Oscar the Grouch

I don't have to go to work until later on today, so I stayed up and watched the Academy Awards last night. I don't know why. Morbid curiosity, I guess. It afflicts me around this time every year. Although I have never had a vested interest in the antics of Hollywood celebrities, and literally could NOT care less who anyone's wearing, I still feel somewhat obligated to tune in each and every time this pretentious-fest rolls around.
Except last year. You couldn't pay me enough to sit through three or four hours of Chris Rock. I've never seen somebody so popular and yet so racist. Everything has to do with race, as far as that man's concerned. If he was white, he'd have been pilloried long ago.
The search for another Billy Crystal continues. While Stewart did not bomb a la Letterman, he was no roaring hell as host. Having never seen the man's show (yup, just as deprived when it comes to television), I can only assume he's a good deal funnier on it...he'd have to be, wouldn't he? Or else they'd cancel it.
Maybe they'll try Jay Leno next year. It does seem as if they're making the rounds of all the late night TV hosts.
I had mixed emotions before Stewart even took the stage. The first of several Brokeback Mountain-inspired jokes had me chuckling, but even as I laughed I revised my estimate of little gold statues that film would take home sharply downwards. Because Hollywood still doesn't get it. They think that movie is something to joke about. Homos on the range, how very droll.
Eva's watching the first 90 minutes with me and exhorting all and sundry to move it along. While they're not fast enough to suit her--I get the feeling she wants each person to say ten words or so and get the hell off the stage--I'm really quite amazed at how fast the proceedings are going. This is a far cry from past years, when acceptance speeches were cut off at Last Trump or after the Oscar winner had thanked her sister's friend's caterer's aunt's hairdresser.

If anybody thanked God, I missed it. Well, I didn't miss it--I just didn't hear it. Maybe Hollywood is as Godless as they say it is. In any case, I loved Clooney's terse rejection of Middle America.

Best song: as a musician, I pay a lot of attention to this category. I don't know what the Academy looks for, but I'm looking for craft: something that makes you hear a standard melody or chord progression in a new way, or something entirely new. The song should also be central to the message and tone of the film. To my way of thinking, the best Best Songs over the past twenty years have been "A Whole New World" from Aladdin in 1992, "My Heart Will Go On" from Titanic in 1997, and "Lose Yourself" from 8 Mile in 2002.
I haven't seen Hustle and Flow, but of the three nominated songs, I thought "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" was far and away the best. "Travelin' Thru" was repetitive and hackneyed and that other song was forgettable, so forgettable I've forgotten it already. The Academy may have thought they were just being hip, but in this case they were also correct.

As the night zipped along, I found myself lamenting what seems to be a widening divide between Hollywood's commercial releases and the movies it sees fit to award. No offense to the makers of any of last night's Best Picture nominees, but the Oscars are looking more and more like the Independent Spirit awards every year. Occasionally the Academy will glance down into the cesspool of commercialism and reward, say, Johnny Depp with a nomination for his performance as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, but you just knew he'd never win. To win a Best Actor statue these days, you need to be in something either so ginormous that the Academy can't possibly ignore it, or, better, something finely crafted for your friends and relatives and a few others.
Add up the box office grosses from all of last night's Best Picture nominees. Go on, I'll wait.
That's right: a shade over $235.5 million. Now check last year's top-grossing movies. Notice anything? Each of the top three made more than those five movies combined, and the fourth (War of the Worlds) was pretty close.
Is Hollywood going all elitist on us? "That can't possibly be the Best Picture, it made too much filthy lucre?"
Oh, King Kong refused to be shut out--it picked up a few little morsels. Then again, so did Memoirs of a Geisha, a movie that was almost universally panned. One of these days, I'd like to see somebody...say, the Ferrell Brothers....craft one of their usual gross-out comedies, only in this one, the costumes would be absolutely brilliant, far beyond the competition. I wonder if it'd be nominated.

This isn't the year to lament the existence of the Best Animated Feature Oscar--while Wallace and Gromit was pretty good, it was nobody's choice for best of the year. But I'm going to lament it anyway. One of these years there's going to be an animated movie so good that it fully deserves to win Best Picture. Yeah, like that'll ever happen.

Sure enough, Brokeback's been all but shut out. Oh, they gave Ang Lee Best Director. You could almost read the subtext: we were so very uncomfortable with this movie, but as supposedly liberal Hollywood types, we recognize that it had to be made. So we'll congratulate you for making it, and do our best to ignore it. Okay?

And that's the way this viewer saw it.