Monday, March 06, 2006

March of the Oscars

I mean they marched right through the Oscars last night - no slobbering, no sloppy overtime, no mating rituals, no feeding frenzies and not much slipping on the ice. It was all done pronto, in three and a half hours exactly. John Stewart got in some of his own signature humor, clever, sly and adultish, but it often seemed too sarcastic for the fawning, sentimental guild members in the Kodak Theater. So the host proved a rather hapless bird swimming upstream against the gowns and glitter. But with all this Academy efficiency, where was the heart and soul of the star fest? Where were our Brando moments? Our Sally Field acceptance speeches?

OK, Reese Witherspoon came close. Indeed, hers was the best acceptance speech of the night, BY FAR. Only George Clooney's acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actor even came close, and he was done within a few minutes of Stewart's itroductory send up. So even at that rapid clip, it seemed we waited through a lot of uninspired and notably UNcharismatic thank you blah blahs before we got to Reese's charming sixty seconds of girlish yet beguiling uberfame.

There'd been talk about the movies being "smaller" this year, though all "worthy." And it seems the Oscars got smaller, too, even in that improbably tall/vertical space of the Kodak. It seemed the cameras kept scanning the first few rows of famous faces, but were there really more than a few dozen real stars there?

After all the hype and hoopla and red carpet this and that (the males reduced to wallpaper in their penguin suits, the actresses' accomplishments and skills reduced to plugging designer dresses), and after so many commercial breaks, we got more anticlimax than drama. By the end, it seems we rushed right up to Jack's perfunctorily announcing "Crash" the Best Picture, and the whole thing went out with a whimper, not a bang.

3 Comments:

At 3/08/2006 10:02 AM, Blogger Rhesus Pieces said...

I think that the best host of the awards has been Billy Crystal. He made the event bigger. Woppie was probably second in my memory. Jon was ok. A more respectable host. His problem for me was that I didn't find him as funny in this role. He had his Stewartesque humor but it seemed out of place. Maybe too pointed for the venue.

I did appreciate the Cobert montages presented throughout the awards.

I think I might even say that Cobert has become more Stewartesque than Jon himself.

Reese (Reese to her friends) did have the most emotional speech of the night. Clooney (George to his friends) had the best speech.

As for the movies, I haven't seen any of them and after the awards I don't feel compelled to go out and see any of them.

 
At 3/21/2006 4:18 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Loved your March of the Penguins metaphor. Katie and I finally watched it over the weekend.
Is it LOVE? Morgan Freeman said it was LOVE? How about instincts?

 
At 3/22/2006 3:18 PM, Blogger Lawrence said...

As for the real penguins, I think it looks like love to the sentimental human viewers, but yes, it's instinct. That is why I have said some pretty disparaging things about the documentary - it is digitally enhanced, for one thing - not sure such manipulations should be so apparent in a documentary. And it's plot and narrative are presumptuous anthropomorphizing.

Thanks for commenting!

 

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