For someone who never received an Oscar nomination, Joan Rivers ruled the award show like few others. During a long period beginning in the nineteen-nineties, the comedian dominated the red carpet without mercy, striking fear into actors and stylists with her caustic fashion commentary, all while generating major ratings—and an impressive career revival—for herself. Since Rivers’s death, ten years ago in September, no other figure has matched her gift for turning acid wit into public affection. The nominees arriving at tonight’s ceremony, in Los Angeles, might breathe a sigh of relief at her absence. In 2015,The New Yorker’sEmily Nussbaumlooked back at Rivers’s story, an alternately glamorous and turbulent path that appears, in hindsight, to pack pain with every punch line. Part of Rivers’s appeal was her willingness to skewer subjects that appeared off limits to everyone else, such as the 9/11 attacks and the suicide of her husband. (“Days after the Twin Towers fell,” Nussbaum writes, the comedian “called her friend Jonathan Van Meter and invited him to ‘Windows on the Ground.’ ”) But one consistent theme, Nussbaum observes, was Rivers’s focus on women’s appearance: their clothes, their bodies, their faces. Even as the world changed, Rivers stuck with the topic, despite all the suffering it had created in her own life. An admiring documentary about Rivers excised her work on the red carpet, along with a “Titanic”-themed Oscars joke in 1998 about Kate Winslet, who was twenty-two at the time. The portrait that emerges is of a complicated figure, a trailblazer who was simultaneously hilarious and harmful. “To honor her, as both a role model and a cautionary tale,” Nussbaum writes, “you can’t airbrush that out.” | 
