Oscars 2015

all of the "old movies are so great!" montages

suck it

O'Hehir postmortem:

Harris floundered and struggled against a stale script and its leaden gags. He repeatedly fumbled names, appeared to go blank for several seconds while eye-locked with a seat-filler, and evidently paid no attention to what was happening when he wasn’t talking. He made a crack about a dress worn by the director of a short film about two seconds after the woman had finished talking about her son’s suicide, and stepped on director Laura Poitras’ powerful acceptance speech for the documentary “Citizenfour” with a weirdly reactionary joke about Edward Snowden and “treason.”

,,,That third-rate David Blaine thing with the sealed predictions in a box, and Harris’ forced attempts to get some shtick going with Octavia Spencer? Jesus Christ. It just would not stop. (I appreciated that when Harris tried to drag Robert Duvall into it, Duvall gave him nothing.) But seriously, people, and I know this is heresy of a high order: Seth MacFarlane was funnier! At least he had the courage to make an ass of himself!

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/23/oscars_2015_nuggets_of_electric_political_theater_amid_oceans_of_lame/

apparently there is upset that Joan Rivers was absent from in memoriam.

BITCH WAS NOT A MOVIE ACTRESS

the first wave of the thinkpiece flood!

Also apparently not a member of the Academy xpost

Also saw a lot of whining about Harold Ramis not being included, even though he died before last year's Oscars and was presumably (can't remember) included in that one.

They're always liberal with that "RIP" thing, they could have made space for Joan.

Also, the Oscars' disability fetish has gotten beyond offensive, IMO, to people who actually have to live with a disability.

The first person with a serious disability who acts in a role that features no disability will get all the Oscars.

Bill Murray gave Harold a shoutout on stage last year. Maybe he was a "too soon" 2014, like PSH, though I guess the latter slipped in the montage last year.

They're always liberal with that "RIP" thing, they could have made space for Joan.

They are not. No Andy Griffith a few years ago, and he actually gave one great film performance.

No Andy Griffith a few years ago, and he actually gave one great film performance.

"Matlock" was a TV show though.

Big Thinkpiece #2:

As for the big winner: Voters were obviously mad about Birdman, and everyone who was rooting for something else is … you know, mad about Birdman. It is possible to admire the exquisite craft and technical facility with which the movie was made, to be amused and charmed by its droll, darkly comic take on narcissism, artistic aspiration, and the fight of a creative individual to make a mark, and still feel a slight twinge of … This again? Another movie about showbiz and its lovable nutcases? There are stretches in which the Oscars seem to go into hibernation; think of the 1980s, when Chariots of Fire and Gandhi and Amadeus and Out of Africa and The Last Emperor won and it was hard to discern how much curiosity, or much of anything other than a desire to retreat from the world and the country into a kind of pictorial/historical splendor, the Academy had. In retrospect, I think those movies won not because Academy voters didn’t care about what was going on in America, but because they didn’t know what was going on with American movies. The 1980s — post–Raging Bull, pre–indie boom that began with 1989’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape — were a decade of uncertainty and trepidation about what American films were supposed to be, other than blockbusters.

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/decoding-the-2015-oscars-the-birdman-win-and-what-it-tells-us-about-hollywood/

think of the 1980s, when Chariots of Fire and Gandhi and Amadeus and Out of Africa and The Last Emperor won and it was hard to discern how much curiosity

Wow, I'm having really painful, depressing flashbacks.

apparently there is upset that Joan Rivers was absent from in memoriam.

BITCH WAS NOT A MOVIE ACTRESS

Ahem:

http://statici.behindthevoiceactors.com/behindthevoiceactors/_img/chars/char_68993.jpg

http://beautyblitz.com/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_image/public/gallery-images/Muppets-Take-Manhattan-final.jpg

"Matlock" was a TV show though.

is this humor our are you ragging on a face in the crowd? in any case, the andy griffith show far surpasses matlock in terms of pinnacles of griffith's career: television phase.

also

No Andy Griffith a few years ago, and he actually gave one great film performance.

unless it's what you were alluding to above, you must never have seen no time for sergeants

v impressed w/ the movies that babysat you on cable, OL

Joan Rivers also had a brief role in that batshit Burt Lancaster adaptation of John Cheever's "The Swimmer."

yes, a movie that Classy Red Carpet Joan would stick her fingers down her throat and go EGGGHHH EGGGHHH at.

jesus, you're really on fire with miserablism the past few days, like more so than usual

i do what i can.

