a great personality. And also two theories of art. One is Hart's very kind of smart collegiate wit approach to Broadway. And the other was Oscar Hammerstein's approach which was very much about heart. And I think anyone who cares about show business should care about this kind of turning point and where Broadway turned away from, you know, Hart's style to Hammerstein's style. And I would've thought everyone in show business will see this movie. Everyone will get it, everyone will get the inside jokes. But I'm getting the impression nobody's watching it. And maybe Ethan Hawke, who I thought was gonna have a real good shot at winning best actor does not have a great shot anymore. 'Cause I just think not enough people have seen it.

Well pour one out for "Blue Moon" then. But let's talk about the other end of things and what might be overpraised. Do you think that's the case for "Sinners," which has gotten more Oscar nominations than any movie ever, which seems like a lot to ask of any film?

I think it's ridiculously overpraised. I think for it to get 16 Oscar nominations is just overkill. To me, "Sinners" is a very overrated, it's kind of a pretentious vampire movie. The first half about life in the Delta is a lot more interesting than the second half, which I thought was kind of a cheesy genre movie. It has however, the appropriate woke anti-racism message. I think that's why it's being overpraised. Similarly, "One Battle After Another" also being overpraised slightly for different reasons. I think, as I wrote in my column a couple weeks ago, the average Hollywood liberal voter's not really paying that much attention to the movie and not noticing that the overall message of the movie is that the kind of liberal left wing revolutionaries always fail. And, you know, a more moderate approach than either extreme is the one that should be on your agenda. I think people are taking this as like a, you know, a power to the people revolutionary sort of Black power movie, when it's not really that. It could be better described as a movie that makes fun of both extremes.

How about Emma Stone in "Begonia"? Is she the obvious front runner for that or is someone else?

No, she's already won twice. She'd be too young to win a third time. I think Best Actress is gonna go to Jessie Buckley for "Hamnet." Tearjerker about Shakespeare and his wife and their kid during the plague years. She spends about 30 minutes of this movie crying, just crying her eyes out. I think a lot of voters confuse crying with acting. So she's definitely gonna win the most tears shed Oscar. A lot of people like Rose Byrne for, "If I had legs that'd kick you," but really obscure movie, I think it only grossed about $2 million. It's hard to watch. It's physically hard to sit through because it's about anxiety.

Another movie sort of fits that category, which is "Marty Supreme," and Timothee Chalamet has made an unusually unrestrained case for wanting to win the Best Actor award.

Someone else is gonna win. I think Michael B. Jordan has a real good shot at winning it because he won the Screen Actors Guild Award. The problem with Chalamet is he's just trying too hard. He's been relentlessly campaigning for this. I think people have gotten a little bit tired of it. The sweet spot when you're trying to win an Oscar, it's kinda like how Christopher Nolan does it. Like once in a while you turn up at a special screening, and you once in a while do an interview, but you kind of keep a dignified distance from it.

Two big picture questions about the Oscars. Do you have thoughts about this new best casting category? Is this a good addition, kind of a wash?

It's stupid. I mean, who cares? It's already too long. To me, they should divide the Oscars up into the faces and the behind the scenes people. Do like a behind the scenes show the previous week where we'd get all the sound effects editors and all the editors and all those people work behind the scenes that nobody cares about, get them outta the way in a separate show. You know, the Oscars would be so much better if it were like 2 1/2 hours and they were all familiar faces and maybe they could take a break for a song and dance routine or something like that, like we had with Ryan Gosling a couple years ago.

Yeah. Does this ceremony even matter still? It's going to YouTube in 2029. Increasingly the best picture, which is often what draws people to watch the ceremony in the first place, is a movie that no one has ever seen.

Yeah, if you look back at the history, it was getting like regularly way over 40 million viewers, like 18 or 19 million people are probably gonna watch it this year. The thing to remember though is the ad rates haven't really softened, the ad rates are still up around 2 million for 30 seconds.

Jack: Wow.

So it's an immensely profitable deal to air the Oscars and sell, you know, well over a hundred million dollars worth of ads. So it's worth it on the business side, and it's very, very worth it on the Hollywood side because these people, they take it real seriously. It's a real big business in Hollywood. They really, really wanna win these Oscars, and essentially what they're doing is spending other people's money on a gold statue they can put on their shelf and be in the history books forever and ever. So, you know, in that sense it matters on both ends. Does the general audience matter? Well, no, it's not really the cultural totem it used to be. The average American probably hadn't even heard of "Anora" when it won last year. Which only grossed about 19 million in the US, something like that. Essentially, you know, Mr. And Mrs. Middle America, I think look at the Oscars as just kind of this weird little thing that, this weird little party that they throw themselves. But the most glamorous people in the world really care about this award and it's worth a lot to them. And there's a lot riding on all this stuff.