As we said in our previous post, hey, not bad Oscar show producers. In fact, take a bow and hats off. The 2008 Oscar awards this year were fairly preordained as we’ve been saying for months from an awards perspective, however the show was — for the most part — very entertaining. The risks paid off for the viewer, that’s for sure and even though it did run over 30 minutes, it wasn’t anywhere near as boring, tedious or painful as it was in past years or generally can be. Definitely an improvement, there was more of an intimate and relaxed vibe and even Jack Nicholson didn’t have his usual ringside chair for once. Change was the order of the night, Let’s recap the night: We sorta “Twittered” along all night? Sorta? On a blackberry with limited interaction and reply capability. Just our snark and typical sass.
The Obvious/The Awards/The Winners
– “Slumdog Millionaire” was the big winner, it took home 8 awards including Best Picture
– “The Curious Benjamin Button” was the runner-up in terms of next amount of awards. The film won 3, but were in the technical field only.
– “The Dark Knight,” and “Milk” tied for two awards each, the former saw Heath Ledger win the Oscar’s only second-ever posthumous award for Best Supporting Actor and the latter took Best Original Screenplay and Sean Penn bested Mickey Rourke in the Best Actor Category.
– The full list of winners.
Our Predictions:
We got 19 out of 24 picks correct. If we hadn’t second-guessed ourselves we would have had 20, as we posted predix on Friday and were sure that Sean Penn was going to win. Why did we change our minds? The rest of the Playlist team was for Mickey Rourke, we (I) personally always second guess ourselves somewhere, and the love in the room at the Independent Spirit awards naively convinced us that Academy voters would have forgotten all of Mickey’s past transgressions. Both he and Penn have been notorious pricks in Hollywood in the past, but Penn was the lesser of two evils.
The Opening:
Hugh Jackman’s song and dance routine at the beginning seemed destined for disaster, but slowly and surely as his singing monologue progressed it became funnier and funnier. His song bit about “The Reader,” a nonsensical robotic-like number where Jackman sang a line confessing to have never seen the Stephen Daldry-directed film was hysterical. This was not the first or only jab at “The Reader” during the evening as it seemed to be the butt of many jokes.
– Clearly irreverent humor works as the segments that seemed self-congratulatory or even took themselves remotely serious (The evening’s tedious middle musical tribute number with Beyoncé) fell terribly flat and reeked of the excess that the Academy was obviously trying to distinguish. However, the opening set the tone of the night, slightly unpredictable, refreshing, entertaining and with an effacing and nice lack of self-importance. The intimate setting created by the 30s inspired cabaret-like set was also elegant and surprisingly untacky.
– Anne Hathaway joined Jackman in some “unscripted” sing-along that poked fun of the nominees in song. Indie Spirit awards take note: this was actually funny. As annoying as Hathaway can be, she proved she has some serious vocal pipes.
– Overall, Jackman was extremely confident, full of stamina and very equipped to perform this showy, but not ostentatious or overwrought musical opening. He should get an A rating overall.
The Funny:
– Steve Martin and Tina Fey introduced The Screenplay awards and the two of them had nitroglycerin-like funny chemistry. Everyone laughed out loud. They seem like a good fit.
– Again, “The Reader” robot song that Jackman sung in the opening where he said, “I haven’t seen ‘The Reader!’ got a boatload of laughs. It’s at about the 6:14 mark of this clip.
– When the Judd Apatow Comedy Tribute “short film” was announced, some online skeptics seemed to shrug, but this video segment stole the show. Revisiting the two characters in “Pineapple Express,” Seth Rogen and James Franco played out their stoner roles again, sitting on a couch watching highlights of this year’s Best Picture nominees. Hysterical! The bit where they watched very grave and solemn scenes of “The Reader” and died laughing for no apparent reason, were gutbusting.
– Then a random cameo from Stephen Spielberg’s Easter European cinematographer Janusz Kaminski entered into the short and pretty much proved, while they didn’t show the duo of Rogen and Franco smoking bong hits, the humor was clearly stoner-comedy inspired. We died and the Twitter world also erupted with laughter. Perhaps the funniest and most enjoyable moment of the night.
The Painful:
The aforementioned musical number. Hugh Jackman and Beyonce were joined by Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens and Amanda Seyfried, ugh. It was long, drawn out and took itself far too seriously. It basically felt like the Oscar show of your and we started to tune out. This unfortunate moment was two-steps backwards in the tone set for the evening and the Academy producers would be wise to do a post-mortem and realize this part was dead weight. The audiences young and old appreciated every moment that wasn’t too pleased-with-itself and overly showy. This five-minutes-or so of brassy musical, show tunes style vamping felt incredibly outdated.
The Speeches:
– The biggest change this year was brought to the four acting categories. Instead of montage clips of each film, five past Oscar winners would come onstage to laud, honor and discuss the nominees one by one and each actor was selected to present an individual. Example: Robert DeNiro was chosen to introduce Sean Penn for Best Actor and he was flanked by Adrien Brody, Sir Ben Kingsley, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Douglas who honored Richard Jenkins, Mickey Rourke, Brad Pitt and Frank Langella respectively.
