Reaction to the Oscars

After such an incredible celebration of Jews and gays, I figured Brokeback Mountain was even more of a lock to win at last nights Academy Awards. Whoops. I was completely shocked when Crash took home Best Picture. I was even more shocked, however, at how poorly organized the show was as a whole.

In case the producers don't realize this, the awards that people are most interested in are the major awards, especially Best Picture. Yet the telecast spent close to 30 minutes of air time on performing songs that few people have ever heard (although I was very happy that one group, the Three 6 Mafia, got to perform...incidentally they gave the best acceptance speech of the night after their deserved victory for "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp"), and showing montages about film noir and epics that were purely self-congratulatory. Lauren Bacall's introduction to the film noir montage was a total nightmare for everyone involved, as she consistently stumbled through her speech. Dan even wanted to fast-forward past it because he felt so uncomfortable watching it. Then, after all that, the telecast spent about 10 minutes combined on handing out the Best Director and Best Picture awards. This would be somewhat akin to the Super Bowl spending three hours on the halftime show and then fast-forwarding through the game-winning field goal as time expired (and then going off the air before the audience could even understand what had happened). Shameful.

Jon Stewart was solid as host. He definitely got better as the night went on, and I was especially happy that he also noticed the fact that Larry McMurtry was wearing jeans. That was incredible. My favorite parts of the show were the various fake ads narrated by Stephen Colbert. Reminded me of Mr. Show. Well done there. I also thought it was funny when the guy from Tsotsi, winner of Best Foreign Language Film, read the teleprompter out loud. He said, "Time to wrap up. Ok, fine, fine." Don't give away the Academy's secrets! Although it might have helped Lauren Bacall...

Addendum: One final thing that I forgot to mention was the TERRIBLE decision to play music throughout every acceptance speech. People had to fight to be heard over the music, which was horribly distracting. They used to play music when people went on too long, not as soon as they picked up the award!

Addendum #2: From Slate: "In 2037, some media studies major will write an un­der­gradu­ate thesis on the 78th Annual Academy Awards as a tipping point in 21st-­cen­tury pop culture, a critical text of the iPod era, and she will get a B+."