Since half my posts have been movie themed, I figured I was obligated to foist my opinions of the evening on you, my dear readers. So without further ado, here are a few highlights and lowlights of the evening.
The Highlights:
Ellen Degeneres was wonderfully quirky and light-hearted as this year's host, and I appreciated the lack of political jokes, especially since it could have ended up being a sustained rant against the Bush administration.
I liked that the awards were spread out over several films, which meant that pretty much every major film went home with at least one Oscar.
I liked the strong showing for Pan's Labyrinth, and I got a kick out of it winning the first two awards of the evening (though why couldn't it have won best foreign language film?).
While I'm not much of a fan on dancers at the Oscars, I loved the movie silhouettes, with Snakes on a Plane being my favorite one.
Though I'm not much of a fan of his, I'm glad Martin Scorsese finally has his Oscar. Now people will maybe stop griping all the time about how he's never won one. Also, I'm rather pleased that it was for one of the two films of his that I actually liked.
The Lowlights:
A glorified powerpoint presentation has no business winning an Oscar, and yet An Inconvenient Truth managed to win two. I was already upset that the five documentaries nominated for best documentary were all Important films (where was the nomination for the highly enjoyable Wordplay?) but I thought the academy would at least go for one that actually had a story. I guess not.
Also, the song that won best song was rather pitiful, and especially when it was up against the wonderfully bittersweet "Our Town" from Cars and three show-stopping numbers from Dreamgirls, it was the weakest of the lot.
And while we're on the subject of music, Babel had no business winning for best score, especially since there was hardly any music in the film at all.
Though I haven't seen Happy Feet yet, so I can't say for sure, I'm rather miffed that it won best animated feature over Cars (no film with the title of Happy Feet should ever be considered for a major award).
3 comments:
I thought you would have realized by now that the Oscar for documentaries is a highly politically motivated award. This has been obvious ever since Michael Moore won for _Bowling for Columbine_ and that doesn't even count as a documentary.
There's quite a bit I could say concerning the Academy's choices for best documentary, and I might devote a whole post to the topic. I've heard critics several times lament the fact that the American public does not seem interested in seeing documentaries in the theater (or in general), and yet the Academy seems unwilling to recognize the documentaries that the general public might actually be interested in seeing. But there has been a string of Important documentaries winning best documentary over more "audience favorite" fare.
Hey, at least March of the Penguins got some recognition the year it was up. It was actually a very good documentary.
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