The 82nd Academy Awards

This year I decided to blog the Academy Awards ceremony live, during the commercials, so here we go.

I usually skip the “red carpet” pre-show because all they do is ask what everyone’s wearing, which after a while becomes tiresome, but mostly because the interviewers will inevitably ask stupid questions or make mistakes or gaffes the are quite unforgivable.  Case in point, one woman tells Miley Cirus that she’s looking forward to seeing her performance, when Cirus isn’t supposed to perform anything at all.

The show begins.  The lights go down and the stage is filled with tonight’s Best Actor and Best Actress nominees.  Why?  Have the clips of their performances, shown when their awards are given out, been scrapped?  I certainly hope not.  And if they haven’t been scrapped, then this stunt only wasted some of the precious time that the Oscar producers always try to trim down.

Anyway, once the applause dies off and they are seated, the lights go up and the stage looks great.  Neil Patrick Harris comes out singing and dancing and he looks great too.  How long before they ask him to host?  Not too long I hope!

Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, tonight’s hosts, follow him with a series of jokes that at times work, but others do not.  They’re funny, but they also look like they’re trying too hard.  Personally, I didn’t find Martin that engaging the other times he hosted, while I really like Baldwin’s sense of humor.

Penelope Cruz is the first presenter of the night and she looks stunning as usual (is she dating Javier Bardem?! – Jealous!!).  As expected, she hands the first Oscar of the night to Christoph Waltz for Best Supporting Actor, whose speech is simple and to the point.

Next up is Best Animated Feature, and Up, as expected, triumphs.  It’s well deserved.  Up was by far one of the best movies of 2009 and the best in this category.

Follows the Best Song award, which, no surprise here, goes to Crazy Heart.  The producers this year decided to scrap the performances of the songs, mostly because they don’t climb the charts and aren’t widely known, but not showcasing them will only reduce their popularity further won’t it?  I’m uneasy about this cut.  I always enjoyed the performances, whether I knew the songs beforehand of not, and can you imagine missing out on Celine Dion’s performance of “My Heart Will Go On,” or Madonna’s “You Must Love Me,” or Annie Lennox’s “Into the West” just to name a few?

Tina Fey and Robert Downey, Jr. present Best Original Screenplay and their prepared dialogue is witty, funny, and well delivered, which is a rarity.  They pretty much kill!  The winner, which I predicted, is The Hurt Locker.  Will this be the beginning of a sweep?  We’ll see.

Follows a tribute to John Hughes, a beloved director that passed away last year.  My reaction is a big, WTF?!  Ok, I don’t really know Hughes and his very popular body of work, especially because his movies are quintessentially American, which makes it harder for someone not born and raised here to fully get them.  But a huge tribute for him instead of the usual inclusion in the In Memoriam montage seems excessive, especially since they always try not to go overtime.

My next prediction miss is for Best Animated Short (Logorama), but I’m happy that they prefaced it with speeches by now famous directors that got their start in Hollywood by winning in this category, some over two decades ago.  They all explain how important this prize is because it can mean the launch of a successful career, which is very enlightening for an audience that sees this and a few other prizes as boring and useless.

Follows Best Documentary Short (Music by Prudence) and the winners’ speech is the first to be abruptly cut short tonight.  It’s never pleasant to witness such a dissing, but it feels even more discordant because of the little speech those filmmakers just gave about the importance of these “minor” awards.

I miss again for Best Live Action Short (The New Tenants), and their speech is cut again.  These categories really don’t get any respect, no wonder the audience feels like they should be removed from the ceremony altogether.  If the industry itself snobs them, why should we be expected to care?

Ben Stiller comes onstage to hand out the Best Makeup Oscar and he’s all made up like a Na’vi from Avatar.  He is funny and the joke feels right until we start feeling sorry for him and feel like he’s been onstage way too long.  And just when it looks like he’s finally done, he adds another piece to the skit.  Ben, get off that stage now!!  Thankfully, Star Trek wins and they have a good excuse to show the gorgeous Chris Pine a couple times.

I realize that no presenter is saying “and the Oscar goes to” anymore.  They all say “and the winner is,” which is odd.  Is there a reason behind all this?  I mean, the Oscar is the It award, and has always been introduced as such.  Why the change?  I don’t like it.

Next is Best Adapted Screenplay and Precious wins.  It’s tonight’s first upset, since Up in the Air was widely expected to at least take this prize, and another miss for me.  The speech is very heartfelt and the guy looks genuinely blown away.

Now Mo’nique goes up onstage to receive her Best Supporting Actress statuette and, although I haven’t seen the movie yet, the short clip they show blows me away.  She seems to really deserve this.  Her speech is short but touching.  Good for her.

The gorgeous Sigourney Weaver presents the first award of the night to her Avatar, for Best Art Direction, one of the few Oscars for Avatar to which I would strongly object, given that the entire movie was created digitally while the other nominees physically recreated their environments.  Like Sigourney herself pointed out, when she worked on the set for Alien she was amazed by the sets the production had built for the actors.  That didn’t really happen for Avatar.

