The Oscars

Who in the world saw that travesty unfunny train wreck of a show and thought it was worth anything higher than a 1? In fact it is even less than that, it is a zero, but for some inexplicable reason IMDb.com will not let me rate this any lower than a 1. This show was so bad and Ellen Degeneres is such a giant suck host that I signed up for this IMDb.com account just to post this awful review. Trust me when I say that me getting up off my lazy butt and doing all this work just to tell strangers how much I hate a show really says something. I didn't even go to all this trouble after I watched Lebron James' Decision special on television.

What parts of this show did you 90 year old housewives enjoy the most? Was it the part where she pretended like she was ordering pizzas for all of the movie stars? I bet you really slapped your knees and hooted when she said she was collecting money for it and then revealed that the hat she was collecting the money in was Pharrell's hat. Oh boy oh boy that guy's hat is huge!

That and the rest of the parade of jaw droppingly horrible jokes made me want to scream. How can anyone enjoy this hacky parade of a hack fest awards show?

Evidently a suicidal jury would much rather shoot itself in the nose clutching a gun in one hand while reaching out for golden statuesque manhood with the other to an Antonio Sanchez drum roll and/or speculate about the universe out of a wheelchair rather than go out there to find another planet capable of sustaining human life. That's survival instinct for you within ''the line of sight''! Long years ago the jury was criticized for making the mortal error of looking above its navel to award 'Gandhi'. It took some years to correct that mistake by eventually decorating an anal-ytical vision of Indian slummery. This is surely a matter of some gravity, which for the Oscar jury must be a dead weight around its loins rather than a gigantic heartfelt force of liberating attraction which Hollywood apparently sets out to annually celebrate even though the jury it appoints continues to believe this is merely special effects! Or side effects, if you prefer!''What's love got to do with it'', yeah! And then there is the distinct possibility that seized with Noah- like trepidation of forthcoming floods due to global warming, Mexico may be emerging in jury-dick-tional mind as the preferred haven for the Oscark a la "The Day after Tomorrow". But I wouldn't credit the sag-acious old men & women of this jury such foresight given their penchant for being wiser by hind-ahem-sight preferably in white tights butting into theater space & turning it into a retirement home for suicidal manic-depressive Oscarcastaways, while themselves setting sail in the Oscark with lusty lustrous garmented types, preferably more revealing than space suits & capable of more than one measly kiss per 180 minutes. (What? No bathtub, no naked Archimedes @ Eureka! Now, that's not traditional @ the Oscars). Land ahoy, lower the anchor! {p.s. The alt title of this mail is : ''Is Oscar, if not Hollywood, waging fund war with NASA, if not NORAD?''}

Ellen DeGeneres is a wonderful host & I appreciate her wit. But this time around, she goes haywire with poor anchoring and she often stammered on stage and not only during calling the presenters (which was supposed to be funny) but also while cracking jokes.

Then comes the bad direction. The camera men really messed things up when it came to on-stage shooting. The speeches were emotional as they are always but I loved the speech of the winner of best supporting actress. It was sweet & true. Towards the end, the awards function was like a parade of giveaways. Williams's Happy performance was pumping while U2's was a soothing gig. The selfie was the highlight of the show and I was fairly entertained.

But I must say, while the glamour stays fine in the Oscars show, the sophistication has dwindled due to many reasons, hosting, presentation etiquette & direction being some of them. An average show, but I am happy for the deserving winners.

One of the downsides of living 5 hours ahead of EST is that some bigger US events cannot be watched live; of course the upside to that is that if you record them and watch them the next day, you can probably save yourself at least half the running time by fast-forwarding the commercials or other "filler" material. I mention this because I was very surprised by how quickly this Oscars flew by when I was doing it through adverts, bits that weren't working and so on. It started well enough. Although Ellen's opening bit lacked the showmanship or spark of some other years (noticeably there was no musical or montage element) it was still very funny and her lines mostly got the right balanced of mocking but without offending.

From there though, it didn't have too much to recommend. Montages came and went for little reason or benefit – in particular with some odd choices for clips, with the animation sequence particularly heavy in modern films and for some reason lots of Kung-Fu Panda. The Best Song performances were pretty decent but not so great. The frequent return of Ellen was a mixed bag; some of her asides were really good but the selfy joke worn thin and the Pizza delivery guy bit didn't seem to have legs or a punchline once the original novelty of seeing stars with pizza wore off. Of course the show is about the awards and for this year, although it was mostly predictable, the majority were at least worthy winners with generally a good split for performances, with technical awards going to Gravity on the whole. The acceptance speeches were mostly safe, but there were some howlers and of course generally it is a bit cringe- inducing to watch the very rich and famous award one of their own, which mostly is what was happening.

Although they are a bit hard to watch, at least the speeches generally strike you as real, which is more than can be said for the presenters of awards. It always surprises me that people who act for a living and can deliver all sorts of characters cannot come out and talk about an award or a person without coming over like they are reading off cue-cards with no more than one or two word per card. There are some exceptions of course but generally these segments are clunky and odd, with most of the scripted bits not working particularly well. Harrison Ford sticks in the mind as he talked through the first three best picture nominees like he had just been woken up seconds before he did it, while Matthew McConaughey and Kim Novak's bit was awkward for so many reasons. These ones stuck in my mind but generally the show had the usual stiff scripted intros that nobody enjoys doing or watching.

It was a very safe show it must be said; solid winners without too much controversy, a presenter who got it right from the start in terms of gently ribbing but not offending and all the usual flaws and weakness of this big bloated show. I must remember next year to just watch the monologue and look up the winners – fast-forwarding can cut out a lot of the fat, but when the rest is just the same old same old then it probably isn't even worth that much time.

First, out of all the nominated movies in all categories, I've only seen "Nebraska", "The Wolf of Wall Street", "The Missing Picture", "Dirty Wars" and "20 Feet from Stardom". All really good. Nonetheless, I'd say that "12 Years a Slave" probably dealt with the most important topic, and I like that Steve McQueen noted that there are currently almost 21 million enslaved people worldwide. One might say that by awarding a movie that looks at the sheer brutality of slavery, the Academy is atoning for awarding the pro-Confederate "Gone with the Wind".

I'm not particularly a fan of Ellen DeGeneres, but that whole thing with the pizza was a neat surprise. I know that everyone likes to treat Bob Hope as the standard, but in this day and age is it really possible to see him as anything except the gross old man who took Playboy bunnies to Vietnam? Watch the Oscar-winning documentary "Hearts and Minds" and see if you can view him positively. As for Best Documentary Feature, I would've gone with Jeremy Scahill's "Dirty Wars". I noticed that Alain Resnais didn't appear in the In Memoriam montage. He died the day before the Oscars, so they probably didn't have time to include him.

It's hard to deny that the ceremony's highlight was Lupita Nyong'o's impassioned acceptance speech. It turns out that Nyong'o is the niece of the brother-in-law of one of my undergrad professors.

All in all, I enjoyed the telecast. I hope that a major result of this is that we all start taking a serious look at the genocidal inhumanity that was the plantation system.