Yesterday was pretty much a waste of consciousness. But I did watch the Oscars for the first time in my life, albeit while lying flat on the couch with a headache that could crush a coelecanth, and that was surprisingly entertaining. Everyone and their second cousin has posted on the ceremony, I'm sure. But I'm too tired to go against the flow.
I loved Jon Stewart as the host. His incomparable deadpan was used to as great effect on Hollywood as on politics, and he is a master of the unforeseeable zinger: when he started in on how Brokeback Mountain had tarnished the noble image of the cowboy, I genuinely wasn't sure where he would end up.* Of the lines I remember, I think my favorites were about Björk ("She was trying on her Oscar dress . . . and Dick Cheney shot her") and celebrity poverty ("There are women here who can barely afford enough dress to cover their breasts!"), but if anyone can remind me of other favorites of theirs, I'm sure I'll have liked them. ("Holy crap! We've run out of film clips.") He was seconded only in awesome by Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, whose overlapping, improvisational, extremely funny introduction for Robert Altman, full of sentence fragments and self-reference and interstitial commentary about who'd gotten the better laughs, was mindblowingly appropriate. If there was an Oscar for Best Presentation of an Oscar, they should have won it then and there.
As for the awards themselves, I was very sorry that Good Night, and Good Luck did not win in a single category for which it had been nominated, but I was very pleased with Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit's Best Animated Picture and Rachel Weisz's Best Supporting Actress for The Constant Gardener.** I haven't seen Syriana, but I was already fond of George Clooney for Good Night, and Good Luck, so I was entirely fine with his Best Supporting Actor: and I was going to write that I've never seen Reese Witherspoon, so I can't comment on her either, but then I realized that she was in Freeway and Pleasantville and terrific in each film; I imagine she deserves her Best Actress. And the look on Queen Latifah's face when she realized that "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp" had won for Best Original Song was totally worth staying up for.
I am absurdly pleased with the number of film noirs and epics I recognized from their respective montages. Good stuff.
*Thank God, with a hilarious montage of smoldering looks, unbuckled gunbelts, bare chests, and lines like, "Do you want to see my Winchester?" Although I still think my life would have been complete without the concept of John Wayne / Charlton Heston slash, thank you very much.
**Although I'm still bewildered that Tilda Swinton was not nominated for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. She still amazes me.
I loved Jon Stewart as the host. His incomparable deadpan was used to as great effect on Hollywood as on politics, and he is a master of the unforeseeable zinger: when he started in on how Brokeback Mountain had tarnished the noble image of the cowboy, I genuinely wasn't sure where he would end up.* Of the lines I remember, I think my favorites were about Björk ("She was trying on her Oscar dress . . . and Dick Cheney shot her") and celebrity poverty ("There are women here who can barely afford enough dress to cover their breasts!"), but if anyone can remind me of other favorites of theirs, I'm sure I'll have liked them. ("Holy crap! We've run out of film clips.") He was seconded only in awesome by Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, whose overlapping, improvisational, extremely funny introduction for Robert Altman, full of sentence fragments and self-reference and interstitial commentary about who'd gotten the better laughs, was mindblowingly appropriate. If there was an Oscar for Best Presentation of an Oscar, they should have won it then and there.
As for the awards themselves, I was very sorry that Good Night, and Good Luck did not win in a single category for which it had been nominated, but I was very pleased with Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit's Best Animated Picture and Rachel Weisz's Best Supporting Actress for The Constant Gardener.** I haven't seen Syriana, but I was already fond of George Clooney for Good Night, and Good Luck, so I was entirely fine with his Best Supporting Actor: and I was going to write that I've never seen Reese Witherspoon, so I can't comment on her either, but then I realized that she was in Freeway and Pleasantville and terrific in each film; I imagine she deserves her Best Actress. And the look on Queen Latifah's face when she realized that "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp" had won for Best Original Song was totally worth staying up for.
I am absurdly pleased with the number of film noirs and epics I recognized from their respective montages. Good stuff.
*Thank God, with a hilarious montage of smoldering looks, unbuckled gunbelts, bare chests, and lines like, "Do you want to see my Winchester?" Although I still think my life would have been complete without the concept of John Wayne / Charlton Heston slash, thank you very much.
**Although I'm still bewildered that Tilda Swinton was not nominated for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. She still amazes me.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}