I of course watched the Oscars last night and unfortunately my overall impression was meh.
I was looking forward to the awards. I thought this was one of the most difficult years to predict the winners. A lot of categories had two very strong contenders and some of the acting categories had five. I also thought Seth MacFarlane was a clever pick for host. I really liked Family Guy at first but haven't kept up watching it or any of his other shows. I knew he could sing and he writes a lot of comedy and he makes references to ridiculous amounts of pop culture and has a reverence for old Hollywood. It could work.
I thought he opened the show pretty well. His first line about trying to get Tommy Lee Jones to laugh was good (and worked). Argo's story being so top secret that the director was unknown to the academy was also good. I thought it was exactly the right tone. I liked the bit about Roman Coppola being in a tough house because he has six relatives with nominations. He was good up to the Chris Brown joke but he recovered ok. Then he went too far with the Mel Gibson joke, recovered and then went too far again with it. That became a trend. Then the Captain Kirk thing started.
The framework for the bit was ok but it was too much about MacFarlane. Billy Crystal saluted movies, not himself. The boob song probably wasn't appropriate, particularly for the beginning of the night, but it was funny, and fun, and was even a bit clever in who he cited and I saw a lot female friends comment on Facebook that they liked it a lot. If you're good, you can get away with irreverence. I also liked Charlize Theron and Channing Tatum dancing and Joseph Gordon Levitt and Daniel Radcliffe too. The sock puppets were pretty good, but he lost me with the flying nun bit. It wasn't funny, ended oddly and the jokes in the final song were weak. Still he got a good number of laughs with the audience. A 17 minute opening isn't too long, Billy Crystal sometimes went over a half an hour.
The rest was meh. Not particularly memorable and a few jokes going over the line.
Linda Holmes of NPR thought it was one of the worst hosting jobs of all time but I wouldn't go that far. I did agree with these points:
"He kept apologizing for and reframing jokes so that he'd be less responsible for them: If the audience didn't like the joke, he'd comment on how much worse it would get, or how unfair that was, or how he'd thought they weren't doing that joke. He showed none of the willingness to say what you're going to say and not walk it back 10 seconds later that characterizes every legitimately daring comedian.
His sexist jokes were in poor taste, sure, but if they'd been funny, nobody would have cared. People are forgiving when your women-are-crazy material is funny; they're not so forgiving when it's dull. It didn't help that the patter written for presenters was almost as bad. It takes a lot to make the charismatic guys from The Avengers come off like charmless dolts, but they managed."
I completely agree about the presenters. The presenters mostly did two awards and only bantered before the first. This cut down on the time it takes to present the presenters. For the awards, most were ok. Christopher Plummer was the best (I liked his acceptance speech last year too). I liked Sandra Bullock, Charlize Theron and Dustin Hoffman, and Jean Dujardin and Meryl Streep. I hated Paul Rudd and Melissa McCarthy, the Avengers cast, Ted and Mark Wahlberg. Kerry Washington was good but Jamie Foxx not so much. Somehow Octavia Spencer managed to do a bad line reading while presenting an award. "Being on stage last year" was supposed to be self deprecating not boasting.
Most of the other presenters just came out and introduced a singer, a montage of best pictures nominees or previously given awards. They did it straight up and without jokes. That's fine. I think the biggest mistake was by Daniel Radcliffe. He came out with Kristen Stewart who while she was on crutches that night limped out on stage without them. Radcliffe didn't help her once. When Jennifer Lawrence tripped getting to the stage Hugh Jackman leap from his seat to help her. That's how you do it.
There were things that annoyed me about the show. The sound mix seemed off for a few numbers. I had a hard time hearing Adele sing over the music. Maybe it had something to do with the orchestra being in another building which struck me as odd. Even as MacFarlane was thanking them, they were playing over him. Life of Pi won for visual effects and after 43 seconds they drown out the speech with the theme from Jaws? Ok, Jaws is a cute way to cut people off, but after just 45 seconds? They let the shorts guy go 53 seconds without cutting him off.
