Thank fuck for Argo.
When fucking Life of Pi won Best Director for Ang Lee, I got flat out angry. Then I got scared: was it going to carry that momentum into a throoughly undeserved Best Picture win? Luckily, beardy Ben Affleck and crew were on hand to extract Oscar from a bad situation, and get it back safe and sound.
I'm probably being unfair to Life of Pi, and to Mr. Lee, but I found it to be shallow nonsense, which purported to have grand insights and which actually had no fucking insight at all. It deserved to win for VFX, and while I didn't love that it got up for cinematography, I could at least understand the thinking. Score? I don't remember a bar, but okay, I'll take your word for it. But Best Director of the year? In this year of brilliant movies? Nuh-uh, no way, not a hope in hell. Still, the major fuck-up with the director category happened with the nominations, this minor fuck-up was just the exclamation point.
Elsewhere, Jennifer Lawrence managed to be graceless with so much grace that I kind of forgave her for not really deserving to win (and I've always, always been terrified of those stairs on behalf of dazed winners ...). Quentin pulled it out for screenplay, which was awesome, and I loved his speech ... but they do know they've got to give him director someday, don't they? Are they gonna pull a Scorsese and keep him waiting for another twenty years? Lincoln, Les Mis and Anna Karenina split Production Design, Make-up and Costume between them, which seems more amicable than going to the mattresses, I guess.
In the supporting categories, Christoph Waltz was a bit of a shock, and Anne Hathaway really wasn't ... though to all those bitching about how she acted surprised in her speech: is she supposed to get up there and be all like 'Yeah, we all knew this was coming, right?' What option does she have?
Seth Macfarlane was just kind of ... meh as host. We could've done with less self-referential humour: jokes about yourself as host can work okay once or twice in the opening monologue, but four hours of them and it starts to get pretty god-damn old. As do jokes about how long the show is running: making those jokes makes the show run longer, for fuck's sake. But he wasn't a James Franco-style disaster (Anne Hathaway deserves none of the blame for that debacle, in my opinion), which has to be a plus. Kind of.
Oh, and Daniel Day-Lewis seems to exist on a plane of awesomeness that is beyond all of us mere mortals. In one speech he had probably the three best lines of the night and man, he's just so fucking cool.
Oh, and Russell Crowe, walking out on stage to sing after being bagged mercilessly from every corner for his singing: ballsiest bastard ever.
And that's that for another year (I won my battle with junk food, by the way, in case you were concerned).
Cheers, JC.
I'M COMING FOR YOU, PROUST! Reading a bunch of books, watching a bunch of movies, and crapping on endlessly about both ...
I didn't watch, but my tumblr dashboard hated Seth MacFarlane with the kind of unanimous passion I haven't seen since the days of Romney. Did he really sing a song about seeing actress's breasts in sex scenes (some of which were rape scenes)? Because that is kinda astoundingly awful, and sounds like what a caricature of Seth MacFarlane might do to make fun of Seth MacFarlane...
ReplyDeleteHmm ... it's an interesting one. As infuriating and stupid as it was, most of the diatribes I've read haven't put that song in its context. The second half of your last sentence is actually pretty accurate: there was a whole running gag that was "This is the kind of stupid shit Seth Macfarlane might do to be a terrible Oscars host". They'd show an 'alternate Oscars' in which he'd do some horrible bit, he'd get told it was horrible, then he'd do a 'safe' version here in the 'real Oscars'. It was weird, like he was trying to have it both ways: do the stupid, 'controversial' jokes, but make the humour mainly at his own expense in an (obviously unsuccessful) effort to forestall the controversy. To be honest, I just kind of figured Billy Crystal would have done exactly as many sexist/anti-semitic jokes if he'd been hosting, so I didn't see it as anything particular to get worked up about.
ReplyDeleteOf course, as a white, straight, relatively wealthy man, I always get a bit freaked out when others are offended by things that I just shrug off. Does honestly not giving a fuck about Seth Macfarlane one way or another make me a bad person? Is my privilege showing? Am I not as culturally attuned a small-L liberal as I want to be?