Notes on the Academy Awards (part 1)

Hmm, the Academy has evidently discovered CGI. Nice intro, though. (And Billy Crystal and Chris Rock in a tent? Genius.)

Jon Stewart's jokes are a little lame, I'm afraid. I expected better from him, really. The western clip thing was good, though.

Jesus, could Nicole Kidman look any paler? It's not really her best look. And... George Clooney wins for Best Supporting. I was sort of rooting for Matt Dillon, just because I like him and he ought to have been nominated long ago, but Clooney is probably deserving too. (I haven't seen Syriana. The minute I heard about the fingernail thing, they lost me as a possible customer. Eww.)

The "78" all over the place is kind of weird.

WTF has Ben Stiller got on? Well, you gotta admit he's a guy who never minds making an idiot of himself. Pretty funny bit, though. Effect nominees: we got Narnia, Kong and War of the Worlds... and Peter Jackson's boys win, as usual.

Reese Witherspoon is giving the award for Best Animated Feature. Howl's Moving Castle, Corpse Bride and Wallace & Gromit... and Wallace & Gromit wins. Whoa, look at this guy's huge bow tie! Oh, both of them have them... and they brought little ones for the Oscars too. I think they had a little bit of a clue they might win, didn't they?

Here's another WTF moment - what is Naomi Watts wearing? It appears to be sort of a deconstructed flesh-colored thing. Dolly Parton looks like she's had a couple of face-lifts since I've last seen her, too. She sounded good, though. It'd be pretty cool to see her win an Oscar.

(More to come, I imagine.)

Oscars, part 2

While I was away, they gave away Live Action Short and Animated Short - I know we missed a lot there. Now they have just given the costume award - I imagine this is the only award that Memoirs of a Geisha is going to win tonight, don't you?

Russell Crowe introduces a little bit about biographical movies. A few of those people really did look eerily like the people they were playing. Mel Gibson as William Wallace... not so much. (Also, that makes two Mel Gibson appearances already. The man is crazy, didn't the Academy get the memo?)

Wil Farrell and Steve Carrell are giving the Makeup award. (Both in very bad makeup, get it?) If they give it to Star Wars I'm going to be pissed... whew, they didn't. Narnia, I can live with that.

I don't like the way they're playing music under the speeches. It sounds like they're reminding everybody to rush.

Yike, I went to the kitchen for a minute and they started giving away Best Supporting Actress. They're not supposed to sneak it up on me like that! Rachel Weisz! yay! Although I would've been been happy with Catherine Keener, too. Michelle Williams was really good in Brokeback, too, of course... but hey, they can't all win.

I like the way they're just putting the Best Picture nominees before the commercials rather than wasting time having somebody introduce them.

Good lord, a commerical for "Tab Energy" - "because women need a different kind of energy." Um, okay.

Lauren Bacall is attempting to talk about film noir, but she seems to be having some difficulty with the teleprompter. She looks pretty good, though. And I have to say that I like the way that they have replaced those horrible dance numbers they used to do with the clip compilations. Remember the dancing Snow Whites?

Best Documentary Short - Rob says it's time to go for a walk. Maybe I will take a little break, myself.

Oscars, part 3

Actually some interesting things happened during my little break. For one thing, the best line in an acceptance speech so far tonight: "I'd like to thank the Academy for seating me next to George Clooney at the awards luncheon." Also, we got Charlize Theron in a dress with a bow on the shoulder so big she looks like she's going to fly away... which is sort of appropriate, I guess, because she ends up giving an award to March of the Penguins. And all of the many, many winners came onstage holding very large stuffed penguins. Did they have those things with them at their seats?

Burning automobiles in the background for a Best Song nominee? A little weird, but on the other hand that song (from "Crash", if you haven't guessed) is so low-key I might have gone to sleep otherwise. (In its defense, it's really rather pretty. But a little bit... slow.)

That Diet Coke commercial with the woman going to the barber and getting her hair all chopped off? Am I the only person who thinks she looks better at the beginning?

Well. My goodness. Memoirs of a Geisha won another award after all - Art Direction. Well, it is a very pretty movie, by all accounts, so I guess that's appropriate.

I sorta zoned out for a while there... there were some more clips (I think they had to do with prejudice, although I missed the introduction). And then the president's speech, which I'm sure the whole world zoned out on. Now we have musical scores, with Itzhak Perlman (did I spell that right?) playing along with the orchestra. I would vote for Pride and Prejudice out of this bunch, but I'm betting that Brokeback wins. We'll see in a minute... Yup. Brokeback it is.

Epic films... the latest clip-fest. (Jon Stewart says, "Wow, we're out of montages.")

