The 77th Annual Academy Awards

I was a little concerned during parts of the show that it was going to be swept up by The Aviator, it seemed like just about every category was going to something from that movie. It is understandable since it is such a great film, but the competition for awards this year included an unusually high number of great films. The Aviator, Million Dollar Baby, Finding Neverland, and Ray all deserved the Best Picture Oscar, for example. And so did Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, by the way. Here's an interesting little factoid – Eternal Sunshine received six times as many votes by IMDb users for Best Picture than The Aviator!

Chris Rock delivered a completely unexciting performance as probably the most anticipated host the Academy Awards has seen in years, at least in terms of the potential for controversy. People were afraid he was going to do something obscene or vulgar, and all he did was get up there and make a lot of bland, dumb jokes like so many others before him. He had some moments, but I know that he is a much, much funnier man than the one we saw during the show. For much of the second half he seemed to disappear completely.

Pierce Brosnan was the only person forced to announce an award winner alongside a wildly unamusing animated cohost, which was one of the options that the IMDb gave in a daily poll that asked what event would make you immediately turn off the show. Interestingly enough, another option was if someone referred to Million Dollar Baby as some gigantic cliché like "a knockout," which strikes me as funny now because, in announcing the winners, the quote on the IMDb home page is "With a one, two, three punch Million Dollar Baby proved to be the one, the darling of the Academy as Clint Eastwood's boxing drama put the competition out for the count." Clever.

I was glad to see Eternal Sunshine awarded in the Best Screenplay category, although I think it deserved more. I also agreed with most of the main acting categories, which is rare, although I was surprised that Jamie Foxx won Best Actor, I was sure he was going to win Best Supporting Actor for Collateral, if only because I really think Don Cheadle deserves an Oscar for his performance in Hotel Rwanda, which was brilliant all around. But Foxx delivered an astonishing performance in Ray as well, and it was also good to see Morgan Freeman recognized for his work in Million Dollar Baby.

Troy should have won costume design over The Aviator, The Passion of the Christ should have won Best Makeup over A Series of Unfortunate Events, I, Robot should have won over Spiderman 2 for Visual Effects, and I really think SuperSize Me should have won Best Documentary, although I haven't seen any of the other nominees, so what do I know. These are just a few categories that I had other opinions on, but I really had a problem with the Best Foreign Film category this year. I haven't seen any of the films in the category, so I won't say that they don't deserve to have been nominated. I'm sure they do, in fact. But here are a few films that not even recognized – Hero, The Motorcycle Diaries, and Maria Full of Grace. What is that? The Motorcycle Diaries certainly deserved much more than recognition than Best Original Song. Catalina Sandina Moreno was at least nominated for Best Actress, but how about Hero for Cinematography or Art Direction? Anyone with me on this?

Oh, that's right. The Motorcycle Diaries wasn't exactly a foreign film, and Hero was originally released in 2002. But still.

Ah, nobody cares. The winners won and that's the end of it, I'm just another in an endless line of people who have to rant and rave about how it should have gone. But I should mention that while I disagreed with some of the awards this year, it's like that any year and I think that all of the winners this year deserved the Oscars that they were awarded. There were just so many other films and people that deserved so much more than they got. Just see them all, that's my solution.

1.Beyonce singing every nominated song was a bit irritating but then again you would be to if you had a voice like that...But her french was horrible"take some french lessons girl" 2.It was nice to see some DIVERSITY in the nominations believe race does matter in the academy.therefore it was great to see Jamie Foxx & Morgan Freeman walk away with the statues 3.It was high time the ever so great underrated Morgan Freeman get recognition and the brilliant Cate Blanchett as well 4.The lowest point was Hilary winning the best actress award,don't get me wrong she was great in the role but did she need a second Oscar especially for this role Imelda & Annette were way better in their performance than she is.Never had a false win made more angry than Nicole kidmans"The Hours" win over Julianne Moore"Far from Heaven" two years ago. 5.Chris rock rocked though

