The Academy Awards

March 10, 2010

The Academy Awards is becoming more of just an awards banquet and less of an actual show or event.  Each year, they tweak and tamper with the format in ways to shorten it to the point where I’m sure the Academy would love to turn it into nothing more than a fifteen minute roll-call where the winners just came up onstage and picked up their Oscar, high school graduation-style.  Not only is there an increasing emphasis on timeliness, but they still waste plenty of time in other areas.  Hey, some might prefer that, but the movie nerds like their one night where it’s all about film and actors and directors.  I’ll elaborate as I go on.

First of all, instead of a single host, they decided to try out a duo of funnymen by having Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin co-host the show which gets a C- from me.  A few funny lines here and there, but overly scripted not genuine.  Both of them on their own would have been great I wager, but Billy Crystal should host it every other year.  They roast the crowd expectedly and aside from the Jew joke directed toward Christoph Waltz, the jokes inspired only slight giggles.  That and Steve Martin telling Merrell Streep that he prefers to think of her sixteen nominations as the most losses of anyone.  That was funny.

Before I get to the winners and losers, I want to address one thing that always bugs me about this awards show: the rudely short amount of time people are given to accept their Oscar.  Is it really so awful to give some of these people forty seconds or so? I mean, Christ, they work so hard in whatever nameless section of the production team they’re in, sometimes for a decade or more, and finally win the award they’ve been dreaming about since they got into the business and you can’t even let them all say a few words?  How about you cut the senseless Red Carpet crap in half or stop trying to be funny with cut-scenes to what the hosts are doing backstage. Har har har! Look, it’s Steve and Alec in their hotel room and they can’t sleep!  They’re tossing and turning! Dur hur hur!  Seriously?  And what’s more pointless than watching Cathy Ireland ask the actors who made the dresses or tuxes?  Axe that shit and let these people talk!   There were also a few technical glitches that I found to be inexcusable for a show like this.  When Cameron Diaz and Steve Carrell were announcing an award, the teleprompter said “Jude” for Jude Law because apparently he was supposed to be there instead of Carrell and no one bothered to change it.  At times there was a strange hissing, static-like sound when some people were trying to talk which was very annoying. Come on damn it, this is the Academy awards, step your game up.

Anyway, on to the actual award winners (the ones that matter).  Naturally, the hot topic this year was the fact that there were ten nominees for Best Picture, double the amount from the past sixty years or so.  Thankfully they didn’t double every other category, but I didn’t have a problem with ten nominations.  It made it a little more interesting and makes room for other less-likely films to get some serious recognition.  But recognition is all it really is because I doubt the team behind The Hurt Locker were really all that worried about District 9 contending for the ultimate prize… their ultimate prize.  Yep, a little movie that actually debuted in my home town of Austin at the annual SXSW fest took home the big boy categories of Best Director and Best Picture.  The first ever female to win Best Director to boot.  While I didn’t see Avatar or Precious or An Education, I thought the awards were well deserved.  The Hurt Locker is one of the most intense and gritty movies I’ve ever seen and will leave a lasting impression on you which is what the best movie of the year should do.  Up was sort of the wild card because it was certainly good enough to win on its own, but since there’s already a category for Best Animated Feature (which it had in the bag), the Academy couldn’t justify giving it both awards.  One of these days it’s going to happen though, but it’ll be tough to outdo Up.  Maybe the most heartwarming and hysterical film in years.  Pixar just gets it right.

The leading roles went to Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock.  Bridges’ role in Crazy Heart was almost a mirror image of Mickey Rourke’s role in The Wrestler from last year, except not quite as sad.  The difference this year was that Jeff Bridges wasn’t up against Daniel Day-Lewis.  Otherwise, they both would be “fellow Oscar winners.”  It was good to see Jeff Bridges win though as he’s one of those veterans of Hollywood who never could seem to get enough worthy roles.  Sandra Bullock winning seems like a really nice story considering how long she’s been type-casted as the female angle in second-rate chick flicks.  I guess I should see The Blind Side now.

The biggest non-surprise was Christoph Waltz winning Best Supporting Actor.  If you’ve seen Inglourious Basterds then you know that no one was going to take that Oscar from him.  He was the proverbial “shoe in” for 2009 and honestly could have contended for a leading award too because he undoubtedly made that movie.  Mo’Nique took the Best Supporting Actress Oscar and from what everyone has told me, was basically a shoe in as well.  I’m really looking forward to seeing Precious and I’m ashamed that I didn’t get around to it before Sunday night.

The only other category of note is the Documentary award and this year’s winner was The Cove.  I haven’t seen it and honestly thought that Food Inc was the sure-fire winner, but you have to know that whoever accepts this award is not just some paid actor or sound engineer.  Documentarians have a message for everyone; it’s who they are and what they do and they’re going to do their best to get their message across to as many people as possible.  When they came up to accept their Oscars, one of them held up a sign that said “TEXT DOLPHIN to ******” and I would put the number in here if I knew it.  The Academy is apparently not keen on people using their venue as stage to promote their cause as they cut away from them until they were done.  The Cove is supposedly about the slaughtering of dolphins in some remote part of Japan.  Stopping that is a worthy cause in my book, but hey.

So after about three and a half hours, the show was over and we crowned a new king of filmmaking for another year and I felt good about it yet again.  Hopefully the days of “fixed” or “bought” Oscars are behind us and we can actually see deserving films win from now on and no more Shakespeares in Love or Chicagos committing highway robbery.  But while I’m on that subject and the conspiracy theorist in me is speaking… what happened to The Road.. hmmm?  Seems a little suspect that the Weinstein Company would get that completely shunned, especially in a year when there are ten Best Picture nominations and Morgan Freeman gets a Best Actor nod for a bland role where Viggo Mortensen’s performance wiped the floor with most everyone else.  Well Weinstiens… selling your soul to get Shakespeare in Love that Oscar better have been worth it.

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