I originally planned to blog during the Oscars, but that would have been a little too toolish even for me, and rude to my guests to boot. And it’s just as well, because my post at 10:30 would have been mostly incoherent.
Crash for fucking Best Picture? I had a couple arguments over when the last time something so monumentally dreadful happened, and the consensus was 2001, when A Beautiful Mind won over Moulin Rouge, In the Bedroom, Gosford Park and LOTR: Fellowship. My counter-argument was that while all of those were better, none was so empirically good and deserving as Brokeback Mountain, making this the more shameful year.
I should make it clear: I don’t think Crash is, as such, a bad film. I think it is deeply pedestrian and tiresome. If I had reviewed it here, it would have been 6/10. It is a tubthumping, noisy film with a monstrously inflated sense of self-worth. It makes the uninteresting and useless argument that we are all racists in our own way and should reach out to each other, and it does this with a minimal amount of skill and subtlety. It beat for Best Picture a film of incredible emotional resonance in the long-run, and far greater social significance in the short run. I need hardly mention that I much prefer the other three nominees as well.
But the Academy pissing me off is hardly new, and I shall not dwell on it. Unlike many years, there were actually two films from my top 10 in the nominees, and that speaks to something.
Other observations of the evening:
-“It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” for Best Song caught me completely off guard and thrilled me. I think I wanted it to win so much that it never occured to me that it might. Terrible production number.
-But not so terrible as “Into the Deep,” with its Car on Fire Ballet. Who thought that wasn’t a terrible, terrible concept?
–Brokeback for Best Score was also an exciting surprise, although it was my dark horse.
–Memoirs winning for Cinematography will probably anger me more in the years to come (Dion Beebe won an Oscar before Elswit, Prieto or Lubezki? Come on!), but I said beforehand that I was happy with all five nominees, and I stand by that. It was very pretty, even if it was very conservative.
-Jon Stewart did not bring his A-Game. The only joke I really liked was, surprise, the most political one of the evening: “Bjork couldn’t be here tonight. She was changing into her outfit, and Dick Cheney shot her.” That said, the mock political ads for Best Actress and Best Sound Editing were as funny as anything has ever been at the Oscars, and is precisely what I hoped for more of when the Daily Show staff was brought into this shindig.
-Playing music underneath every speech was tacky, though not so tacky as presenting in the audience like last year.
-Ang Lee wins the award for Worst Brokeback Joke Ever, telling his Oscar “I wish I knew how to quit you.”
-Worst speech: Reese Witherspoon was long and boring, but I could hardly pay attention to Philip Seymour Hoffman, so angry was I that he backed down from his promise to bark like a dog the whole time.
-I was shocked and a bit dismayed that Altman wasn’t a firebrand in his Honorary acceptance speech; he’s a damn radical, not a Hollywood player.
I will admit, I’m interested in seeing how this plays on the Right. The least-liberal filmwon, but I’m sure it won’t be spun that way.