Now we have Sound. Memoirs of a Geisha had a good many nominations, didn't it? (It was also in the Score nominations.) But King Kong wins, instead, even though all of these guys already have Oscars for ROTK. (I liked Kong quite a lot, and it deserves some attention. It seems like it got ignored, as much as a movie that cost that much and made that much can be ignored.)

Robert Altman gets a special award. Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin do this sort of virtuoso improvisational act (which I imagine is not improvised at all) in introducing him. And he says he's good for another 40 years or so because he's had a heart transplant. (He's 81. We looked.)

(Also, Jon lied. There were more clips.)

Oscars, part 4 (and a big wow! at the end)

M. Night Shamalayan is in a commercial.... for what? Ah, American Express. I was pretty sure it wasn't for his new movie.

Next song: "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" - Best. Nominated. Song. Title. Ever. (My husband, who can hardly be described as a rap fan, says "That got nominated?") And guess what! It wins!

Jon: "I think it just got a little easier out there for a pimp."

(I criticized his monologue, but the jokes as the show has gone on have been much better.)

Also, I like the fake ads for the nominees. Those were good.

OK, the "in memoriam" section. This is going to be long, considering the rate that people have been dropping the last few weeks. (But Don Knotts and Darrin McGavin aren't in there - I guess they'll get to them next year.)

The guy who won Best Foreign Language Film (Tsotsi, from South Africa, apparently) is shouting, although I'm not very clear on why. I think he said "Viva Africa!" among other things.

Crash wins Editing. Haven't seen it, so no real comment.

Hilary Swank's top looks like it's not going to stay on. Also, it is black, which seems to be the new black. (I know, old joke, but everybody really does seem to be wearing it this year.)

They are mixing up the order of things this year, and are already giving out Best Actor. Oh yay, Philip Seymour Hoffman wins. I've liked him for a long time. I was a little worried that Heath Ledger was going to sneak in there - I like him, too, but I didn't love that mumbly-voiced performance so much.

Hey, Memoirs of a Geisha wins cinematography, too! (It really did win all the "pretty" awards, you notice - Costume, Art Direction, and Cinematography.)

Mixing it up again, we have Best Actress, and it's Reese, of course. I think that was the closest to a Sure Thing we had here tonight. She's still a bit excited, though, and I like what she said about June Carter being a "real woman" - I mean, realistic parts for women are pretty few and far between, aren't they?

Now Dustin Hoffman is giving Best Adapted Screenplay. He stops in mid-speech to say "I'm looking at everybody who didn't win - great work! Great work!" And it goes to Brokeback Mountain, of course. Larry McMurtry makes a nice little speech about "the culture of the book." - For Original Screenplay, I assumed that Crash would win, and it did. (Uma Thurman, who was presenting, also had the extremely pale look going which I commented on hours ago when Nicole Kidman was out. There have been a number of people wearing those flesh-colored dresses tonight, too. I made that joke about black being the new black, but you could just as easily say that tan is the new black, too. There have been very few bright colors in evidence tonight.)

Tom Hanks is not aging well. Ang Lee wins. Of course. (Although if Memoirs of a Geisha had been nominated, Ang might should've been worried!) And Jack Nicholson is out to give Best Picture, and it's Crash !! Wow. There's an actual shocker for Best Picture. It's been a while since that happened, hasn't it?

(I was all set to type "Yawn. It's Brokeback." But they actually surprised me.)

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I hear (via cleolinda) that a huge flap has already started in various internet circles about how terrible it is that Crash won. And like I said, I haven't seen it - is it really that terrible, or is this just the Brokeback fans that are mad because their movie didn't win? Some of the people in Cleolinda's comments seemed to be intimating that the Academy didn't have the guts to vote for a gay-themed movie, but honestly, I have trouble believing that. The Academy is pretty gay-friendly, on the whole. I don't have too much trouble believing that people just got tired of hearing about Brokeback - and maybe the whole "gay cowboy movie" business, too - and decided en masse to vote for something else, though. That's not quite the same thing. And I suspect that it was a very close vote, in any case.

I do have to admit, though, that one reason I haven't seen Crash is because I haven't heard that it's really that great. And because somebody-or-other said that it's one of those movies that pounds you over the head with its Big Message, which not something I'm much interested in. But I didn't think that Brokeback was really all that and a bag of chips, either. I still maintain that out of the three I've seen, I would've voted for Capote.

But Big Message movies do tend to win Academy Awards, let's face it. So it may be as simple as that.


Also: not that this has anything to do with anything, really - but in my mind, Brokeback isn't exactly a gay-themed movie, anyway, except in a very loose way. Both those men are bisexual, not gay, don't you think?