Oscar 2010 Reaction
PCS went from Red Carpet to After Show at Vanity Fair. Here is the lowdown on the
biggest evening in the Hollywood calendar.....
Okay, so what the hell was all that about? The biggest night in Hollywood is slowly becoming a cringe-worthy, knuckle-biting embarrassment. Having sat through the entire thing from ninety minutes of red carpet schmoozing to the queue at the taxi stand for the limos to Madge’s house or to Vanity Fair depending largely on your clique, we witnessed every moment, mostly through our fingers.
There appears to be a tendency for Oscar to be the pinnacle of cheese anyway, but they laid mozzarella on with a trowel made especially for the night on this occasion. It was bad enough to have to watch the Best Actor and Actress nominees squirming uncomfortably in their front row seats last year as their colleagues and/or friends gushed with carefully syrup coated adjectives to describe their individual talents. So much so, that you would have expected that small nightmare to have been withdrawn. But oh no. In their wisdom, it made another appearance, but we’ll come to that in good time.
The show wasn’t a complete disaster, far from it, but this was easily the most nauseous and bile inducing in recent memory and it was obvious from the very outset that this wasn’t going to go well. Whoever came up with the idea of displaying the nominees on stage before taking their seats like a collection of prize-winning bullocks needs to have a re-think about just what they were trying to say.
They should have gone the whole hog and had them spinning slowly on the spot too. Carey Mulligan looked like she was thinking and hoping that a large hole would swallow her up and couldn’t get off the stage quick enough when the cue came to exit stage front. Only good old British manners stopped the poor girl from sprinting to the relative anonymity of her seat.
This was quickly followed by inexplicable and open-mouthed moment #2. What possessed anybody to think, even for the briefest of moments that the opening number was a good idea? Neil Patrick Harris all tappitty-tappitty in a shiny, blinged-out jacket, singing like an X Factor contestant with little or no chance of getting through round one. I thought the first bit was embarrassing, but this made me stop tweeting. I was transfixed by the sheer, bloody horror of it all. Frankly, I was waiting for someone to shoot the poor chap from one of the boxes, just to put him (and us) out of his misery. It was like watching the first fifteen minutes of the Matrix Reloaded for the first time. The Director probably waffled on at him about ‘opportunity’, ‘exposure’ and ‘one billion viewers’. He needs to bear in mind that this has its clearly obvious drawbacks as well as its possible, albeit unlikely, benefits.
So not a great start then, all told.
Yet things were to get a little more perplexing, and I’m not just talking about those over the top tributes for the Lead Actors and Actresses (yes, I am still getting to them, hold your horses). When Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin descended to the stage, I felt a certain amount of anticipation. Baldwin particularly has had a couple of great years, albeit on television (most notably ‘30 Rock’) and you would think his inclusion would allow him to exude a fair degree of confidence. Steve Martin, on the other hand, is not quite as popular as he has ever been, but through whatever forces threw the pair of them together, they didn’t actually do that bad. Saying that, given that they were both ‘hosting’ the event, you would have been lucky to catch them onstage for as much time as it took Jeff Bridges to accept his Best Actor award. (he did go on, didn’t he? Or was it just my eyelids getting heavy from being awake for 36 hours? Still, he has been waiting for about 150 years to get one) It’s not a new idea and if you remember Hugh Jackman last year, he probably spent about as much time actually hosting. Being the true comic of the two, Martin had the better of the lines, and he delivered them well enough, with some true moments of irony usually reserved for awards ceremonies far away from California. (Gervais, Fry and Ross take note, they are getting better at this)
We were still forced to suffer the A-list star spotting from the hosts however, with both of the anchors taking turns to point out the stars they could see, adding their own sometimes witty but usually awful and obvious quips about them. Most of the people on the receiving even retreated even further into their seats, and with good reason as some of the jokes were downright risible.
General all-round film ruiner Kristen Stewart inexplicably got on the stage with ‘life-size walking action man with real eyes and hair’, Taylor Lautner, to enlighten us all that it had been 37 years since a horror film got a fair crack at the Oscars (an aside to ‘The Exorcist’) and that it was time that we recognised that horror still had its place. Where that place is, is something of a conundrum however. If you include the likes of ‘Silence Of The Lambs’, which did rather well at the Oscars and was certainly less than 37 years ago was included in a bewildering montage from ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ to ‘Child’s Play’. The only point any of us can imagine for either of these two being there was for the ratings, and they just had to put them in somewhere.
