I thought the Oscars were pretty good, but I made good use of my DVR to fast forward over most of the slow spots. The songs didn’t seem that good. It’s a pathetic year when you have to pick two foreign movies to come up with five decent songs. I don’t see why they couldn’t get the original singers. Certainly Antonio Banderas didn’t sing that song in the movie and I know Beyonce couldn’t have been booked for three movie songs. If you’re not going to have the original singers do their songs, then what’s the point?
Chris Rock was pretty funny. Not really funny but he was seriously handicapped by the organization to use clean language and avoid politics or whatever. I kind of agree with Sean Penn that it wasn’t appropriate to belittle just about everyone in the auditorium by saying there were only 4 real actors, but I still thought he was funny and took shots at himself too.
Robin Williams was kind of lame. And why was Adam Sandler there?
I can’t complain about who won. I didn’t see Ray so I’ll take people’s word on it. However I don’t think just imitating someone is really great acting and two imitators got Oscars (Cate Blanchett’s take on Hepburn was the other). I was glad Clint won director instead of giving it to Scorcese for his past work. I liked Aviator (Susan hated it), but it wasn’t his crowning achievement. I thought Hillary Swank was great in Million Dollar Baby so I’m okay with that. And Morgan Freeman was an okay choice for Supporting Actor since he hadn’t won before for doing the same role in other movies. Most of my picks didn’t pan out but I did get the two screenplay awards right and would have been disappointed if they’d gone other ways.
I didn’t like them having nominees up on stage for the minor awards. It would be awful to have to stand up there in front of everyone and then lose and go walk empty-handed back to your seat. Bringing the camera to where the nominees were sitting wasn’t much better. Especially for animated shorts I always like seeing a little snippet of whatever piece they are talking about as they mention it, but we just saw the people and the titles. That’s meaningless since I haven’t seen any of them. Were they black and white? Computer animated? With animals? It seems like whoever carries the Oscars could show all the short pieces the night before or something. I can’t imagine they saved that much time by not having people walk up to the stage. If they are really serious about cutting the speeches down, they should just cut the mike when they go 10 seconds over. And for major winners, why even try to limit their speeches? If people have stayed with the program for the first three hours, they don’t mind hearing what Clint Eastwood has to say.
When there were about 30 minutes left, I caught up to real time and started watching the broadcast live in HDTV instead of crappy DVR satellite resolution. Wow! It looked absolutely fantastic. It almost made me wish I’d watched the whole thing live, but I saw the important part live anyway. There were just great colors and you could make out a lot of the people in the audience when they would pan the crowd.
UT,
I watched the end of the Oscars. I thought Ray was okay, but I left that movie feeling really depressed. It was too dark and sad. I also didn’t care so much for the cinemetography.
Were you not a fan of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? I really liked that movie. That was a pretty one, and it was interesting. I really like the song Beck did for it, “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime”… I downloaded it a while back, so I bet you can find it online too if you’re interested.
Still need to see Million Dollar Baby. She talked for a long long time on stage though.
…she being Hilary Swank.
I thought Eternal Sunshine was the best movie of last year. If you thought Ray was dark you may want to avoid Million Dollar Baby.
I just put together my 2004 review of movies yesterday:
1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, A, Weird, fun, sweet, and scary*
2. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, A-, the best of the series so far*
3. Sideways, A-, enjoyable but not terribly complex road trip movie*
4. The Incredibles, A-, somewhere between Toy Story and Monsters, Inc.*
5. Finding Neverland, A-, sweet and sentimental without being syrupy*
6. Collateral, B+, good writing, good performances, cool look
7. The Aviator, B+, interesting but also lacking*
8. The Bourne Supremacy, B+, well-executed spy movie
9. Spiderman 2, A-, too conflicted for its own good*
10. Phantom of the Opera, B+, almost collapses under its own weight*
11. Million Dollar Baby, B, I liked the first movie, not the second*
12. Mean Girls, B, a simple statement that is worth stating*
13. Farenheit 9/11, B-, scattershot indictment of Bush*
14. Thirteen Going on Thirty, C+, awkward remake of Big*
15. Welcome to Mooseport, C, great cast delivers a bland comedy
* Saw in the theater
WHAT?
What about Napoleon Dynamite? That should at least be in the top five!
Man!
I need to borrow that one from Kelly.