Garcia Marquez seemed like an odd inclusion.

xpost

Oh it doesn't matter either way to me. Just wanted to bring up that movie because it has a scene featuring Lancaster in swim trunks sprinting alongside a horse

I enjoyed the apathetic tone of some of NPH's intros. "The talented Scarlett Johansson." "Two people who absolutely deserve to be here."

and you'll never hear "The talented ___" about an actor

Couldn't help but notice that the "Two people who absolutely deserve to be here" followed immediately on the heels of Terrence Howard's performance.

think of the 1980s,

Anyone else notice that a lot of the orchestral commercial queues were from the '80s, stuff like "Flashdance" and "Eye of the Tiger?"

know your early-middle-aged target audience

Yeah, I did notice some pretty specifically Gen X cult film touchstones in the NPH opening song (like Clue and Back to the Future).

where the 30th anniv tribute to The Goonies went, i can't imagine

andy greenwald, reviewing the show as a telecast (not much talk about what should or shouldn't have won) with the daggers:

By mid-show, even Harris knew he was bombing, but he appeared powerless to do anything about it. His puns atrophied. His skit partners sold him out. The simple act of throwing to commercial took on the airless tenor of a proof-of-life video.

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/american-snoozer-the-dull-earnest-predictability-of-the-87th-academy-awards/

where the 30th anniv tribute to The Goonies went, i can't imagine

Could have sworn the opening song showed a brief Goonies clip, too!

Yep, Goonies at 2:29:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h48wcCnP9A8#t=149

Looking forward to Blue Ivy's rendition of "Goonies R Good Enough" during the 2040 telecast.

Or whatever will have replaced the telecast several times over by the year 2040.

in two years the 50th anniv of The Graduate will demand a Disneybot's soiling of "Mrs Robinson"

Paul Simon medley.

Well, we already know Ass wins eight Oscars in 2505.

Ass The Movie?

BTW, isn't "Everything is Awesome" the Lego Movie's brainwashing anthem?

gay civil war! over treason joke.

When asked about Harris’ comment, Greenwald told BuzzFeed News at the Governors Ball following the Oscars, “I’m just gonna go ahead and treat it as a joke. I thought it was pretty pitiful, given Hollywood’s fondness for congratulating itself for doing things like standing up for McCarthyism and blacklists. So to just casually spew that sort of accusation against someone who’s not even charged with it, let alone convicted of it, I think is, you know, stupid and irresponsible.
“But I’m trying not to make too much out of it,” he concluded, before adding with a laugh, “Although I’m not succeeding.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/glenn-greenwald-on-nph-snowden-joke-at-oscars#.tl20JzAxj

Wait ... what?

http://defamer.gawker.com/oscar-winning-imitation-game-writer-graham-moore-im-n-1687449330

read that last night

So...should we tell him or let him find out on his own?

oh, gurl.

I went to the MoMA screening of Imitation Game and there was a Q&A after with Moore and a couple of the actors. Matthew Goode jokingly felt him up several times.

Master Moore is suddenly the most interesting person to be Touched by an Oscar:

His mother was formerly the City of Chicago's chief lawyer and First Lady Michelle Obama's chief of staff.

Oh boo hoo over Snowden. I just knew we would get a pompous political speech regarding that.

"Another movie about showbiz and its lovable nutcases?"

Yeah, I remember when they gave serious awards to Topsy-Turvy and A Prairie Home Companion and... oh wait

Perhaps this had more to do with their love for both a comeback story and middlebrow pretension, visual and otherwise, the need to exclude independents, and maybe even the fact that Boyhood goes out on psilocybin?

could you go out on whatever it takes?

Sean Fennessey of Grantland on the creepiest of the major victors:

Eddie Redmayne is 33 years and 47 days old. He has appeared in 14 feature films. He has an Oscar for Best Actor now. He’s just barely younger than Clark Gable was when he won the award for It Happened One Night in 1934. And Redmayne is actually older than Nicolas Cage when he won the award for Leaving Las Vegas in 1996. Cage and Gable appeared in a combined 56 movies by the time they won the award, and seemed to have lived for many years, and through many, well, experiences. Eddie Redmayne — his eyes wet, his body trembling, and his voice approaching the giddy squeee of a teakettle — seemed like a tiny boy. He clutched his award as if it were a sickly animal, petting and cooing it into his breast....

Redmayne, who seems like a nice and hardworking person, promised to “polish him” while genuflecting before his statuette. He seemed a little too excited to be in possession of one. Many have already described his speech as “adorable,” which is the sort of word we use to describe newborn calves. For me, it was as ghastly and exaggerated a response as I can imagine. OK, maybe not the most ghastly.

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/oscars-after-party-birdman-or-the-unexpected-virtue-of-four-hour-awards-shows/

Totally had a moment of trying to remember which movies Nicholas Cage and Clark Gable had done together before realizing I'd misread the quote.

re Redmayne: Does playing an ALS sufferer count as going "not full retard" even if the guy might be a genius? If Rain Man counts I think this does too.

Eddie Redmayne — his eyes wet, his body trembling, and his voice approaching the giddy squeee of a teakettle — seemed like a tiny boy. He clutched his award as if it were a sickly animal, petting and cooing it into his breast....

This writing borders on hate crime.