Obligatory Oscar Summary Post

Disappointed faces from James Cameron AND Jason Reitman? That's a twofer right there.

So another overcooked slab of back-slappery draws Awards Season to a close, and by golly gosh, don't the Oscars just love stamping their "us last!" foot all over the place. Despite the fever-pitch stand-off that had developed between Avatar and The Hurt Locker, the whole ceremony felt markedly flat and passed by with little in the way of surprise or upset. Let's break this shit down, shall we?


THE GOOD

• Sandra Bullock's speech - gracious, funny, touching. Good on her.
• Waltz winning Best Supporting Actor. Hopefully this guy has a long career ahead of him, and not just in villainous mainstream guff either.
• Fisher Stevens winning an Oscar. That's FISHER. STEVENS.
• Martin and Baldwin as hosts. Alright, they were kinda touch'n'go for the first few minutes, but the wisecracks soon began to flow.
• Tyler Perry's introduction for Best Editing. Funnier than all of his movies put together.
• Jeff Bridges' posture. That guy just knows how to stand.

 THE BAD

• Barbra Streisand announcing Best Director with "It's about time," leaving an entire ethnicity and a whole gender wondering if she's talking about them.
• That horror montage, as introduced by two stars of fuckin' Twilight. A moment of geek revelry (did you spot Warwick Davis?), but wholly out of place and massively forced.
• Some Argentinian movie I've never heard of beating both A Prophet and The White Ribbon to Best Foreign Language Picture. I know that me not having heard of it is no reflection on its quality, but fuck it - this is my blog and I liked those movies.
• Interpretive dance, to visualise the Best Score nominees. Absolutely bloody awful.
• James Taylor performing a live song over the New Dead People montage. Ghastly.
• Those stupid fucking Best Actor / Actress introductions from the nominees' peers. Only Colin Farrell salvaged a little dignity there, by talking about spooning in Mexico with Jeremy Renner whilst shooting S.W.A.T.

THE UGLY

• Martin and Baldwin's Paranormal Activity skit, meeting stifled laughs that double up on showing a) it wasn't funny; and b) nobody remembers that movie enough to find it relevant.
• The John Hughes tribute. I loved Hughes as much as the next 80s child, but that was excruciating - particularly a terrified-looking Molly Ringwald and a smug twat in the shape of Macaulay Culkin.
• Sky Movies' ad-break patter, with cryptmaster Claudia Winkleman shepherding a bemused David Baddiel, a vacuous Ronni Anacona and a smug, actually-knows-fuck-all-about-movies-for-a-so-called-expert Mark Dolan.
• Sean Penn, using his fleeting introduction for Best Actor to talk about his favourite subject: himself.
• Ryan Seacrest. He's America's answer to Vernon Kay - as long as the question is "What is the transatlantic equivalent, measured in cuntishness, to Vernon Kay?"

And... I'm spent.