Some Thoughts on the 80th Annual Academy Awards

• Awards shows like the Oscars seem to primarily exist to please celebrities. It becomes even more obvious what a bubble most of these people live in. Viewers at home watch in hopes of somehow entering the world of the rich and famous. The nominations and awards are secondary to the spectacle of "who's wearing what," and the possibility of drama unfolding on a national stage.
  

• John Stewart is both necessarily refreshing and painfully awkward to watch in this setting. Unlike a Billy Crystal or even Ellen Degeneres, Stewart is not a celebrity's celebrity. He is expert at skewering the powerful and famous. It is fun to watch him juggle flattery, kind jests and some not-so-kind jests. Crystal and Degeneres did something similar, but were never nearly as blunt or caustic as Stewart is. He provides a dose of some much-need medicine.
  

• Many actors and actresses are surprisingly bad at being natural and delivering lines from a prompter, considering the demands their job entails. Many try to be funny, few succeed. Everyone tries to look aloof, and even fewer succeed.
  

• Heath Ledger's death was addressed almost too tastefully. The reference was so scarce and not deliberate that it almost appeared that they were trying to sweep the event under the rug. In any event, its better than not being tasteful enough.
  

• I would not put it past Hollywood (the ever-powerful abstraction) to have intentionally selected especially young looking men and women in uniform to present the award for best documentary. Four of the five movies in the category were decidedly anti-war, the last was of course, Sicko. Nice going Oscar.

• The fact that Juno won best original screenplay solidifies the irrelevance of the Academy in judging Independent films. I feel like the media latched on this movie in an attempt to play catch-up with recent movies of the same genre that it never recognized in the past; reparations of sorts. I maintain that while Juno was far from the worst movie of the year it was at best average and slightly annoying. Plus, the deepest problems with the movie were embedded in the screenplay: the painful dialogue, confused messages and lazy character development (Michael Cera's character probably had less than 15 minutes of screen time but was still treated as a main character whenever he was onscreen). I realize that this is becoming more of an informal review of Juno than of the Oscars, so I'll leave the rest of that rant for another post.

• The silver lining of the whole show was definitely when Once won best original song for Falling Slowly. Of course I'm biased, Once was my favorite movie of the year, but the moment was so pure, unpredicted and detached from usual Hollywood grossness (that I also love). Actually, Stewart did sort of drop the ball by being a little bit condescending towards the duo of Hansard and Irglova. His tone seemed to say, "Isn't that great that even a funny looking bunch can make a cute little song and win our big prestigious award?"
  

This is all based on the two hours or so that I watched while half-concentrating on my Linguistics reading assignment. I wasn't even watching when No Country won best picture. Maybe I missed out on some of the big juicy bits.