Oscar...Oscar, Oscar

forget the Scorcese game, drink when you see Angi's groin

I don’t usually red carpet.  The interviewers get on my nerves, and it is about as easy to hear as the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl.  The fashion chat sort of bores me, but I do like seeing who arrives with whoooom.  Nowadays, though, the carpet creepers are reading Twitter posts to me.  Do they think we don’t HAVE Twitter?  Or do they think that we are more likely to tweet if we think they might read our post?  That’s the case, I suppose.

I was working upstairs on an expense report (for the 2^nd time, mind you.  Thanks Oracle.  Bitch.) but I couldn’t prove what time the awards were going to actually start.  ABC keeps saying the show starts at 7, and I know they are lying – that it is probably 8-THIRTY even, but I  came down anyway.  I can’t afford to be distracted by that expense report again.   

Literally.

So of course, I was right and we are calling to seats at 8:30.  That’s how they get ya.

This is the only night I would Twitter.  But it's not a list even I want to read, so I’ll try to have something more meaningful to say than running commentary.  After all, when my comple-at papers are collected by some well-meaning graduate student, we need my cultural/film commentary to stand on its own.

24 awards.  Count ‘em 24.

The theme I notice is convincing us that we do love the movies, we do!  Or perhaps that we should help our children understand why they should.  And I had a sudden awareness/panic that the movies won’t  always be with us, which had never occurred to me before.  I am as guilty as anyone of watching on a tiny player resting on my belly, on the company laptop in a hotel room, on somebody’s Wii… but I can not imagine a world that has no picture show in it.  It gave me the same Bell Jar as realizing that Niagara Walls would never stop running.  Then think of a day when maybe it did. 

I am also painfully aware that my television is now the wrong shape.  Even the awards shows have outgrown the square ratio.  The top of everyone’s head is cut off, and these split screens of nominees and their films has everyone peering out of one right eye.  As we used to say when reading Cinemascope credits on the small screen.. “Klahom!”

Where is the award for these sea salt caramels I’m eating?

Nice work, Coca-Cola, on the “not all stars” commercial.  I would like you to show that before the films I arrive too early for.  If you are going to show commercials in the sacred hall, they might as well be about the movies.  I remember a Loews pre-show that was all movie clips of characters talking about the movies.  Sort of like the open of this year’s Awards show.  The “no talking” rule could feature DiNiro in Cape Fear, and “no smoking” could be the screening room of Citizen Kane.  Has this been done?  It feels like it’s been done.

When the Emmy noms come around, please remember that the directors of the Oscar broadcast could not figure out how to shoot that Cirque d’Soleil piece.  Some things are too big for any screen. 

The night is really flying by so quickly, I find I have very little to say by way of commentary other than the technical glitches of the production itself.  I have reset my audio to mono because the music and announcer were out of balance.  And just now during Christopher Plummer’s speech there is a strange applause feedback in his microphone, as if it were mounted on a slinky.

This is not a good sign in a eyar devoted to silent films.

Will I sit through Titanic again, and is that far too much 3-D?  I tried to sit out some of the 3-D in Hugo, but the film was unwatchable without the glasses.  Was I supposed to keep the glasses?  I doubted I would get a ticket price break if I brought them to the next 3-D, like a reusable grocery sack.  And there was that big recycle box right outside the door.  So recycle I did.  Lord knows what they’ll charge to see Titanic.  In 1996 I saw it free about 6 times.  And it didn’t even have an iceberg in it.

I have to stomp around the room over Woody Allen winning an Academy Award for writing his same movie again just because he had Wikipedia open in the other browser.  And then not show up.  Do you know that you do not have to submit for a nomination?  Did you not hear Ludovic Bource just thank Hans Zimmer for doing that very thing?  Of course, Bource  also acknowledged John Williams on his way up the aisle, and thanked Sheila E. from the stage.  He’ll remember this moment forever.  Woody will shoot another movie through doorways (scored by clarinet) and fetishize his typeface. 

At night's end, it is 2 movies about movie making that take home all the prizes.  Academy voters needs their jobs to have meaning, too, just like the rest of us.  Good luck with yours this week.