Gotta admit, I found James Franco and Anne Hathaway fun, funny, and adorable. I couldn't see them as hosts, but ended up totally enjoying their presence.
The pacing seemed really off right from the start though, not of the hosts bits but of the rest of the show.
And too predictable, except for the original screenplay award, where the winner (David Siedler for THE KING'S SPEECH) said he was the oldest winner in Oscar history and then said he hoped that record would be broken soon and frequently. Hear hear.
And Charles Ferguson, the director of the best documentary, INSIDE JOB, who began his acceptance speech by saying something about how it's been three years since the economic collapse and no one has yet been indicted let alone convicted for the fraud that was perpetrated by the Wall Street firms that caused it.
[His actual quote: "Forgive me. I must start by pointing out that three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that's wrong."]
Otherwise it was mostly a no-surprises event (although Melissa Leo "dropping the f-bomb" as Christian Bale put it and giving a confusing acceptance speech was kind of out of the ordinary).
We'll all be hard put to remember the winners by this time next year, but it's still fun to watch, at least for me, and always has been since I was a kid (which reminds me that the historic references were handled terribly, completely unexciting and unemotionally engaging).
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5 comments:
Poor poor form to have left Cory Haim out of the in Memoriam. The kid died at 38 was "one of the Cory's" and starred in "Lost Boys" - arguably the film that started todays "hip vampire" craze. The rest of it is meaningless anyway, but even moreso that they're so self important they couldn't even give him fifteen frikkin seconds to make his family feel good about his life. Fuck them all and I'm glad Melissa Leo used this word.
I didn't even notice that Robert. Great point, and bad on them.
I actually saw 8 of 10 Best Picture nominees, and for me "The King's Speech" was near the bottom of the list. I was disappointed but not surprised that it won. I thought Melissa Leo was good in "The Fighter," but I was really rooting for Hailee Steinfeld. Switching channels when the winners began their tedious catalogues of thank-yous----boring & meaningless to the millions watching---was the only way to get through it for me.
I like the Oscars too, but not as much as the Grammys which usually have some great performances. The Oscars were dull this year but I give a lot of credit to JF and AH for giving it a go.
Hailee Steinfeld was amazing in True Grit, but I didn't see Melissa Leo's movie. HS will probably have many future opportunities.
TP, as others have pointed out, many of the best picture nominees had to do with contemporary realities, like social networking or x-games (127 HOURS) etc. but the academy went for the "traditional" (i.e. Brit royalty) old stuff. But maybe the presence of so many more contemporary themes augers well for future Oscars and at some point looking backward, especially to the royals, will lose ground to younger members of the academy prevailing.
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