Random Reactions To Last Night's Oscars
So there’s only one thing you need to see from last night’s Oscars, and it is this musical number that blew the goddamned roof off:
(EDIT: Fuck. LJ doesn’t appear to want to embed the video – why am I on LiveJournal again? – so you have to be annoyed and go look at it here. It’s worth it, though.)
(I correctly picked, and enjoyed, the “Selma” track as the Oscar winner, but some things don’t win Oscars and are still fucking timeless. This would be one of them.)
For the first time in eight years, I did not win my Oscar betting pool. Jim Nauer now has the championship. I am shamed, but I accept my loss with dignity; I should have trusted that Birdman was a better movie than the awful, awful Boyhood instead of hedging my bets.
Neil Patrick-Harris was a good host – he kept things moving, and I loved when he took shots at the things we all knew should have been nominated. (Saying “Oh, now you like him” when David Oyelowo got a round of applause made me cheer.) And he got the greatest one-liner of the night when he said Edward Snowden couldn’t be here “for some treason.” The Birdman riff was classic.
Yet still, NPH was good but not great. A lot of his jokes fell flat, and NPH isn’t particularly good at letting a joke fail gracefully. You need that Carsonesque charm of being able to shrug it off and look gratifyingly embarrassed, and NPH just looked embarrassed. The “locked suitcase” was too much buildup for too little payoff. And the opening number – despite Jack Black’s awesome unforeseen interruption – was pretty tuneless. So a solid B, but hey, what do I know? I thought Chris Rock was the best host in years.
Seriously, what kind of douche is Sean Penn? Hey, let’s remind America the dude’s a fuckin’ Mexican just as he’s winning! I mean, Iñárritu took it in stride and may have even been amused (seriously, what’s he going to say if he doesn’t feel like trashing Sean in the press?), but I’m a little tired of presenters deciding to go “Oh, yes, and remember – this winner is a minority!” as opposed to, you know, “This person is a winner.” Let the labels fall, you dumb motherfuckers.
My second-favorite Oscar moment was when the Polish director totally FOUGHT THE POWER by giving a lengthy acceptance speech through the sendoff music, and beyond. Thus breaking their power. Note how the rest of the small-fry Oscar winners exhibited no fear of the music for the rest of that evening, now having proven that the Oscars had no control over them.
Jim Nauer – the man who finally bested me in the Oscars – says that the Ig Nobel awards handle overlong speeches by having a nine-year-old girl walk out on stage and yell, loudly, “I’M BORED. IS THIS OVER YET? I AM SO, SO BORED.” I would like to see this feature at all future Oscars, thanks.
Please. Please, let John Travolta’s mushy face and creepy wax-person demeanor fade from the Oscars stage. I loved him as a movie star, but now his face-touching mauling is a liability.
Lady Gaga doing serious musical numbers strikes me as a way for Lady Gaga transitioning from “celebrity freak-pop-star” to “actual singer.” And God. She can sing. She sung so well that Julie must have been as proud as she looked.
In conclusion, Whiplash is the best movie of 2014 and you should all see it. It was a tiny box office thing, so it had no real chance, but it’s coming out on DVD tomorrow and you should all own it.