WrestleMania 36: Give The Undertaker all of the Oscars right now
By Josh Hill
Undertaker and AJ Styles turned in a bizarre instant classic match at WrestleMania 36
Cancel Oscar season, ladies and gentlemen, because we have our winner.
The Undertaker and A.J. Styles closed out the first night of Wrestlemania on Saturday with an instant classic match that is going to take a while to fully process.
Without fans in attendance this year due to social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, WWE was forced to get creative with how WrestleMania was filmed. What that ended up meaning was the production of a boneyard match in a makeshift backyard boneyard blended with all the B-horror movie cheese that could be packed into 15 minutes.
It was stupid, it was cheesy, and every single damn minute of it was amazing.
Not having fans for WrestleMania 36 was obviously not ideal, but it has afforded WWE a chance to lean into the capital-E Entertainment part of its business. Pre-filmed matches that were perfectly choreographed and brilliantly staged added an unexpected element of awesome to the proceedings. What would have undoubtedly been a classic in-ring match became something else entirely away from the arena. It was an otherworldly experience that felt as unique as it did strange.
There was no referee, no roar of the crowd, but all of the elements of a traditional match were there. It didn’t feel real, it felt (as odd as it is to say about WWE) sacrilegious to how we normally digest wrestling, yet it all worked.
Simply put, the cheese was diabolically delicious.
Just like the WWE, the Oscars are likely to fall victim to having its traditions flipped upside down. Moviegoing has come to a grinding halt amid a global pandemic; how we traditionally navigated the award circuit is going to be tremendously altered. Either we will have a truncated award season packed with every movie that wanted to contend between now and whenever we are safe, or the rules about not having movies play in theaters for a certain amount of time to become eligible are going to have to be amended.
Here’s a call to amend them so The Undertaker wins all of the Oscars. Give him every single one.
Who’s leading the Best Actor race right now? What’s the Best Picture at the moment? Where else have we received an injection of such unadulterated joy?
Relax, cinephiles. Obviously, Undertaker isn’t going to win an Oscar. If anything, WWE would be eligible for an Emmy award, but let us have some fun for a moment. We’re living in an absurdist extreme reality, so anything is possible (not really but if you’re mad about this you’re thinking about it way too hard).
Undertaker’s performance on Saturday night was every bit the escapism we need right now. The Oscars are meant to honor the very best of filmed cinematic entertainment each year, of which the Boneyard match ticked a lot of boxes. Regardless of his actual Oscar chances (which are a hard zero), The Undertaker deserves every ounce of praise we can heap on him like the dirt he heaped upon A.J. Styles in what amounted to the most fun we’ve had in the middle of otherwise terrible times.