and giving people Oscars in the audience WAS disrespectful. Did Beyonce have to sing every song but one? Has Hollywood no more singers these days? What about Catherine Zeta-Jones, who used to sing with the Welsh National Opera and won an Oscar (in part) for singing? It turned the Oscars into a Beyonce concert....As to the winners, Jamie Foxx and Morgan Freeman were really no-brainers, but I was depressed to see the women win who did. Hilary Swank won an Oscar five years ago for playing a butch woman from the wrong side of the tracks, and here she plays the same kind of role and wins again. In between the two awards, her career has really come to nothing, because she is a terribly limited talent. Can she play an l8th Century French aristocrat? No -- but Michelle Pfeiffer can, brilliantly. Can Swank play a turn of the 20th-century suffragette? Nope -- Julia Ormond took every scene away from her in IRONJAWED ANGELS. Swank is a very contemporary American woman, masculine, and not really very attractive. She doesn't seem to have much depth or sophistication. If she can find other roles like these two, she can continue. Meryl Streep she ain't. Annette Bening really deserved to win, whether people liked BEING JULIA or not (I doubt many actually saw it, but it was a tour de force). And while I do admire the multi-talented Cate Blanchett, basically she was doing an imitation of Kate Hepburn; I don't think impersonations deserve Oscars. Virginia Madsen really deserved to win in that category. As to Best Director and Picture, AVIATOR was much more artistic, and Scorsese is to my mind a greater talent. But Eastwood has grown tremendously since his spaghetti western days, and he is popular in Hollywood. Doesn't justify a simplistic boxing movie winning, though.....Thanks for a chance to express my opinions.

A day or two after "The 77th Annual Academy Awards", I read an article in The Wall Street Journal about how Uruguay's new populist president Tabare Vazquez had just been sworn in. But it said that the thing on the minds of most Uruguayans was not their new president, but what happened at the Oscars: Uruguayan singer Jorge Drexler didn't get to perform his nominated song "Al otro lado del rio", so he sang a few lines when he won.

Aside from that, I wonder just what Martin Scorsese has to do to win an Oscar. I mean, "Million Dollar Baby" was good, but Clint Eastwood had already won an Oscar. As for the whole thing about cutting people off before they have a chance to finish their speeches, what are you gonna do? And I do think that Chris Rock was a pretty good host (but I liked Jon Stewart even better the next year).

All in all, passable.

I'm not usually given to hyperbole, but after seeing over two decades worth of Academy Awards, I can honestly say that this year's awards show was the most disgraceful example of poor direction, total cruelty, and sheer stupidity that I've ever had the misfortune to witness. I'm not talking about the awards themselves- as usual, there is plenty to argue about when you tally up who won, who lost, and who never even got nominated, but the process is as it's always been and is as fair as it's liable to be. What is terribly UNfair is the treatment both the "stars" and "non-stars" received at the hands of Cates and Horvitz, in the name of "reducing boredom."

It is bad enough that for the last several years anyone who isn't Al Pacino has been "played off" at 45 seconds without any regard for what he was saying, how he was saying it, and what the emotion was behind the statement. It demonstrates nothing more than a total lack of respect, however, to herd nominees on the stage like cattle without paying them the honor of showing their faces while their names are read, to make them slink away quietly when they lose, to deny them the thrill of a walk to the podium, and to force them to read their statements with their backs to the audience. All of those things were done to the "non-stars" -never mind that the movies wouldn't exist at all without those artists and that most of them only ever get one chance to face their peers and their audience.

The stars didn't fare much better. It's becoming more sad than funny when winners of the caliber of Hilary Swank and Clint Eastwood have to beg for a few extra seconds for their speeches. Chris Rock, as host, was neither as inflammatory and controversial as the Academy had hoped, nor nearly as funny as he could be. His opening remarks were almost (but not quite) as offensive as Sean Penn made them out to be, and his comments during the show were more innocuous than interesting. Of course, he could hardly be blamed when it was clear that was being kept on as short a leash as any host has. In the end, Chris Rock was something he's almost never been before: a non-entity.

Even the musical numbers were handled poorly. Beyonce sang well, but there was simply no reason why she should have been featured in three out of the five songs. Another example of utter disrespect for an artist was giving Jorge Drexler's nominated song to Antonio Banderas- even though Drexler was present and clearly wouldn't have minded singing his own song, based on his winning "speech."

The efforts of Cates and Horvitz to make the show shorter and faster may have worked to a degree, but what resulted was a show devoid of life. We've all whined about the overlong speeches given by people we don't know, about the overblown production, about the self-congratulatory quality. But this is THEIR night- not ours. What is meant to be a celebration has become an insult to the people being celebrated. Cates and Horvitz should, frankly, be ashamed.