Sunday, February 22, 2009

Strange Times in the Kodak Theatre


I hesitated posting about the Oscars this year, but since it promised to be "different" I was intrigued and thought there would be some things to consider and observe. There certainly had been a lot of press about surprises, change in format, and bringing in a real movie guy, Hugh Jackman, to seduce the female demographic into tuning in.

I don't think this year's choice of host worked. If it did, then how come it didn't really feel like the Oscars until Steve Martin came on. The opening number with the low rent sets didn't work at all. It would have been stronger if they had Jack Black and Mos Def doing a Be Kind Rewind parody, but I'm thinking that film came out a year earlier so they couldn't do that. Hugh Jackman's singing voice reminds me of gargling, Pam says it is stage singing. The robot dancers for The Reader were just plain strange and Anne Hathaway as Nixon was like an ill fated experience you would expect with a high school drama club.

At the end of the first 90 minutes came another huge miscalculation: the big musical number by Baz Luhrman. Couldn't they have had more Pineapple Express parody instead? And is this interminable, parody-like over the top number a more substantial waste of time that could have given folks a better taste of the Oscar songs, especially Peter Gabriel's. And what they finally did with his Wall E credits song was actually kind of an abomination. They mashed it into a Slumdog Millionaire sandwich with the big picture's two songs surrounding and then reprising all three together. For once I thought, too bad that something from Wall-E didn't win. I would have loved to have seen Gabriel come out and sing it anyway for his acceptance speech.

I guess the point with the songs was the same reason they piled on loads of technical awards for Will Smith to present. We have got to get through the boring ones so we can pile on the stuff we know our middle aged or older female audience is going to like.

And that appears to be the fawning and bizarre Oprah speak that five past acting award winners gave to the nominees as a kind of one on one personal introduction. It reminded me of the kind of crap stars would generally say to each other on the Merv Griffin Show. However, if the folk were genuine, it felt genuine. Shirley MacLaine talking at Ann Hathaway was pretty good, as was DeNiro's pitch to Sean Penn. Still. I hope no one ever uses that format again. I don't think the orchestra, (now elevated on stage, no pit) was playing one of those big chords like when the guy read the questions in Slumdog, when the actors were toadying each other, but it kind of felt like the same kind of dramatic artifice was being applied. I am impressed that last year's best actor winner, Daniel Day Lewis wasn't there to play along, whatever his reason for not attending may have been.

The lengthy bits Hugh Jackman read about how various stages of movie making got pretty tedious in a hurry. And there was this kind of weird information architecture going on in the introductions where everyone was either mentioned obliquely with video screens or directly before announcing them again. A large collection of LCD screens also seemed out of control sometimes like the TV wall at Frye's or Circuit City sort of pulling a HAL and doing what it wanted. A cycle of stuff would come up randomly. Kung Fu Panda showed up during the best actress nominees. And during Queen Latifah's I'll Be Seeing You (Sorry Queen, you are a favorite of mine, but Sarah Vaughn you certainly are not) they played around with the skew so you couldn't see or read what was going on the various screens. But the Queen's song did curb the strange phenomenon of the audience clapping for the dead people where you wondered if some year they were going to bring in an applause meter in the lower left corner of your screen.

What did work were the montages for the Best Picture nominees where their themes and content of the films were linked to other classic movies. It was getting to be long in the broadcast for such a moment of profundity, but it made us take notice. Casablanca tied into Slumdog Millionaire, who would have known?

It was weird to realize I missed the guy who did the voice over talking about how many nominations or awards the recipient had prior. But his disappearance kept my Google search box busy as in "Didn't Sean Penn win an Oscar already? What was that for?

The best moments were the ones that show producers Laurence Mark and Bill Condon couldn't condense or control. The acceptance speeches by non-Americans and ESL speakers were especially charming this year. Pam commented on how good the stage looked loaded with brown people when everyone involved with Slumdog Millionaire was on it.

And then there was Sean Penn, who made me feel that sitting through this thing, writing some notes for this dispatch and doing some low impact school administrivial work was a worthwhile way to spend the end of the weekend

"I think it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect, and anticipate their great shame, and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way of support. We've got to have equal rights for everyone. "I'm very, very proud to live in a country that is willing to elect an elegant man President, and a country who, for all its toughness, creates courageous artists,"
.
I try to keep an eye on pop culture, but I didn't realize the significance of Penn's final remarks about Rourke ("In great due respect to all the nominees who despite sensitivity that sometimes has brought enormous challenges, Mickey Rourke rises again, and he is my brother") were loaded because of Rourke shooting his mouth off in December calling Penn a homophobe and an average actor who probably didn't deserve the nominsation. Maybe he didn't realize he wasn't still on the set playing a wrestler when he was smacking like one. Nor did I have any idea what was going on with Ben Stiller's Joaquin Phoenix parody when he did his presenter appearance. Is this just growing old or just having my head in a different sector?
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:46 AM
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