Post-Oscars Coverage

Red: Well, to nobody’s surprise, the little film that could was able to outlast a late invasion from a group of giant blue aliens. The Hurt Locker ended up taking home an Oscars-best six awards, including the big three of Best Picture, Best Director, and a surprising grab in Best Original Screenplay. As is the usual case, once it won the award for Best Editing, the top prize for the war movie was pretty much a lock. The movie made plenty of history with the night, including Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first female to ever take home of the Best Director award. And with plenty of other great female directors out there, I hope this is a sign of things to come in the future, as well as inspire other young female artists to make movies.

Castor: I agree wholeheartedly that it’s good to see Kathryn Bigelow get the nod, simply because of the “trailblazing” factor as the first woman to win Best Director. In my opinion, neither Avatar or The Hurt Locker were worthy of Best Picture but I guess this is the lesser of two evils.

Red: Also as predicted, the acting categories were well predicted by pretty much everybody. Jeff Bridges finally gets his long awaited Oscar for his role in Crazy Heart, a film which I am hoping to finally catch tonight. The Dude truly abides. Christoph Waltz took home the Supporting Actor award, something that he had wrapped up since Inglourious Basterds debuted at Cannes early last summer. As always, his extremely humble acceptance speech (and believe me, he’s had quite a few this year) was one of the shining spots of the show.

Castor: Yes, anyone should have seen those two categories coming from 5 miles away. Good to see the dude finally win after 5 nominations.

Red: As for the ladies, Sandra Bullock was able to hold off Meryl Streep, even if the master still has a gazillion more nominations. While Bullock certainly wasn’t my first choice for Best Actress, it was a decent performance and was more of a career achievement award. And seeing how my favorite performance of the year from Tilda Swinton in Julia wasn’t nominated, I guess I was always going to have something to complain about. What makes this win even that more wonderful was that Bullock accepted a Razzie award for worst actress on Saturday night for her role in All About Steve. What a weekend! And then of course, Mo’Nique was another actor who was a virtual lock to win her award, took home Best Supporting Actress for her truly evil role in Precious. Her acceptance speech was great as well, knocking on everybody who criticized her for not trying to promote the award, saying that her win depended on the actual performance, and not showing up on late shows every other night.

Castor: I thought it would bug me more that she would win Best Actress but she was absolutely gracious the entire weekend, even going in person to pick up her Razzie Award and defending herself without knocking down anyone’s feathers. She even showed up 4 hours early on the red carpet to talk to every single news outlet. No wonder everyone in Hollywood loves her!

Red: Arguably the biggest surprise of the night was Geoffrey Fletcher’s win for Best Adapted Screenplay for his work on Precious, an award that was a heavy favorite to go to Up in the Air, which turned from an Oscar favorite in November to not winning a single award. Fletcher also became the first African American winner of such an award. Like I said, plenty of history was made on Sunday night. And while The Hurt Locker taking home the Best Original screenplay wasn’t too big of a surprise, it seemed like the majority of the people out there were hoping that Inglourious Basterds would steal this away, myself including.

Castor: It definitely was very disappointing that Inglourious Basterds did not get even Best Original Screenplay. I don’t know what you have to do to win that award, seriously. Precious‘ script was nothing fantastic while IB’s script was mind boggling in its detail and character development. Fletcher looked like he was going to have a cardiac arrest lol! One recurring theme last night was how they would show videos for the most random stuff such as Screenplay but they would not show videos for the most visual category of all, cinematography.

Red: The biggest disappointment for me was the Foreign Language category. While I have yet to watch The Secret in Their Eyes, it would be hard pressed to receive a better grade from myself than a movie like The White Ribbon, which I finally caught last week and graded a perfect A+. I ignored all the signs that Ribbon wasn’t going to win, and predicted it instead. First, there is the trend as of late of the Academy ignoring violent movies when it comes to the international movies. Second, there was the fact that Ribbon and The Prophet were going to split too many votes for either of them to win, despite both movies being in many critics top 5 movies of 2009.

Castor: Yes, The White Ribbon is a movie I need to catch. Good on you to post a prediction for the Oscars, I did not care enough to do so lol

Red: I ended up being 17 out of 24. I whiffed on both screenplays, as well as most of the shorts and a documentary. Add on “Avatar” losing out on Sound Editing, and there are all my misses. The night was mostly predictable for the awards that mattered most, but when it comes to those smaller awards for pieces that most people haven’t watched and more than likely won’t remember, it really is just a wild guessing game.

The telecast itself seemed to be too long. My DVR didn’t even record the entire thing. I loved the opening sequence by Neil Patrick Harris, especially the Dolly Parton joke towards the end. Baldwin and Martin were great as hosts, though the opening monologue seemed to drag on and on, seemingly pointing out every single person in the crowd. And then as the show dragged on, they seemed to be less and less involved, although their Paranormal Activity spoof was absolutely hilarious. Oh, and Ben Stiller as a blue alien? Fantastic.

Castor: I thought it was not better or worse than in previous years which means it was pretty damn bad. To me, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin weren’t all that funny. Their pseudo-conversations felt really flat and the jokes seemed like they were directed to the 60+ year-old crowd. The show really dragged on for way too long! Like you said, the intro of all the nominees at the beginning was really overkill. And then, they pretty much did the same thing again at the end. The only fun parts was when the purple woman ran up the stage and interrupted the winner and how they would cut off all those “technical” people who went over the 45-sec limit. Oh and could Kristen Stewart be any more constipated?

Red: Well, that officially puts an end to the 2009 year of cinema. And just like that, we are moving into next year. Already people are calling for Leo to receive a nomination for Shutter Island, although it would be pretty difficult for it to last the entire year. But with the Best Picture field expanded to 10, it could be just a matter of one or two months before the first couple nominees sneak up on us.

What did you think of the winners and/or television cast?