Post-Oscar Night thoughts

It's been a while since I've been so torn about my feelings of the Oscar outcome. On the one hand we've got winners like Christophe Waltz for Best Supporting Actor in "Inglourious Basterds", Jeff Bridges' Best Actor, Mo'Nique's Best Supporting Actress and of course Queen Kathryn Bigelow for Best Director. But on the other hand my distaste for "Up" winning Best Animated feature and Best Score is still there as well as "The Hurt Locker" managing wins in Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture. Granted the latter was one that everyone figured would happen, but part of me kept hoping for a non-safe Oscar movie to win.

Don't get me wrong "The Hurt Locker" is a very good and suspenseful war story on first watch. After that it becomes simply a good soldier's story, but loses the suspense and tension. It wasn't made as an Oscar movie and in some ways it's cool that an action picture took it, but at the same time I can't help but feel that "District 9", "A Serious Man" and "Inglourious Basterds" all endure and sometimes even strengthen with repeated viewing. I really dug "Avatar" was well, but it was, is and will always been just a really good sci-fi adventure picture and in my opinion was never posed to be the big Oscar movie the media tried to trump it up to be. Something that was done more so out of Cameron and Bigelow's former relationship than out of the quality of work. And the fact that people are playing into it makes them dim witted and blind to what they've been trying to do since December.

As for the Oscar tellacast itself, Steve Martin and Alex Baldwin were weirdly unfunny, the set design was wonderful, the tellacast directing and crowd camera work was awful, getting shots of James Cameron completely in the dark and cutting to people who didn't seem the slightest bit interested in whatever was going on. Ben Stiller's "Avatar" joke worked really well, although the other thirty of so "Avatar" jokes got old and I actually enjoyed some of the presenters humility realism when knowing their written jokes weren't too good (Elizabeth Banks, Tyler Perry) while some of the other ones that worked like Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr.'s were perfect. If only Fey could make a movie that was equally that witty and funny. Waltz, Bullock and the screenwriter of "Precious" had some strong speeches that seemed pretty damn earnest. And I'm still flip flopping on the break dancing thing for the best scores. I still think Zimmer's "Sherlock Holmes" score was the best and most surprising.

So after I did some totaling last night I discovered that I got 12 correct.
Best Picture
Best Actress
Best Supporting Actor
Best Supporting Actress
Best Animated Feature
Best Documentary
Best Original Song
Best Film Editing
Best Director
Best Art Direction
Best Visual Effects
Best Sound Editing

Which is decent for the ones I did pick (I think I skipped the shorts category, but my picks are posted in the February section of my blog). So now it all re-sets and this time next year we'll see if things get a little less predictable. A lot of big names have movies this year (Fincher, Aronofsky, Coen's, Herzog etc) could they get their due? Time will tell.