So this strangest of years was matched with the strangest of Oscar ceremonies, a weirdly subdued and anticlimactic affair with an ending that had people more discombobulated than the final episode of The Sopranos. No central host, none of the usual deployment of clips, and then the evening finished with best actor instead of best picture, leading everyone to expect that it was going to go with a posthumous tribute to Chadwick Boseman for his performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Instead it went – I think justifiably – to Anthony Hopkins for his portrayal of a man with dementia in The Father. But Sir Anthony was not present. No speech. There it all ended.

But not before we’d had now heartwrenching tradition of The Pipping of Glenn Close at the Post. Up for best supporting actress, Close once again had to take it on the chin and smile with great generosity and good nature from a seated position when another nominee got the prize and thanked her from the podium. Close’s rather overripe performance as the grizzled grandma in Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy was beaten out by the rival grandma played by the veteran Korean star Youn Yuh-jung in Lee Isaac Chung’s brilliant Minari, and Youn gave us a funny speech making her basically the queen of this year’s awards season.

But otherwise #Oscars2021 ran on expected lines with no real upsets to the predicted winners, though it delivered historic wins for a film-maker who is also a woman of colour – Chloé Zhao, director of Nomadland. Nomadland won best picture, best director and best actress for perennial Academy favourite Frances McDormand for her performance as Fern, the woman who in her silver years has to go on the road looking for seasonal work.

In some ways, Nomadland ran both with and against the spirit of the times. Covid has had the world locked down while Nomadland showed people ranging freely around, the camper-van nomads, new American pioneers in a new landscape of financial catastrophe. But perhaps the film spoke to a new reality of financial woe: the economic crisis of Covid has been as great as the 2008 crash, which is at the centre of Nomadland.

This movie shows people coming to terms with a new reality in the final act of their lives: what they thought would be an uneventfully comfortable retirement was to be a reckoning with hardship but also a sense that perhaps the hoarding of income against the challenge of existing in your 60s and 70s had been an illusion. But this trio of wins for Zhao is a wonderful coup for a genuinely original and daring film-maker and it’s a great performance from McDormand.

Hopkins deserved his best actor in a strong field for his disturbing performance in The Father, although many would have been happier to see Riz Ahmed get it for his equally heartfelt and intelligent portrayal of a man with hearing impairment in Sound of Metal. The Father is a film about something that is set to become one of the great issues in societies where people are living longer: dementia and the stripping away of identity. Hopkins was devastating in this film, especially in its anguished final moments. And again, the best adapted screenplay Oscar for The Father was widely anticipated.

Daniel Kaluuya’s best supporting actor Oscar for his muscular and charismatic performance as the murdered Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah cements his reputation as one of cinema’s brightest young stars. Where he had been a slight, vulnerable and almost boyish presence in Jordan Peele’s satire Get Out, now he is more bulky and muscular and heroic. Kaluuya surely has the most mesmeric gaze of any leading man, although it’s strange to think that his role was technically a supporting turn.

One of the most personally satisfying Oscars of the night, for me, was Emerald Fennell’s best original screenplay for her subversive rape-revenge satire Promising Young Woman, starring Carey Mulligan as a woman who pretends to be drunk in clubs as a trap for “nice guy” predators. It’s a film that had been subjected to a blizzard of obtuse hot takes, treating it as if it were an opinion piece or a Twitter thread, instead of a complex and challenging movie. It is great to see Fennell’s brilliance rewarded.

Elsewhere, the Academy Awards did not disgrace themselves with anything outrageously wrong. Soul was rightly made the best animated feature, and Mank, about Herman Mankiewicz and the genesis of Citizen Kane, took cinematography and production design, although director David Fincher must surely have been dreaming of greater things.

However, at the risk of being curmudgeonly, I was once again exasperated to see Thomas Vinterberg’s lively but essentially silly booze dramedy Another Round capture the international feature film Oscar over better films. And, heretically, I wonder if the best documentary Oscar winner My Octopus Teacher was a bland heartwarmer, whose story could have been told as a short film.

But this was a deeply satisfying night for Zhao’s Nomadland, the work of a genuinely great film-maker.