My obligatory post-oscar post

Right. It's final then. Oscar and I are officially over. Finished. Kaput. You go your way and I go mine. I take the high road and you take the low.

The thing with the Oscar's is, every year I tell myself that it's just a stupid award ceremony, it doesn't mean anything, I shouldn't let it get to me. And then every year, come Oscar night I sit there raving saying No! No! You've got it all WRONG! Sigh. It's the sheer consistency of it that gets me, the way they manage to get everything but the most painfully obvious things wrong. I mean, for my money, you could get a group of three blindfolded monkeys to throw darts at the nominations and still get a more intelligent set of picks.

Okay, so I'm going to try and suspend judgement here, given that I haven't actually seen some of the stuff that won. So it's POSSIBLE that Reese Witherspoon, who has always struck me as the quintessential featherbrain, may actually have delivered a better performance than Felicity Huffman's glorious turn in Transamerica. And maybe, just maybe, Memoirs of a Geisha got all the art direction, cinematography type stuff right, even if, by all accounts, they managed to get everything else wrong (note to self: Never, ever watch a movie because it got 'Three Oscars' without first enquiring into what they were for). But Rachel Weisz? Best supporting actress? Really? On the theory, presumably, that the more emotion you show the better the performance, never mind if you play a self-sacrificing activist as a self-righteous little brat. Even George Clooney's performance in Syriana was more deserving, and the best I can say about that is that it was mostly harmless.

And fine, so I won't crib about Crash winning Best Picture because I actually thought it was a really good film [1], even though I think both Brokeback Mountain and Capote were better. But Best Original Screenplay? This is the same movie where all of Los Angeles is peopled by exactly twelve people and a thirteenth guy who turns out to be the twelfth guy's brother, right? I suppose I should be grateful that Munich didn't win for adapted screenplay - if they're rewarding the sacrifice of elementary logic for the sake of making some obscure political point, that would have been the most obvious pick.

Ah well. At least this way I'm sure some theatre in Philly will show me Tsotsi. Oh, and Wallace and Gromit won. Proof that even the Oscars haven't got to the point where they can overlook outright genius. Yet.

[1] Of course, it stands to reason that the one movie I watch and don't write a review of has to end up winning the Oscar for Best Picture.

Categories: Arts, Rant