Vaudeville Volodymyr’s Big Night

It was a show that forever changed not just the entertainment industry but the world.

As the Sunday afternoon hour approached for the start of the 97th Academy Awards ceremony, rumors swept down the Red Carpet more quickly than the fires that had ravaged Los Angeles a few months before. That catastrophe’s toxic residue glazed the Californian light in a vintage 1970s hue that conjured a goldener era for American movies.

In every corner of the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard could be heard wildfire whispers: was Buster-Keaton-sad-faced-comic-turned-wartime-President Volodymyr Zelenskyy really in Tinseltown, fresh off his star turn in the White House? It could just be true, since the Ukrainian entertainer-cum-politician had gotten rave reviews and registered record-breaking ratings for Friday’s cross-talk act in the White House with the Vaudevillian bad-cop, bad-cop duo, Vance and Trump.

Faced with plunging popular interest and dogged by charges of irrelevance and ennui, the moribund Oscars needed a jolt. Maybe, just maybe the annual ritual would get one before it was too late.

As hundreds of Patek Philippe and Rolex wristwatches ticked past 4 pm Pacific Time and host Conan O’Brien ambled onto the Dolby Theatre stage for his opening monologue, the assembled glitterati emitted a collective sigh of resignation. Another stinker of epic proportions appeared to be underway.

The red-haired emcee cracked a crooked grin and started into his script: “There probably aren’t many of you out there who’ll think this is a Crimean shame, but I’ve been given the hook …”

That’s when the Miracle of the Movies’ Night began.

Four shotgun-wielding G-men marched in headed by Kevin Costner, who informed O’Brien that “we have the right for you to remain silent.” In a lanky cameo, James Comey handcuffed the ousted host and the FBI agents carted him off into the wings as the Academy orchestra’s brass section launched into a military fanfare.

Out sashayed Sunday’s savior and thus began what would become the Academy’s finest hours. His tuxedo piped in the Ukrainian colors was from Tom Ford and therefore “Built to Last,” as Zelenskyy proclaimed when Meryl Streep asked from the front row who he was wearing.

For the next twelve minutes Vaudeville Voldy wowed Hollywood and the world with a top-hat-and-cane song-and-dance routine that choreographed its way into a rollicking production number unsurpassed in the history of the Oscars:

Are you blue and yellow in the White House

And had enough of all those shits?

Putin on the Ritz …

The swelling strings were pierced by a train whistle. A locomotive with “Trans-Siberian Railway” painted across its black body blasted through the backdrop. Up on the big screen, the onstage camera captured the steamy kiss of the engineer and his brakeman—Woody Harrelson as JD Vance and the Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón. Her racist tweets had scuttled her Oscar changes, but now she was back in the spotlight. There was no quicker way to get there than by kicking the Hillbilly Elegist and MAGA-Manchild in the cojones.

From the bowels of the stage, up came Ed Harris strapped to the train tracks as Putin in a Ritz™. The dictator’s stubby fingers wiggled nefariously just beyond the scalloped edge of the greasy cracker as it was run over by the locomotive in a spectacular snack explosion.

Academy Award winner Casey Affleck, also eager to feast on the crumbs of decancellation, waddled out trussed up as an Elon Muskovy Duck, dabbled at the buttery debris and quacked:

Have you seen the well-to-do

Up

and down Park Avenue?

Also in urgent need of a reboot, Alec Baldwin slunk on stage as Don the Drag Queen of Hearts casting off falsetto skeins of de-tuned melody: “You haven’t got the cards,” he crooned as he mounted the cockpit for the threesome’s refrain:

“Pants with stripes and cutaway coat, perfect fits

Putin on the Ritz”

Jane Fonda in Ukrainian army-issue helmet and black war fatigues by Versace drove out in a budget-busting Abrams tank as Voldy soft-shoed in time to the rumble of the mighty treads:

“Dressed up like a million-dollar trouper

Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper (super duper)”

Busby Berkeley drones pirouetted in formation above the stage as the whole ensemble sang and high-kicked, the audience rising as one to join in on:

Move to the rhythm

We can

Move

Move

I want you to move

As if aroused by the massed crescendo, the muzzle of the Abrams’ cannon raised to an erotically suggestive angle, gave a “pop” and shot out a giant blue-and-yellow flag with a peace sign to climax the show-starting show-stopper.

