Four Hours of Oscar

Another Oscar night is over, and this year they managed to keep things clicking and give out an award every 11 minutes. (Although that is just an average, early on it went much longer between awards.) The problem is that while some of the usual Oscar filler was interesting, at least the first couple times, after the first couple hours I just wanted to know if Martin Scorsese was going to get robbed a fourth time. Like the dancers who formed silhouettes were pretty impressive, and at least one of the many montages was good (Michael Mann's America), but once you hit that fourth hour they're like hold music: it doesn't matter how much you like the song, it's just an automated voice telling you "Your call is important to us". On the positive side, there was nothing so terrible as the interpretive tap-dance homages to Saving Private Ryan and La Vita E Bella that were practically offensive.

Some of the big favorites got their well deserved rewards, like Helen Mirren, Forest Whitaker, and Martin Scorsese, and The Depahted for Best Picture and for William Monahan's screenplay. About the only upset I cared about was Pan's Labyrinth taking home awards but losing the foreign film award to The Lives of Others, although that is the only award where you're required to see all the nominees before submitting a ballot, so it tends to hold up a bit better... I couldn't believe Amelie lost to a Bosnian movie about opposing soldiers stuck in a trench with a third guy stuck on a land mine, it turned out No Man's Land was just a truly fantastic black comedy in the spirit of Dr. Strangelove, so there's something to be said for actually seeing the movies before voting.

The idea that the big cash-grab Norbit may have cost Eddie Murphy an Oscar was fairly amusing, especially in light of his comments at the Golden Globes, where he raved about how he had basically done the movie for free only because Bill Condon told him he'd get an award for it. Maybe he already blew through all his Axel Foley money, but I can't help a certain smug schadenfreude when a successful person chases even more commercial success and gets it, but still falls flat on their face when their greed makes them miss more meaningful opportunities. It's like Meg Ryan, she had to do just a few more romantic comedies to put a few more bucks in the bank before the big 4-0. Just to be fair, while writing this I took a look back at her filmography, and I was surprised to be reminded that there are a fair number of dramatic films over the course of her career, but she kept following the Ben Affleck model of doing a safe movie to counterbalance every risk she took, and consequently any credit she gets for Proof of Life is undermined by making sure it was closely followed by Kate & Leopold. Cut out a couple of her less successful romantic comedies and the third time around with Tom Hanks, maybe occasionally take a small part in a good movie, and I wonder if she'd have gotten scripts better than In the Cut for her last gasp "I'll get plastic surgery and drop my pants" attempt at keeping her career alive. And so it is with Eddie Murphy, if he'd held off on fucking Norbit for a few months, doors might have opened for a guy who hasn't done anything but bathroom humor family entertainment in a decade (I blocked out Pluto Nash), but I guess he wanted the cash.

I did enjoy the gags with Al Gore about the possibility of launching his presidential run at the Oscars, almost as much as I enjoyed seeing that POS Babel go home with a consolation prize, and as many Oscars as Pirates of the Caribbean. How that got a best picture nomination over Little Children or The Last King of Scotland, to give a couple alternatives, I'll never know. Rinko Kikuchi can pick a movie up on her shoulders, but she can only carry it so far. There were no outstanding original songs, or animated films, and of course the only animated short I didn't see was "The Danish Poet", which won. And a lot of winners of course had to make passive-aggressive protests against the request not to read lists of names on an international TV broadcast, setting down their Oscars on the floor so they could pull out their little folded pieces of paper to start reading... the reason there's no podium is so you can't settle in and start rummaging around in your pockets and purses for wadded up pieces of paper, dummies. But the best moment was when the announcers cemented how stupid and intrusive their little factoids were by bringing up the Japanese film Infernal Affairs William Monahan used as the basis for his Depahted screenplay, because despite their best attempts, Japan does not in fact include Hong Kong.