Academy Award Rehash 2007

Another year that goes to show that even someone who goes to see most of these boring and pompous Oscar worthy pictures can’t really pick the irrational way that Academy voters are going to see any particular race. Again this year I missed the Best Picture category and was overall an abysmal 11 for 24 or 46%. I guess I won’t be winning any office pools with numbers like that. That is, if anyone at my or any other office cared enough about the Oscars to start a pool. But generally that honor is reserved things people actually care about like the Super bowl or the NCAA tournament or the World Cup.

As I predicted this year’s Oscar festivities were a bit of a snooze. Most of the inspiring moments were relegated to the end of the show, after midnight for those on the East Coast. Whoever in LA decided that the show should start at 8:30 should be shot, people have to go to work on Monday on the East Coast and the big winter storm failed to fully materialize and keep everyone home. The show did come in under four hours but just barely.

Ellen Degeneres did a fairly lame job as the Oscars emcee. In a velvet suit she was probably the most casually dressed person in the room. At least she remembered to brush her hair which is more than can be said for presenter, and last year’s winner, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Ellen seemed comfortable enough, but there wasn’t much to talk about at this year’s Oscars and a lot of the canned material was pretty lame.

The evening started off with a really boring film of all of the nominees being happy for themselves. While I liked the audience applauding the nominees before any of them became winners or losers, the film was tedious and unnecessary. Instead of starting off with one of the big awards like Best Supporting Actress the organizers decided to start off with the snoozer categories and of course with the inclusion of so many foreign nominees the first two awards went to technical categories where the people not only aren’t comfortable speaking in front of crowds, but are generally used to speaking in a different language. The result was that probably half the television viewing audience tuned out in the first half hour.

For those who did slog it out we got lots of preaching from Al Gore who looked surprisingly uncomfortable given that he has made more live speeches than all of the other people in the room put together. Of course this was offset by Leonardo DiCaprio who looked like he had just won the lottery to be able to share the stage with the former politician. There were also a number of notable flubs my favorites being Will Ferrell calling his Talladega Nights costar by the wrong name and Clint Eastwood acknowledging that he should have worn his glasses so he could read the teleprompter. Also there were a number of somewhat tedious and unnecessarily cruel jokes at Peter O’Toole’s expense though he seemed to take them all graciously.

The best scripted moments of the night were the musical number by Will Ferrell, Jack Black, and John C. Reilly about how comedic actors get no love at the Oscars and how they should all play invalid inspiring teachers to gain some attention. The other great moment was when Ellen Degeneres had Steven Spielberg take a picture of her and Clint Eastwood and directed him to take a second one to center it better. Another nice touch was to pre-record the speech from the president of the Academy and keep it under one minute. Not that it helped speed up the presentations much, but every little bit helps.

On the award front it was nice to see Jennifer Hudson express some real emotion during her supporting actress win, Michael Arndt make a decent writer’s speech for his win for Little Miss Sunshine’s original screenplay, and Ari Sandel make a great speech for the funny live action short West Bank Story. The big winners saw Helen Miren thanking the queen of England, somewhat unimaginable to an American, and of course Martin Scorsese’s win for Best Director in which he asked his friends and presenters Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas to check the envelope again.

There were no surprises in the Best Actor and Best Actress categories nor were there expected to be any. Jennifer Hudson seemed surprised to win her Best Supporting Actress award but she was probably the only one. The Academy decided to shy away from the populist Eddie Murphy and went with veteran Alan Arkin for his role in Little Miss Sunshine. Perhaps Murphy hasn’t paid his dues long enough as a ’serious’ actor to gain serious consideration. Or perhaps it was that little comment at the Golden Globes. Either way no one was showing Eddie Murphy the love on Oscar night. Best Animated Feature surprisingly went to Happy Feet which beat out Pixar’s Cars for the animation award.

Little Miss Sunshine got the double kiss of death for best picture since it won both a supporting acting award and the Original Screenplay award. Of course being a comedy it was never going to win Best Picture anyway even if it was the most complete of the nominated films. On the other hand The Departed was the big winner of the evening picking up all of 4 awards for Film Editing, Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture. Except for Best Director these were all surprises to me as there was really only 2/3 of a great film in The Departed, I still maintain that the thing started to fall apart at the end. But the Academy Awards for 2007 were less about the films of the year than they were about awarding actors and directors for their body of work. That is what happens in a weak awards year.

I did significantly better in the documentary/foreign language/short category than usual getting two out of five of these undecipherable categories right. It was no question that An Inconvenient Truth was going to win and the producers gave over most of their speech to Al Gore’s proselytizing. Lots of shots of the crowd nodding sycophantically at every word just reinforced the divide between ultra-liberal Hollywood and the rest of the universe. Live Action Short went deservedly to the humorous West Bank Story. I think everyone was surprised that The Danish Poet won for Animated Short, well everyone who cared. Personally that was my least favorite of the nominees. The Best Foreign Language award was something of an upset as well as The Lives of Others gained enough ground in recent weeks to overtake Pan’s Labyrinth for the win. While The Lives of Others was a good film I think Pan’s Labyrinth will be the film people will still remember 10 years from now. Finally, Best Documentary Short went to The Blood of Ying-Zhou District I have no comment on the winner or really any of the other nominees for that category.

On to the technical categories. We always expect this part of the proceedings to be full of unattractive people who don’t make very good speeches; which is why they are usually broken up with humorous presenters and the occasional musical number. Not so this year. Since three of the nominated songs were from the same film they decided to do a medley thus there were only two breaks for the songs. There were the occasional interruption for strange things like the choir that sang the special effects and the people who did the impressive shadow puppets, but in general these served as distractions to the proceedings and did not amply break up the dull speeches. This is where Ellen could have stepped up to keep things moving but didn’t.

As already mentioned Pan’s Labyrinth not surprisingly took home three of the technical awards for Art Direction, Cinematography, and Makeup. Marie Antoinette surprised by winning for Best Costume while The Departed won for Film Editing. Dreamgirls not surprisingly won for Sound Mixing, a category that seems to favor musicals while Sound Editing went to the other of the two war films, Letters From Iwo Jima. The Sound Editing Oscar was the only win for Clint Eastwood’s two massive projects. To no one’s surprise Pirates of the Caribbean won the award for Best Visual Effect citing the character Davy Jones as a massive achievement.

Finally, Best Original Score went to Gustavo Santaolalla for the second year in a row this time for Babel. The award was Babel’s only win for the evening. The Best Original Song surprisingly was won by Melissa Etheridge for the song

Related posts:

1. 2007 Academy Award picks
2. Academy Awards Wrapup 2005
3. Golden Globe Redux 2007
4. Golden Globes 2007 - Television
5. Oscar Picks 2010