The obligatory In Memoriam section came and went with not so much a bang as a whimper. James Taylor sat, almost offstage with his guitar while the producers rolled out the many faces that passed away in the past twelve months since the last wake. On a personal note, I find it quite offensive that the crowd of superstars applaud proportionately for the amount of recognition each of these poor unfortunate souls has amassed, regardless of actual talent. I understand everyone has their favourites but would question if it would be too much to ask that no one applauds the dead at times like this as it surely makes the families of those less famous even more depressed that they didn’t get as big a clap from their deceased loved ones peers as some others, just because they were a writer or editor, as opposed to some silver screen goddess or Adonis. Incidentally, what happened to Farah Fawcett? She didn’t appear in this montage, overshadowed yet again, by the passing of singer/dancer/circus freak Michael Jackson.
Another oddity that didn’t seem to belong anywhere was the John Hughes tribute. All well and good to honour the man responsible for The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller, Pretty In Pink etc, but I did wonder if it was a good idea to drag some of his previous cast members from whichever cardboard box they’d been sleeping under to say a few words. Judd Nelson has definitely seen better days and looked like he had just been granted a twenty-four release from the nearest prison. I would like to have remembered them as they were, as practically none of the poor buggers have anything to do with top draw cinema these days.
One of my peers had the best line all night from my tweet deck. “Fuck me! It’s Molly Ringwald!!!”.
And indeed this was the case, even if it looked to the rest of us like she had just been told she’d won a million dollars but in order to spend it, she would have to pull it, in tubes of quarters, out of her bottom. She looked positively shell-shocked and quite possibly in genuine pain of some kind.
And so to those tributes. (told you we’d get there) As I mentioned earlier, this was an idea that was really rolled out last year. Each of the five leading actresses and actors, one of which would be imminently about to be awarded the prize, has to sit in their seat as one of their colleagues or star friends waxes lyrical about all of the great things they do. Most of the lead actresses are described as ‘intelligent’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘graceful’ whereas the lead actor nominees are usually on the end of something more manly, like ‘determined’ or ‘hardworking’. ‘Funny’ seems to occasionally cross both types, though you never hear ‘tiresome’, ‘diva’, ‘usually drunk’ or ‘up her own arse’ too often, which could all be equally deserving.
This is stomach turning stuff as nobody believes it any more than anyone that cries when they win an award. You get the impression that this is a Hollywood insider joke to see just how much schmaltz, insidious talent leering and lecherous in-house back-slapping they can get away before it gives the entire audience a coronary. This is the ugliest side of Hollywood and we all hope that they will see sense and just bloody stop it, okay.
As for the awards themselves, this was not another ‘King of the World’ night after all. James Cameron’s Avatar was relegated to the what most would define as the minor awards for Cinematography, Visual Effects and Art Direction. Precious picked up two, most notably for Mo’Nique’s Actress in a Supporting Role, though it is unlikely she will win another one after her speech, suggesting the she was grateful that the award went to talent instead of politics, which appeared to be something of a ‘how great am I?’ comment that would not have impressed either the voters or her fellow nominees, all of whom remained tight-lipped and above it all. Christoph Waltz picked up the gong for Supporting Actor in Inglourious Basterds. I mention only as a fact as this was as sure as me waking up this morning to find my nose still where I had left it in the middle of my face.
Jeff Bridges picked up Best Actor in Crazy Heart which you would have bet your house on with an unnerving certainty that goes to prove, as it does every year, that the marketing push, if timed right, can make a winner out of anyone, even if this one may or may not have been deserved. Also, let’s not forget that the Academy loves a sob story, especially when it has overlooked one of its own darlings once too often and feels it has to make amends.
Sandra Bullock got the vote for Best Acceptance speech which was suitably modest, deprecating and occasionally genuinely funny. Her performance in the ‘The Blind Side’ was just about flag-waving enough to get the voters pride to tick her box, even if other performances may have been more worthy.
That only left the other two biggies, Director and Picture, which had been largely accepted, would be a two-horse race from as early as a fortnight ago. Both of these were shoehorned for either James Cameron or his ex-wife, the unfeasibly tall Kathryn Bigelow for her modern war drama ‘The Hurt Locker’. Most would have guessed that it may have been a 50/50 split between them, with Best Picture going to ‘The Hurt Locker’ and Direction going to Cameron for his groundbreaking technological advances in movie making with ‘Avatar’. Additionally, people were sceptical that Bigelow could be the first female Director to ever win an Oscar for the role.
As it turned out, Bigelow pipped her ex-husband to the post on both occasions, bagging the two most important awards of the evening in the space of about two minutes. And so we were done. After four long hours in the theatre, with mutual appreciation at the forefront of everybody’s minds and tongues, it fell to Tom Hanks to deliver the winner for Best Picture and he announced the most important result of the night so quickly, you could be forgiven for thinking that his testicles had just burst into flames as he walked onto the stage. No mention of the nominees that they had all been blathering on about all night. No drama, no tension, no build up. That was the winner, thank you very much and good night. Whoosh, bang and he was off again. All that remained was for Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin to close up the shop, which was done just as quickly, and that was your lot. They were off quicker than Delboy and Rodney when they spot a copper on the market.
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