The Oscars

For those of you who don't know, Sunday night was Oscar Night, and it may very well have been the most predictable one ever. I am not here to brag, but I was able to call the winners of almost every award except for some of the technical ones. I even managed to predict who would win Best Live-Action Short and Best Animated Short based solely on the clips they played during the show. The only major exceptions were Best Documentary and Best Foreign Film which I predicted would go to Food Inc. and the black-and-white German one respectively. Otherwise Up won Best Animated Feature and Best Music, Christoph Waltz won Best Supporting Actor, Mo'Nique won Best Supporting Actress, Sandra Bullock won Best Actress, Jeff Bridges won Best Actor, Crazy Heart won Best Song, Avatar won Best Special Effects, Cinematography, and Art Design, The Hurt Locker won a whole bunch including Best Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay, and District 9 got jack all as expected. Though Kathryn Bigelow looked like she was going to puke when she won Best Picture. But of course the awards are only half the show. The other half is pure pablum. So let's take a look at that shall we?



Let's start with the hosts, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin. They had a few snappy one liners, but overall they weren't that funny. The opening monologue (dialogue?) was especially terrible. Here's a fun drinking game: Take a shot every time Steve Martin mentions an actor and then says, "Wow!" The only memorable part was the Hitler joke they made at Meryl Streep's expense. The Neil Patrick Harris musical routine which introduced them was also pretty disappointing, which is too bad since I like Neil Patrick Harris almost as much as I enjoy saying his name. Neil Patrick Harris. You didn't really see them all that much the rest of the night, but when they did show up their jokes weren't much better. But then again Oscar jokes are always pretty corny and mostly involve making fun of celebrities, so I can't complain all that much especially if you compare them to the likes of Ellen DeGeneres.

Next up you have the award presenters who are normally (pretty much always) reading some tripe off a teleprompter. The only people of note are those who stray from the script, though that normally ends poorly. For instance, Miley Cyrus came off looking pretty retarded. Sean Penn rambled on about god-knows-what. He's pretty much the Kanye West of the acting world. The only stand-out was Ben Stiller who came out dressed as an Avatar, which put some people off, but I enjoyed it for the most part.

On the flip side you have the acceptance speeches. But the only one worth remembering is Mo'Nique's which was easily the best. Sandra Bullock's was also pretty classy. Jeff Bridges' started off good, but he started to ramble, like a lot. It turns out he wasn't really acting in The Big Lebowski. Also there was that crazy annoying lady who interrupted that guy's acceptance speech for Best Documentary Short. Yah that was weird.

Finnaly you have the pageantry which they cut down on a lot this year. All they had was Neil Patrick Harris at the beginning (as I already mentionned) and a large dance crew halfway through which danced to the music from the movies nominated for Best Score. The dancing was pretty cool, but it didn't really have anything to do with the movies the music came from. I was disappointed that they cut the performances of songs in the Best Original Song category, that was always one of my favpurite parts. Instead they put in this bullshit where actors get on stage and talk about how great the Best Actor/Actress nominees are. Some of their speeches where pognant, but most of them were the same old teleprompter bullshit.

So that about does it for my review of Oscar night. It wasn't the best by a long shot, but it wasn't the worst either. There were few surprises, and most of it was the same old thing one expects from the Academy Awards, but it had its moments.