I'll take Melissa Leo's super annoying and awkward "I can't believe I won" look and use of the word "Golly" in her speech. I'll take the crowd cheering on Kirk Douglas through a bit that went 10 minutes too long and bordered on painful to watch when he should never have been up there in the first place. I'll take James Franco acting like he was too cool to host the Oscars even though HE WAS HOSTING THE OSCARS. I'll take Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law laughing about their DUI and Prostitution arrests while children were watching. I'll even take the King's Speech guy dedicating the Best Screenplay Oscar to stutterers around the world when it would have been way cooler to have Christopher Nolan dedicate his Oscar for Inception to all the dreamers out there, including those who dream to not stutter anymore. But what I can not take is these smug Hollywood nincompoops cheering when the Inside Job directors mentioned that nobody has been thrown in jail from the 2008 financial crisis.
I'm not going to get into who should be thrown and jail over the financial crisis and who shouldn't be because that's not the point of this blog. The point is that everyone in that audience is probably friends with a guy who worked at Lehman or Bear Stearns, a ton of them surely invested money with one of many complicit investment banks or hedge funds and most importantly, most of them do not know a single person who's house was foreclosed on outside of Detroit. We're talking about the largest concentration of smugness outside of Bono's bedroom here. Kudos to these filmmakers as a.) I'm sure that their film was great and b.) they used their 5 minutes of exposure to draw light on something they care about, but God Damn It Hollywood, could you be more predictable and hypocritical? You have Anne Hathaway wearing like $50k worth of dresses in one night while the audience suddenly seems aghast at the excess of Wall Street. Sure, this may be a sweeping criticism of a large group and I'm sure many of these people are quite philanthropic, but don't pretend to be a sudden activist because the cameras are on, how fake can you get? This is the same group who probably drove SUV's to the show where they cheered on Al Gore's global warming movie. Shut up and focus on looking beautiful. God Damn It.
Some Random other thoughts on the Oscars:
- Hosting the Oscars should be like hosting the Superbowl, its better in warm weather, in a vibrant city, just like the Oscars are better hosted by a well seasoned comedian. Miami or New Orleans.....Baldwin, Billy Crystal, or Steve Martin. Franco and Hathaway were like Jacksonville, and nobody wants to go there.
-As terrible / creepy / uncomfortable as that Kirk Douglas thing was, he's still Kirk Douglas, and I wanted to kick Timberlake in the shins when he made fun of him. Easy Timberlake, people still remember your stellar work in "Alpha Dog" and when you lived at that fat perverted boy band guy's house when you were like 15.
-Can we be done with Céline Marie Claudette Dion? Titanic came out in 1997 and she's been holed-up at Caesars Palace in Vegas since 2003 with her pedophile ex-manager husband avoiding all shaving and daytime speaking. Do you know her husband was 38 when they met and she was 12? Celine, you're from Quebec, not France and you've lived in the US for like 20 years, enough with the heavy accent already. Lastly, If we're going to go with a washed up Vegas-performer for the live performance of the death montage song, lets at least get someone sweet like Tom Jones, Carrot Top or Dani Gans' corpse. Dennis Hopper would puke if he knew that he was remembered on national TV by someone whose second best song was "its all coming back to me now."
-What does Helena Bonham Carter actually look like? Does she always look like a clay-mation character from a Tim Burton movie? I get that he is her husband, and he probably digs it, but come on, you're nominated for Best Supporting Actress, take a shower before you show up.
-Loved Aaron Sorkin just plowing through the play-off music without skipping a beat, I would rather hear him talk about anything then waste another moment of my life watching James Franco roll his eyes and be "artistic".
-Great subtle lesbian moment when the two male and one female Inception sound-mixer winners thanked their "wives".
-How badly did Spielberg look like he wanted to mention Saving Private Ryan, ET, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Color Purple, or Munich when he was telling the nominated but won't win Best Picture candidates and how impressive of a list they will be joining?
-Lastly, the most under-appreciated man in the game is Christopher Nolan, just no love at all from the Academy for the Dark Knight or Inception (not including the technical stuff) and the guy is a perennial ace.
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