The first prize at Sunday night’s Academy Awards was announced before the evening began. As we gazed down at the Dolby Theatre from on high, enjoying what was officially described as “a really dope view” of the proceedings, Giuliana Rancic, hosting on E!, revealed that “aerial coverage was provided by Goodyear, award-winning tires recognized by experts for superior performance.” Hey, what awards? Best Tread? Least Likely to Blow? Why can’t we watch that ceremony on TV?

As the years crawl by (and Oscar, as we were constantly reminded on Sunday, has now hit ninety), the pre-match warmup, out on the red carpet, grows stranger and more transfixing, while the game itself—the ceremony within—becomes ever more of a drag. There is an honesty and a freshness, in the fashion commentary, that you just don’t get with the speeches delivered, or stumbled over, by announcers and winners alike. When somebody exclaims, as happened Sunday night, “She is Zoolandering it! She is owning that Glambot,” you have the thrilling and privileged sense of being right at the heart of the crucible in which our language is forged and reborn. Heedless of the usual rules, Jason Bolden and his fellow truth-tellers on E! say what they think and say it so crisply, sometimes, that it emerges as an iambic heptameter: “It’s hot, it’s hot, it’s hot, it’s hot, it’s cool, it’s modern, it’s new.”

No, not a plug for “Darkest Hour,” which is so darned hot that it appears to have been made in 1955, but an accurate hymn of praise to the outfit sported by Chadwick Boseman: a long black coat bedecked with mystic runes of silver, such as Merlin might have worn for early-evening drinks at Camelot, plus boots that zipped up the front. As a look, it was hipper than anything donned by Boseman in “Black Panther,” and it was a handsome runner-up in the night’s style awards. The victor, we must all agree, was Shane Vieau, who, as he strode to the podium to collect his statuette for “The Shape of Water,” was clad in the following: white wing-collared shirt, black collar stud. No tie. Tux and pants, with a turquoise silk square tucked into the breast pocket. Sleeves of the jacket cropped short, stopping at the elbow but allowing the shirt to continue down to the wrists. White sneakers. Oh, and a large pair of shades. It’s as if Vieau couldn’t decide whether to come as a tennis player, a croupier, or an eight-year-old boy, so he chose to come as all three. And why not? If you’re a set designer by trade, as he is, you might as well begin by designing yourself.

Further Reading New Yorker writers on the 2018 Academy Awards.

As for the set, in front of which Jimmy Kimmel had to master the ceremonies, who built that? Was Shane Vieau not available? Is that why the stagehands were forced to break into the storeroom at the back of the MGM lot and raid the toy box? Nothing else could explain the ritzy heap of Versailles knockoffs, broken bits of palace left over from “The Thief of Baghdad,” and an arch of Swarovski crystals that looked like what remains of your windshield after a thief has smashed it in to get at your purse on the dashboard. Four hours of staring at that thing and my eyes were starting to tear like Daniel Kaluuya’s in “Get Out.”

Jane Fonda, walking out hand in hand with Helen Mirren to present an award, had a nice dig at the sets. “They’re just like the Orgasmatron in ‘Barbarella’,” she said. This was both a fond glance at a highlight of her youth and a careful sleight of hand, since the pleasure-enhancing device in that movie was in fact called the Excessive Machine. The Orgasmatron, on the other hand, did much the same job in “Sleeper,” but that very funny film was directed by Woody Allen, who also starred as the guy who got to fondle the device in question, and whose name did not, let us say, figure heavily in last night’s entertainment. Nor did Kevin Spacey’s. There was a brief mention of Mel Gibson, though only as the punchline of a joke, courtesy of Kimmel. This is known as playing it safe.

The odd thing about concerted action, when a number of people close ranks and link up to defend a cause, or to utter a cry for change, is how often one voice, for all the force of that communal intent, stands out from the hubbub. So it was with Oprah Winfrey, at the Golden Globes, and so it was on Sunday, as Frances McDormand took control. “I’ve got some things to say,” she declared. Boy, did we sit up and listen. It was clear how serious she was from the moment that she put her Oscar down on the floor. James Ivory had done the same, but, at the age of eighty-nine, he needed one hand free for the script of his speech and another for his walking stick, whereas McDormand, displaying a touch of the verve with which her character, in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” hurls Molotov cocktails into a police station, went hands-free to make an important point. You had to love the boldness of her sign-off, which saw her proclaiming the words “inclusion rider” and caused half a billion people to reach for their cell phones. Say what? Could this be a reboot of “Knight Rider,” perhaps, from Netflix, with the Hoff returning in triumph to play Michael Inclusion?

It turned out to mean something rather more practical: a clause in an actor’s contract that requires both cast and crew to meet a stipulated level of diversity. An excellent proposal, and well overdue, although, on Sunday’s evidence, the crews may be harder to transform than the casts; most of the folks trotting up to be garlanded for their technical skills were white guys of a certain age, or beyond. Not that Rachel Morrison—the first female cinematographer in Oscar history to earn a nomination, for her work on “Mudbound”—would begrudge the award that went to her confrère Roger Deakins. He won at the fourteenth time of asking, for “Blade Runner 2049,” having conjured much of his most elegant work, over the years, for the Coen brothers. It was he who shot “Fargo,” which brought a well-deserved Oscar for, yes, Frances McDormand, back in 1996. She is not just a trailblazer but someone who knows how long the blazing can take.

So, what will the Oscars guests have pondered, in their hearts, as they sat down at the Governors Ball, to toy with the black truffle ravioli dished up by Wolfgang Puck? Were their consciences as tender as what Puck called the “Miyazaki” beef? One thing’s for sure: if there were any grumps or grinches in the crowd who hadn’t felt sufficiently woke at the start of the show, they will have been a damn sight woker by the end. Almost anything could have done the trick, be it Mira Sorvino’s exhorting us not merely to aim at “honor and truth and beauty and justice” but to lionize them, as if they were movie stars, or else the thumping performance of “This Is Me,” belted out by Keala and a chorus so rampantly energetic that they spilled off the stage and flowed down into the aisles. Their song hails from “The Greatest Showman,” the Hugh Jackman movie that the general public, to the indignation of critics and the bewilderment of pollsters, keeps insisting on going to see—of its own volition, would you believe—months after the opening weekend. Apparently, it’s all to do with something called “word of mouth,” whatever that is. I guess it must be an app.