And that was just the beginning.

The evening’s first award, for Best Supporting Actor, went to Kieran Culkin for A Real Pain in which he plays a mad/melancholic stoner (the character smokes weed from Ithaca, New York—that line got some laughs when I saw the film in that very city) on a heritage tour of Poland. Along with his cousin (a role taken by Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed the movie), he vists a death camp and other sites and goes in search of their recently deceased grandmother’s house. Culkin gave a concise and eloquent acceptance speech, first lambasting Rupert Murdoch’s anti-democratic depredations (Culkin played one of the media baron’s sons in Succession), then voicing support for Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer’s speech at last year’s ceremony decrying what Glazer had called the “hijack[ing] of the Holocaust by an occupation that has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” In a witty-weird closing flourish, Culkin promised not to force his wife to have any more children.

Later, Nobel laureate Bob Dylan and Timothée Chalamet, nominated for Best Actor for his portrayal of the bard in A Complete Unknown, sang “The Times They are A-Changin’” together, joined halfway through by the real Joan Baez and her screen epigone, Monica Barbaro (also nominated for Best Supporting Actress in the Dylan biopic).

Even though snubbed for her work in Callas, Angeline Jolie floated down from above like last year’s Barbie, and Mick Jagger bounced up from the auditorium to join in with the gang on a “Mr. Tambourine Man” for the Ages.

Throughout the seamless show, Voldy continued somehow to charm with silly one-liners like the one that started “Elon goes to Kremlin with chainsaw and asks Vlad, What is your Occupation? …”

Late in the broadcast Adrian Brody was declared Best Actor. He strode to the stage already carrying an Oscar—the one he had received for The Pianist more than two decades ago. In a terse but heartfelt address citing George C. Scott’s refusal of the 1970 Best Actor award for Patton, Brody renounced “the crass hucksterism of declaring one artist better than another.” He took his second statuette from last-year’s winner, Cillian Murphy, then handed both to the nearby Zelenskyy. “Not exactly rare earths,” said Brody, “But maybe good for a few bullets.” Sticking to his running gag of making a spooneristic muddle of his English, Voldy nodded and said, “No, no, I give these boys to VD Jance and Tronald Dump on way back to Kyiv to thank them—to really thank them!—for their terrific show on Friday.”

Next, Jeff Bezos bulldozed his way to center stage and announced that Amazon and all other streaming services, from Netflix on down, would close for business before the end of the year. Bezos instead would be putting 200 billion bucks into restoring America’s downtown movie theatres and providing free screenings in perpetuity, funding independent films, and remodeling (with windows and turf roofs!) all Amazon fulfillment centers and converting them to climate-safe agrarian theatre schools, daycares, and free-for-all hospitals.

In the last of the many shocks and surprises, the Best Picture went to the Croatian short film The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, whose dramatic force and moral power harrow and build across its epic 12 minutes. There is no more compelling and urgent piece of cinema.

After this final award, dispensed after a crisp 100 minutes, the director of this year’s show, Steven Spielberg, took to the stage to announce that, however much the Academy had wanted to make it to 100, this would be the last Award ceremony. The first Sunday in March of 2026—if there turned out to be one—would instead find all of Hollywood Royalty in Kyiv’s National Palace of the Arts for the premiere of the first film in a ten-part series to be made in collaboration with Ridley Scott, called Fighting for Freedom and starring none other than … Volodymyr Zelenskyy! The Ukrainian shrugged: “Then maybe I keep these two Oscars after all.”

(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)