10:30 p.m.
•Tom Hanks is thankfully succinct as he introduces the Best Director nominees. Ang Lee wins. Wowza.
•Jack Nicholson is old. Jack Nicholson is great. He intros the Best Picture nominees. He rules the world.
•Best Picture is "Crash"! Holy hell, a real "oh my God" moment at the Academy Awards. The audience is about to bust loose in some sort of mass Three 6 Mafia moment.
•But then they play the producers of "Crash" off the stage -- in mid-speech -- and into a commercial. This is what happens when you have eight billion montages in a three-hour telecast. Rat bastards.
Things we want to forget about this year's Academy Awards:
•Ben Stiller in his green unitard.
•Charlize Theron's dress.
•Montages.
•Kathleen "Bird" York performing "In the Deep" from "Crash." Slo-mo dancers and a burning car. WTFF? Yes, FF. It was that freaking weird.
•"Crash" screenplay winner Bobby Moresco getting dinged from speaking. Director Paul Haggis said his piece, but before Moresco could talked, the orchestra played them off the stage. Bastards. Guess this is what writing is worth.
•Jon Stewart as host. He was OK, which isn't OK. More "meh" than anything else. Neither Stewart nor Dave Letterman are Johnny Carson.
10:15 p.m.
•"Brokeback Mountain" wins best adapted screenplay. See? Something for everyone.
•Uma Thurman's hair is, um, something. JBF was our first thought, but we're weird that way. "Crash" wins for best screenplay. Best Director is all up in the air. Except for Clooney, of course. No way he can win.
10:02 p.m.
•Philip Seymour Hoffman's win is the ultimate reason to now see "Capote."
•It's 2 past the top of the hour, so there's no way the show will end on time.
•It is a relief that the "gay Oscars," as the social conservatives called it, are not living up to the right-wing hype. A little bit of something for everyone, from "Narnia" and that damned penguin movie to Three 6 Mafia and Robert Altman. "Crash" wins for editing. Even Mel Gibson popped up in the open, making another one of his dead-language epics.
•John Travolta's face cannot get any wider, can it?
•"Memoirs of a Geisha" bombed at the box office but has done very well tonight -- three Oscars (we think). Meet the next hot DVD reissue to take your money.
•Time for Best Actress. We're pulling for Reese Witherspoon because we never thought the "Legally Blonde" chick could ever win an Oscar.
•Witherspoon isn't crying, she's just got that tremor in her pipsqueak voice. Good actress.
9:35 p.m.
•Richard Pryor gets the coda on the We Salute Our Dead montage. And the biggest applause, we might add. It would suck to be one of the post-prod peeps who wins only a smattering of claps in the obit reel. Then again, they're dead, with no idea that Pat Morita's passing in 2005 overshadowed their own contributions to cinema.
9:30 p.m.
•He said it in a flippant way, but Jon Stewart was on to something when he noted that Three 6 Mafia were the most-excited guys in the joint. Hey, even Dolly Parton was jazzed when the rappers won, and they seemed genuinely blown away by the win. Perhaps the only person more surprised was the guy with the dump button, waiting for acceptance-speech profanity that never came.
•Clooney's back on stage, his Oscar safely tucked down someone's dress, to introduce the We Salute Our Dead montage. What an upper.
9:23 p.m.
•Three 6 Mafia captures our thoughts with precision. It is hard out here for a pimp. And now Oscar will forever have the word "pimp" in its history.
9:15 p.m.
•The Academy finally gives Robert Altman an Oscar -- an honorary one, of course, because he doesn't kiss ass. "The Player" and "Short Cuts" are personal favorites. He thanks his doctor by name. The industry's best actors are hanging onto his words. There is no music bed. This is a fine moment.
9:02 p.m.
•We want to see "Capote." Really, we do. It's just that we're voice bigots. Not proud of that admission, but we're not certain that we can stand two hours-plus of that voice, the one we remember from that strange man in the guest chair on Johnny Carson's show. But it's Truman Capote, for God's sake, the writer who described Holcomb, Kan., this way:
Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.
•As the evening wears on, Jon Stewart becomes the Incredible Shrinking Host. Though his "salute to montages" crack -- after an especially pointless montage of clips -- is a good one.
8:50 p.m.
•We learn something new every day. In this case, we learn Itzhak Perlman is alive and well, 'cause there he is, playing selections from the nominees for best original score. Yes, we're musical barbarians.
•Salma Hayek. Mmm. Must be the hair.
8:43 p.m.
•Keanu Reeves is not aging well. Than God he's still vapid.
•We're rooting for "Good Night, and Good Luck," and not just because it's a film about a great journalist. We think about that movie a lot -- the all-indoors shots, the cadence of Joe McCarthy's insanity, the parallels to the all-or-nothing knife fight that passes for today's politics -- and need it on DVD.
•Samuel L. Jackson can be a serious presenter all he wants, but he'll always be Jules to us:
There's a passage I got memorized, seems appropriate for this situation: Ezekiel 25:17. "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you."
8:25 p.m.
