Oscar Recap: And the Loser Is...
The dust has settled on the 78th Annual Academy Awards, and we at Your Film Sucked feel that the awards fit neatly into three convenient, movie title related, categories. Jason's comments appear in RED. Jon's comments appear in BLUE.The Good:
The first good thing the Academy did this year is to get Jon Stewart to host. While he started off shaky, he eventually got into a rhythm. A few things were a hit with everyone, the early Cheney joke and the fake smear campaign ads, for example. However, the best part of his performance was being funny and taking the wind out of Hollywood's sails while the big names sat stone faced in the audience.
The event seemed to move along at a fairly brisk pace, and the scripted jokes from presenters which are normally horrendous and awkward, were at the worst tolerable. I'm not sure if this was an edict from the director, but it was also nice that I saw no one pull out a piece of paper to roll off a list of meaningless names. It may be surprising, but I don't care about your legal counsel.
My favorite parts had to be the fake smear-campaign ads with Steve Colbert voiceovers. Jon Stewart thankfully made the show watchable, at least for me.
The Bad:
Whoever decided that the orchestra should play over all of the acceptance speeches should be fleeced. It was terribly distracting to not only me, but to the award winners as well.
Poor Lauren Bacall stumbling through her speech. It was so absolutely brutal that I changed the channel because I started getting embarrassed for her.
Did we really need a montage of basically every movie ever made? We get the point already.
How is Don Knotts left off of the In Memoriam? He better be on next year, though by then the moment will have long been passed.
I have to disagree with my esteemed colleague as to the quality of the presenters-I felt that most of them were even more robotic and unlikeable than they are in their horrible movies (ironically, the one who I felt delivered the best performance was the girl from Geisha, whose English I think may be better than Keanu Reeves').
While I think Ben Stiller has his moments, his green unitard bit which lasted about 4 minutes was easily 3 1/2 too long. Thank God he showed his range as an actor and didn't do his standard goofy guy character...oh, wait.
The Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep bit was horrific...at no point during their rambling, completely and utterly incomprehensible drek did I have a clue what their point was. While both have a fine resume and the respect of the industry, I thought the entire scene made them look like complete blathering fools.
The Ugly:
Hollywood's outdated, blind view about the modern movie watcher. On at least two occasions they tried to make some terrible point about how movies are best experienced in a theater. Movie studios are basically surviving on DVD sales, yet they are telling us this isn't what we should be doing? For the same price as two movie tickets, two drinks, and a large popcorn (Around 30 dollars here) I can BUY the same movie, watch it in surround sound on a widescreen TV as many times as I want, and eat enough popcorn to feed a small island nation.
Oh, wow, where do I begin?
Did I see Waldorf and Statler in the balcony during the opening sweep? If so, man, was that an omen of things to come.
Thank God for TiVo-I was able to make it through the entire show in about an hour and 15 minutes.
Could Keira Knightly have looked any less interested to be there during the entire show?
How again has Hillary Swank won two Academy Awards again? She was in The Core, right? Just checking.
John Travolta-did someone put on his hair with a Magna Doodle?
And finally, Clooney's self-righteous rant about people in Hollywood being out of touch. Yes, you are, but you know what? No one cares. I'm fairly certain the demographic which enjoyed you in Ocean's Twelve really couldn't care less about your political ideology, so why don't you just stick to making movies and stop pretending you're in it for the people, man. Last time I checked, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was not high on the list of humane organizations throughout the country, let alone the world, so let's keep things in perspective.
Oh, and I pirated my copy of Ocean's Twelve.