Next Oscar: Best Costumes.  The Young Victoria’s Sandy Powell wins her third Oscar and in her speech dedicates it to all her colleagues who don’t work in period piece movies but in more contemporary films, which are perennially overlooked by the Academy in this category.  That’s the 800-pound gorilla that no one wants to acknowledge and it feels so right coming from her, who just won again and for a period piece.  It’s like telling the Academy, “Wake up, old, fancy gowns are not all there is to costume design!!”

Martin and Baldwin present a skit about last year’s surprise hit Paranormal Activity, and it’s a good one.  It introduces a montage of famous horror movies that are a genre perennially overlooked by the Academy.  Horror is in good company however, since the Academy snobs Science Fiction, Comedy, and Musicals with the same frequency.  You really need to be a Drama if you want to be taken seriously for an Oscar.

Next up are Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing.  The Hurt Locker wins both, which means two misses for me.  The best thing about this though is the introductory clip that explains, finally, the difference between the two, which is unknown to anyone outside the industry.

Now Avatar picks up its second statuette for Best Cinematography, another miss for me.  The winner is Italian, and he salutes Italy in his native language as well.  That’s nice.

James Taylor sings a wonderful song over the In Memoriam montage, which is always very touching, even though this year it feels a little less interesting, in spite of the good number of celebrities that left us.

Jennifer Lopez and Sam Worthington are now onstage.  She looks totally unbalanced in a very unflattering gown that will surely end up on the worst dressed lists of many magazines.  He looks and sounds amazing.  It feels like the temperature in the room just went up 20 degrees.  They introduce the dance number that’s supposed to accompany a short selection from the five Best Score nominees.  The dancers are amazingly talented, but I don’t like the choice.  Somehow the choreographies don’t make justice to the movies’ soundtracks.  I prefer to see a montage of images from the movies themselves.  There’s nothing more powerful to judge the effectiveness of a score than to see it accompanying the images it was written for.  As expected, Up takes the prize, which makes it even more unforgivable that neither presenter knows how to pronounce the winner’s name!

Best Visual Effects goes to Avatar, to no one’s surprise.  It would have been a travesty otherwise.

The Cove, as predicted, wins Best Documentary, and the winners’ speech is cut once more to underscore their secondary status.  How terrible.

The Hurt Locker wins for Best Editing, a very well deserved prize since one of the strongest points of the movie is its ability to keep the viewer on the edge of his seat, which the editing has a lot to do with.

Martin and Baldwin seem to  have found their footing and are getting better and better as the ceremony progresses.

My last miss comes with Argentina’s win for Best Foreign Picture (El Secreto de Sus Ojos).  Entertainment Weekly had rightly projected this upset of the German favorite, The White Ribbon.  I wish I had gone with their pick.

It’s time for the top four awards of the night.  Best Actress should be up next but it’s the actors time instead.  It’s the first time ever they make a switch, which underlies how the Best Actress race is the only one left with any real drama.  Five people who have some connection with each nominee are brought onstage for a collective love fest that’s about ten minutes long.  Whatever happened to trying not to go overtime?  Just a short while ago I had thought the ceremony might actually end on time this year, which would have made all the cuts worth it.  And then they do this, whose length can’t have come as a surprise to the producers.  The introductions are nice (and Michelle Pfeiffer even brings tears to Jeff Bridges’ eyes) but also a bit overblown.  A presenter with a collection of clips of the performances would have done the job.  Anyway, Bridges wins Best Actor, as he was widely expected to do, gets one of the many standing ovations of the night and starts off on a speech that seems to last forever.

The same setup is used to award Best Actress, for which I’ve been anxious for months.  I so want Meryl Streep to win, even though the favorite has been Sandra Bullock for a while now.  The individual presentations seem to last even longer than those for the guys, to the point where I start to really dislike the format (even though Stanley Tucci’s intro for Meryl is great).  At the end, Sandra wins and I’m heartbroken.  She was great, but Meryl in Julie and Julia was out of this world, in a league of her own.  It’s a clear injustice.  I’m actually curious to see if Bullock will ever get nominated again now.

No more commercial breaks.  I guess they realized they’re running so late, they might even break a record!  Barbra Streisand is called upon to award the Oscar for Best Director, which this year could go for the first time ever to a woman or a black guy among the five nominees (even though the race has really been between James Cameron and his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow for weeks now).  She is hard to read when she opens the envelope, but when she says, “The time has come,” everyone knows it’s not Cameron’s win, which means it’s Bigelow’s.  She’s very excited and gracious in her speech, and sounds incredibly emotional.

Finally, Tom Hanks comes onstage to award Best Picture and doesn’t even bother repeating the ten nominees (I don’t like that at all).  I guess they’re really freaking out about ending the telecast now.  The winner is The Hurt Locker, a well deserving movie that was fought hard to make.  Bigelow is back onstage and is handed a second Oscar for co-producing the movie that ends up collecting 6 Oscars out of 9 nominations.  Clearly the big winner of the night.

The big loser is Up in the Air, an early favorite that unfortunately goes home empty handed, but other big names like Inglorious Basterds have to make do with few statuettes and even the almighty Avatar only scores in three technical categories.

I got seven wrong, for a grand total of 17/24 correct predictions.  I can’t complain.

Goodnight!!