The Oscars

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?''}

For a change, the show last night used the minimum amount of get-off-the-stage music, allowing most of the winners to make decent acceptance speeches. I've been writing for years about this issue, how the play-music-over-the-winners'-speeches ruins the proceedings for me because the whole purpose of award shows is to honor the winners, let them bask in their moment of glory, and apparently others have been vocal about this issue as well. There were still constraints, off-screen cues of how much time was left, and most everyone heeded them so the music wasn't necessary in most cases. Thumbs up.

The show itself was very good. Ellen DeGeneres was a fine host, funny without being mean-spirited or corny, just sharp enough in her comments throughout. Loved the pizza thing, that really humanized the affair in a clever way. This was a classy show for the most part, and I didn't nod off once. Kudos across the board - for a change.

Bad direction! Missed many emotional times. Camera always panning away from the most touching moments. Would have been nice to share those with the actors, that are indeed unscripted. For example, watching Judy Garlands kids, watch their late mother in her prime, would have been a sight to have been seen. As the camera switched to another celebrity who was applauding (w/o emotion) to Pinks performance, the camera missed Judy's girls crying and having a moment that only they could share, allowing us a small look into these girls/women of a legend. Ellen, was neither on nor off. I would still say she was a success. The pizza was a GREAT idea. (Was the guy in on it, did he know he was coming into the theater?) Loved how they didn't play off the acceptance speeches. Speaking on behalf of the east coast, move it an hour ahead. We "non Hollywood people" do have to work the next day. Please consider.

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.

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.