I went to an Oscar-watching party tonight. One of my friends guessed every award correctly but two. Seriously. I got the first three right, and thought I was an amazing guesser, and then got about four more right all night. I did pick the Pimp song, but I had a 1-in-3 chance with that category, so I can't get too excited. I think Dolly Parton should have had to perform all three songs. I wanted to see her sing the Pimp song. I think that would have worked. I got the Penguins right too. But that seemed like an easy one, since it was the only one I'd seen or heard more than a tiny bit about. And I picked Tsotsi, which won the foreign language category, because it was the most foreign sounding. That's a good rule of thumb I decided made sense.
This would have been funnier if I'd been live-blogging, but I prefer real human contact to writing blog posts (at least this week... we'll see how long it lasts...:)... I'm going to try to recall some thoughts I had while watching.
1. The Diet Coke commercials. Bothered me. A lot. In case you missed it -- Diet Coke, animated bubbles flowing out of the bottle, energizes the drinker. In one of the commercials, a man screws up the goodnight kiss on his date, walks away, opens Diet Coke, lots of bubbles, he takes a sip, and then runs back and awkwardly kisses the woman, who, in real life, would have thought he had a screw loose. But that wasn't what bothered me. What bothered me were the bubbles. If the bubbles flow out of your soda, your soda will become flat. No one likes flat soda. This commercial got me thinking about how terrible flat soda is, and how quickly soda goes flat. This isn't what they should want me thinking about. Very poor commercial.
2. I think the people who made the documentary short "God Sleeps in Rwanda" were just copying the Don Cheadle film from last year, "Hotel Rwanda," trying to hop on the Rwanda bandwagon. Like that new Rwanda cereal with the marshmallows, and that children's magic kit with the Magic Rwand. Uh, okay, I'll take a mulligan on this one.
3. The cameramen loved Matt Dillon. In retrospect, maybe they knew Crash was going to win?
4. I didn't get all the montages. "Epic films," "Film noir," "Documentaries," etc, through history. The documentaries one was one of the first, and I was waiting and waiting for "Passion of the Christ" to show up, but it didn't. "Charlie Chaplin." "Ray Charles." "Jesus." Would have made perfect sense.
5. Charlize Theron's dress looked like it was pregnant with a new dress growing on its shoulder. I think it was Charlize Theron.
6. The guy in charge of the Motion Picture Academy, or whoever runs this thing, talked all about how movies are about storytelling, telling stories, no matter what era, no matter the technology. Ten minutes later, Robert Altman got his honorary Oscar, and said something like, "Movies are not about storytelling. They're about characters." They should all agree on some talking points. Directly contradicted the other guy. I thought that was funny.
7. I counted three times someone said movies are made to be seen on the big screen, big special effects, go to the movies. There might have been more. The subtext I kept reading into it -- "Stop downloading movies! Stop it! We don't like it! Stop doing that!"
8. Richard Pryor got the final spot in the death montage. I thought it would have been Shelly WInters. It was a pretty lean year for famous actor deaths, which is good I guess. The death montage is always a little weird to me, because it's pretty clear they stagger the names to spread out the applause and get it building toward the end, and it seems pretty disrespectful to the people in there who get no applause or come right before or after someone who gets a lot of applause, and noticeably get ignored. It's kind of an insult. They should cut the sound on that -- not air the applause, just let us see the montage without hearing the differential levels of applause. Alternatively, they could replace the montage with the soon-to-be-dead montage, where they show images of all the actors they think will die in the coming year. Or the your-career-is-dead montage, of the former winners now desperately trying to find work. Or the ones who got divorced in the past year. That would be an interesting montage.
9. Why was Jack Nicholson wearing sunglasses indoors?
10. Whenever someone mentioned any black person, it seemed like the camera went right to Jamie Foxx. Whenever someone mentioned Memoirs of a Geisha, the camera went right to Ang Lee. Whenever someone mentioned anything else, it went to Matt Dillon.
11. Reese Witherspoon and Broadway actress Kristin Chenoweth could be sisters.
12. Paul Haggis didn't give his co-writer a chance to say anything when they won for screenplay -- they played the music before he was done talking. Haggis Hogged It. That's sort of alliterative. That's what I'm going for.
I only watched 10 minutes, but saw the "epic" montage. I completely agree that it was a not-so-subtle attempt to discourage illegal downloading/video on demand/portable video players/anything that does't fit the $10 per ticket theater profit model.
Posted by: gunner | March 06, 2006 at 09:44 AM
Did you see that the woman who sang the Crash song was the same as Toby's ex-wife on West Wing?
Posted by: Archana | March 06, 2006 at 10:23 AM
Did you see Dolly Parton's breasts? That is not normal.
Posted by: Sanya | March 06, 2006 at 07:09 PM
"Reese Witherspoon and Broadway actress Kristin Chenoweth could be sisters."
Have you seen "Wicked"? I spent the first 10 minutes convincing myself that that was NOT Reese Witherspoon up there.
Posted by: | March 07, 2006 at 10:56 AM