Let's be honest: Oscars night is too safe, struggling with relevance, and needs a rethink | Coco Khan

Each year the ceremony becomes slicker - and safer - no matter how much more diverse, creative and bold the films being feted are

For the first time in two decades, coverage of the Oscars was free to watch for Britons this year. More than a million of us tuned in to Hollywood's biggest night of the year. That's a huge audience, but with a full day's distance from the event I feel comfortable speaking on behalf of us all to say: well, that was anticlimactic.

An awards ceremony that brought to mind the meme Could this meeting have been an email?", the 2024 Oscars turned out to be a rather bland affair: a perfunctory giving out of awards where category winners had long been a foregone conclusion. There were no hiccups, no muck-ups, no jokes that went too far, not too much politics - but not so little it would draw criticism, either. It was so tightly curated it even finished early.

Coco Khan is a freelance writer and co-host of the politics podcast Pod Save the UK