•What in hell is Charlize Theron wearing? Looks like some sort of left shoulder pad. Damned Penguin guys win an Oscar, bring props to the stage. They're lucky to draw the same air as Theron. Music gets louder over French guys talking, narrator intros Jennifer Lopez. Nice shoulders on that woman.
•Time for another nominated song. After seeing Dolly Parton's tiny waist and gigantic shelf-like breasts during her number, we're blind to all else.
8:15 p.m.
•ABC's open relied on film icons. Too many present-tense touchstones
•Fab opening film with past hosts.
•Jon Stewart killed -- kinda. Uneven monologue, but better than expected. His shrugging mugging doesn't work well in a big freaking hall.
•The music bed beneath every acceptance speech is past annoying and into ridiculous. Works on radio, doesn't work with the Oscars.
•Morgan Freeman flubs his intro into Best Supporting Actress. He sounds so high.
•Rachel Weisz says something above "brimming over," and while she's not talking about her breasts, she ought to be. She grabs Freeman's hand as they exit the stage. Lucky bastard.
•Nice spoof commercials on the Best Actress nominees. As Stewart notes: "Shameful."
14 comments:
Ben Stiller was fantastic,if you didn't laugh go get your perscriptions filled and quit being old and cranky. Jon Stwart was also fantastic. Get used to this. The next generation is taking over and we find ourselves funny even if you guys don't. Look out on Social Security and the rest of the running the world bit.
It would have been more fun to laugh at the Oscars with you, Ron, and perhaps add our own 2 cents as it was happening, than to recap the next day. Why post this long musing after it's over?
Anon 2: It was a live blog from Sunday night. Posted concurrent with the ceremony. Sorry you weren't here.
Anon 1: If you considered Ben Stiller funny at the Oscars, then I want some of your meds. He's funny. Just not at the Academy Awards. As for Jon Stewart: Sure missed those Bush jokes.
Don't feel sad, Anon 2. If you were as young, smug, hip and arrogant as Anon 1, you would have been high enough on meth that you could not have resisted splitting your attention between an Oscar broadcast that was viewed by millions around the globe, and the running Oscarbabble of Chatter, which was ignored last night by millions around the globe.
Love how all the critics are too cowardly to leave their name. Evidently none of them blog. That makes it easy to criticize those who do. And remain cowards.
Everyone's entitled to an opinion. But it's not really YOUR opinion if you're unwilling to attach your name to it.
In his latest rush to demonstrate how pathetically thin-skinned, illogical and downright little-girl pissy he becomes when someone offers a challenging point of view here, I believe doclarry inadvertently failed to accuse us cowardly anonymous posters of siding with the terrorists, too.
Evidently we DO blog, now don't we?
Doc: Critics? Why do you gift the anons with such an esteemed title?
Ah yes, critics. Now THERE'S an esteemed profession.
Gee Ron, I really enjoyed your Oscar watch, even having missed the "live" thread. According to the postings today, there is no point in re-hashing the event - even if half the U.S. population is discussing it today, everything from dresses to bad speeches to yes, the host. But then again, I'm too old to get it. P.S. Can I be AK and anonymous? Does that make me a critic? A coward? Or just too lazy to sign up for an account?
I'm not "pissy" because someone has a different opinion. I'm pissy because the cowardly little mind trying to form that opinion cannot do so without tossing irrelevant insults at Ron while refusing to sign his or her name.
For all the little children unable to figure this out for themselves, please note the wording immediately beneath the box in which you type your comment. You'll find the words "Choose an identity." Beneath those words you'll find three choices: "Blogger," "Other" and "Anonymous." I know you've seen it as you're chosen "Anonymous." Here's the really hard part.
Choose "Other" and type your name in the "Username" box. You don't need a password. You don't need a Blogger account. I'll demonstrate.
If you do this, you'll prove you're not a coward. And neither my "thin-skin" nor my feathers will be ruffled.
Well, at least you've admitted you're being pissy. Points for that.
I guess we're getting a better sense now of what it takes to get doc larry to pop up out of his hole and defend poor old Ron, almost as if Ron were his helpless prison bitch, which I'm just almost sure he isn't.
Talk about courage and cowardice all you want. It's amusingly ironic that when one person challenges another's views on here through an option that appears to be freely afforded to all visitors (anonymous posting), your balls seem to disappear and you whine as if every challenge of thought (even those not directed at you) were some sort of personal attack, which isn't quite the case at all.
Grow some skin, man. If you can't take the heat, maybe you shouldn't be playing around with blogs.
She got you, Doc.
That cross-dressing, syphilis-infested, kiddie porn producing, daughter of a lesbian gorilla has a point.
You and Ron are being too sensitive.
Ron,
One little quibble with your otherwise excellent Oscars recap: They DID use the dump button on the posse, just once, very briefly, but it's there. Hope you Tivo'd it! It was great that they won, since the other two songs each sucked in their own special way...
Cheers!
Anne's right, Ron.
I heard it too, and I have it recorded.
Play it for you Saturday.
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