I was also confused by the theme. It was movie musicals, which is fair enough but it was all about music not movies. And after announcing the theme, the first such thing they do is a tribute to James Bond. Ok. Having Halle Berry introduce it is a great start. But how do you show a montage of Bond clips and not show the
union jack ski jump from The Spy Who Loved Me? Then it ends with Shirley Bassey singing Goldfinger. Ok, that is the best Bond song but why not go into Adele singing Skyfall, the song actually nominated this year?
Later we get more musicals. In a 12 minute segment we see clips of three films and then a musical performance. First Chicago, then Dreamgirls and finally Les Miserables. I now understand why, the producers of this years Oscars broadcast also produced Chicago and TV's Smash (now with Jennifer Hudson). Hudson did great and the Les Mis number was my favorite thing of the night (I think I liked it better than the movie, certainly I liked Russell Crowe better here). But why not just do that and then sing the other nominated songs? As it stood we got two full performances and then three shorter ones of the song nominees.
The In Memoriam segment has become a staple. Apparently this year only 7 actors died so they had to fill in with others like writers and directors (fine) and executives and publicists (a little questionable). Will they start including grips and caterers in the future? Still it ended with Barbra Streisand singing in tribute to Marvin Hamlish and it's hard to beat that.
Not to complain too much, but the clips they showed bothered me too. In three segments they introduced the 9 nominated best pictures. They did this by showing their commercials. I kind of expected more. The scene they choose to show of Denzel Washington from Flight, is the only spoiler in the movie. For the other awards they mostly showed a frame or two with horrible graphics over it. Here's an example from a best makeup nominee:
This is a room full of people being honored for their ability to effectively use film as a medium to convey something. How well does the above convey why this film was nominated for best makeup? The swirling lines reminded me of JJ Abrams' len flares and the blurry little text is just mind boggling stupid on a number of levels. It's a reference to text at the bottom of movie posters that no one reads, in part because it's formatted so badly. So let's blur it out to make it actually illegible and use it to mark up every shot of great movies that we show because otherwise people might not realize it's a movie scene. Next year they'll probably put in the corner an FBI warning about pirating films.
On the other hand a few speeches during the night were really good. I particularly liked Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Lawrence and Ben Affleck. Quentin Tarantino tried to make a good point about how important casting is for a writer to have his creation remembered, though I thought his swagger and style drowned it out a bit.
Meryl Streep giving Daniel Day-Lewis his third best actor award was pretty epic. They might be the two best movie actors of all time. His speech was by far the best of the night. It was funny, entertaining, reverent, humble, gracious and heartfelt. I saw this
tweet, "Daniel Day-Lewis on Oscar speeches: "If you can’t find your own words in situations like this, it would be a little sad."
Having the First Lady present the Best Picture award from the White House was cute but the execution was odd. Jack Nicholson comes out on stage and makes some comment about chiffon, rouge and ringlets I still don't understand. Then he introduces FLOTUS who was standing in front of what I assume were soldiers, though they seemed to be dressed like waiters. Then back to Jack then back to FLOTUS.
Kristen Chenoweth and MacFarlane sang during the closing credits. I'm surprised that hasn't been done before. "Here's to the Losers" might have annoyed some people but I thought it was pretty good, though they flubbed some lines. I've seen people complain it was the longest Oscars in a long time. At 3:34 it was a little under average for the last 15 years. 2010's was 3 minutes longer. Looking back on past awards I forgot that Alec Baldwin & Steve Martin co-hosted or that Jon Stewart hosted twice and Ellen DeGeneres hosted at all.
I guess it is a thankless job and it's a hard show to produce but there seem like some obvious things they have to keep in mind. The show is about movies, keep the focus on that. In particular, this year's movies. Let the winners speak and help them not just recite a long list of names. Remember it's a show that people of all ages watch, some of them might be inspired to get into the film business, or at least to pay money to see films.
I have a new favorite Oscar website, Thank the Academy. "A visualization of how Oscar winners express gratitude."
