Oscars 2007

Last night was oscar night. I didn't win my pool, but would have if I had choosen The Departed for Best Picture instead of Little Miss Sunshine. I was confident in my picks but only got 14/24 right. There were a number of upsets this evening:

Alan Arkin over Eddie Murphy
Happy Feet over Cars
Pan's Labyrinth over Children of Men in Cinematography
"I Need to Wake Up" from An Inconvenient Truth over "Listen" from Dreamgirls
The Danish Poet over The Little Matchgirl

Costume Design was a crazy category this year. The Costume Designers Guide awarded Curse of the Golden Flower and The Queen, the critics pick was Dreamgirls and the winner was Marie Antoinette. And the film about fashion, The Devil Wears Prada, was no ones pick.

I thought the show was ok. The only speech I really liked was Forest Whitaker's. Al Gore's acceptance speech was ok and he was funny presenting with Leo DiCaprio. Leo kept pressing him to make a big announcement and when he started to the orchestra started playing and cut him off.

Years ago they had an interpretitive dance for the best pictures and I thought they'd never do it again. But this year they had a troop of about a dozen people behind a screen with a big light. They would come out and then form human shadow sculptures representing the films. It only took a few seconds before they went to commercial and it was pretty amazing. They also had a sound effects chorus who "sang" the effects for various movie clips in a montage.

Ellen DeGeneres was pretty good hosting. I suspect it was her idea this year to "celebrate all the nominees as opposed to all the other years when we just celebrated the winners". They opened with a short film of all the nominees (even of minor categories) speaking against a pure white background, saying thank you or something funny. It was done by documentary great Errol Morris. Ellen's best line in her monologue was about the diverse group of nominees "if there weren't blacks jews and gays there would be no Oscars". Between awards she was just ok, but she went into the audience a few times. Once she handed Martin Scorcese a script to consider and another time she had Steven Speilberg take a picture of her and Clint Eastwood for myspace.

I really liked the iPhone commerical of various movie clips of people answering a phone and the JC Penny commerical that recreated iconic movie scenes (Singing in the Rain, Mary Poppins, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, The Birds, Titanic) with ordinary people on the streets of New York City.