– Kate Winslet’s speech was great too. She asked her dad to whistle so she could find him in the crowd, which she did and then stopped her acceptance speech to wave at her family. It was a very heartfelt and cute moment. She also sort of inadvertently dissed Meryl Streep. She thanked all her fellow nominees, but said to Streep something like, “suck it up!” It wasn’t intended as a diss and she was definitely over-excited in the heat of the moment, but we Twitter-joked that the statement was like, “IN YOUR FACE, MERYL STREEP!!!”
The Speeches: Penn Brings The Semi-Political, But Not Annoying Scold
– Happy that “Milk” won from a political perspective, Sean Penn ironically thanked the,”commie, homo-loving sons of guns,” who voted for the film, admonished those who “shamefully” voted for Proposition 8 banning gay marriage in California and singled out Mickey Rourke for his talents and efforts in “The Wrestler,” welcoming him back on behalf of the Hollywood community. ”I think it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame…if they continue that way of support. We’ve got to have equal rights for everyone,” Penn intoned. It was a fiery speech, but not too off-putting and mostly classy all-around. Homophobes and conservative minded readers would surely disagree.
More Best Speeches: The Class Acts & Funny
– When “Man On Wire” won Best Documentary, the film’s wacky subject Phillipe Petit ran onstage, balanced an Oscar on his nose like a seal, told fellow nominee Werner Herzog, that he won their bet and did a magic trick.
– Penelope Cruz thanks her longtime friend and collaborator Pedro Almodovar. He’s basically the one who made her a star. It was a classy move.
– Danny Boyle’s acceptance speech for Best Director proved once again that the filmmaker is a class act. Humble and nearly-tearful, Boyle bounced up and down with joy explaining to the audience that he promised his kids he would do a Winnie The Pooh-esque Tigger dance if he won. The classy and modest filmmaker also gave props to the Academy show producers and said while he wasn’t sure how the ceremony looked to the TV audience, to those sitting court side, it was marvelous.
In Memoriam: Surprisingly Not Embarrassing
When it was announced that Queen Latifah would sing along to the “In Memoriam” section, we cringed. It seemed like it could be nothing but, disrespectful and in poor taste. But we forgot the song, “I’ll Seeing You,” was a pretty classy one and she sang it with poise and grace. So much amazing talent died this year. On top of Paul Newman, Heath Ledger, Eartha Kitt, Ricardo Montalban, Issac Hayes, Bernie Mac, Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, American ex-pat turned French-based director Jules Dassin passed away, as did acting greats like Roy Scheider and Richard Widmark.
– The bad part: The cameras focused on Latifah more than the screens and you couldn’t see half the names. Also, no George Carlin?
The Snubs:
With 12 nominations, more than another other contender, “The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button,” surely must be seen as film that was snubbed even if it won 3 awards. “The Wrestler” was already looked over when Bruce Springsteen’s titular song did not receive a nomination and than the insult to injury was even worse when Mickey Rourke was overlooked. “Frost/Nixon” was nominated 5 times, but it too was totally shunned. “The Reader” was nominated five times, but only Kate Winslet got any award love from that film and that was basically all honorary praise, anyhow.
The Upsets:
– While Sean Penn did win the Best Actor SAG award, many people assumed Mickey Rourke was going to win the award. Many said Pixar’s “Presto” was going to win and it surely felt like the safe bet, but the Animated Short award went to “Les Maison En Petits Cubes.”
– Finally “Waltz With Bashir” seemed poised to win the Best Foreign Film, but the honor went to Japan’s “Departures.” InContention’s Kris Tapley called this and in a moment of very hasty online irritation, we called him out saying he was making this call as a way to generate Oscar content. We already apologized in the same space, but he was totally right. We were totally wrong and we wanted to call ourselves out for that unnecessary flub.
The Bad:
Bill Maher presenting the Best Documentary award and using the opp as a passive/aggressive way to gripe about the fact that his mediocre doc, “Religulous” wasn’t nominated. He came off as a smarmy, unctuous dick. Oh wait, that’s normal.
– Reese Witherspoon. What was she doing there exactly? Her overplucked eyebrows even offended us.
– We’ve already talked about the music controversy behind the scenes. They pulled it off in the end, but the poorly-timed music-cues seemed to sloppily be all over the place. And even Hugh Jackman told them to shut up once with a, “c’mon guy,” scolding. This happened throughout.
– The lighting inside the venue was terrible. Notice how there wasn’t a variety of cutaways during the show and they kept showing reactions of the same people? This is because any further than four rows black and talent were grossly underlit. One such cutaway early in the show to Sophia Loren proved this and they rarely went back past those rows after that.
-Adrien Brody’s in actor’s tribute to Richard Jenkins: “I googled you.” Telling someone that in front of a worldwide audience is creepy enough, admitting you had to google an actor because you basically knew nothing about him was almost worse. He also looked like Charles Manson, but that’s for a role, people.
– Ben Stiller doing the clued-out beard shtick of Joaquin Phoenix. Did you guys not watch the Indie Spirit awards the night before? They did the exact same joke, before you guys. ”You look like you work at a Hasidic meth lab,” by Natalie Portman was the only funny part of this bit.
BTW:
“Jai Ho” means “Go Forth”/”May You Win” in Hindi. Go forth, indeed.