February 27, 2011

• Live Blogging the Oscars 2011

  righty-o.  i’ll be updating all night, so stay tuned!

  some starting thoughts.  this wasn’t a very strong year, imo.  lots of B+ films.  not many A’s if any.  Inception gets an A, and personally i really enjoyed Winter’s Bone, Animal Kingdom, Never Let Me Go and Blue Valentine to varying degrees.  The Social Network and The King’s Speech both seem to be the favorites for best picture.  i’m not very high on either of those.  meh gawd, man.  what is it about those two films?  why does everyone love them so much?  it’s beyond me, man.   True Grit?  i’d accept that for best pic.  Natalie Portman seems a lock for best actress.  i’d put money on Colin Firth for best actor too.  i haven’t seen The Fighter but Christian Bale’s performance has been described to me as the easiest lock of the night.  Melissa Leo, also from The Fighter, for best supporting actress?  perhaps.  Tom Hooper and David Fincher seem to be favorites for Best Director but i’d keep my eye on Aronofsky to swoop in for a dark horse win. 

  7:32 – marisa tomei is looking elegant and gorgeous.  i simply love that woman.  oooh.  a critic is dishing some dirt.  apparently melissa leo was the favorite for  best supporting actress but she took out ads promoting her own nomination, and now the mood has soured on her and Hailee Steinfeld (who was the indisputable star, not supporting actress, of True Grit) might sneak in for the win, which would be really cool.  she was great in True Grit and i vehemently disagree with Helena Bonham Carter’s nom for King’s Speech.  total overreach.  how fucking tacky is melissa leo taking out her own ads? 

  7:37 – Scarlett Jo is wearing a form-fitting dress that is fucking smashingly flattering her curvy figure.  damn that’s a nice dress.  i even love that color.

  7:44 – Anne Hathaway is standing there with the designer Valentino, and all this fucker Tim Gunn can do is talk to Valentino about designing pretty  much ignoring Anne Hathaway.  i am now remembering that this ABC red carpet team were simply awful interviewers.  i’ve already seen several very awkward moments from each of the three interviewers.  someone pull the plug on these fucking jokers please.  oh now Tim Gunn is talking to Anne Hathway, finally.  she’s wearing SO much makeup.  it looks jarring close up. 

  7:55 – robert downey jr is a handsome man.  i’m very comfortable saying that because it’s just an obvious fact.  his wife is wearing earrings designed by angelina jolie apparently.  is there anything she doesn’t do?  i wouldn’t be surprised if i heard that she won a rib-eating contest in texas then built an airplane the next day that she used to fly to the south pole.  oh hey!  look at this.  it’s a trailer for Source Code, the next film by Duncan Jones, the filmmaker of Moon, one of my favorites from last year.  looking forward to this.

  8:00 – holy crap.  jennifer hudson lost a million pounds!  now she’s all teeth.  Natalie Portman does not look pregnant.  not in her face anyway.  definitely in her cleavage though.  purple seems to be the color of the night.  is it true the father of her baby was living with his gf when he and natalie shacked up?  so she’s a bit of a homewrecker!  James Franco has come so far since Freaks and Geeks.  it’s pretty awesome. 

  8:08 – a film critic says Colin Firth is the strongest lock of the evening.  he even said it’s like the green bay packers playing a high school team.  Firth being the packers, obviously.  he’s also saying momentum, which went from The Social Network to The King’s Speech, might be swinging back to The Social Network. 

  8:15 – wow, i’m so used to seeing Christian Bale in american roles that i forget he’s a brit.  heavy cockney accent!  sounds like he’s acting when he speaks in his natural accent.  and Mila Kunis looks like.. omg.  she’s so hot to begin with but this dress is just ridiculous.  it’s totally sexy but it’s elegant too.  she’s so hot she hurts my eyeballs.  wow, look at this.  there are pics up her up already.  dude, check this shit out.

  

  *sigh*  she’s so beautiful.

  8:30 – this opening montage of Anne Hathaway and James Franco in all the best pic noms is fucking hilarious! 

  8:52 – Kirk Douglas is presenting and he looks unrecognizable.  he had a wicked stroke, i think, a while back, and he’s also really really old.  he’s severely slurring his speech and his face looks a little deformed.  that mutherfucker was Spartacus!  he can barely speak but apparently all his mental faculties are all there because he’s talking how hot Anne Hathaway is.  so Best Supporting Actress is up.  the new Melissa Leo news makes this the most controversial category, imo.  Kirk Douglas is stretching this out, not announcing the winner, purely torturing the nominees.  funny.  and hey waddya know.  Melissa Leo won and she said “fucking”! 

  9:07 – Toy Story 3 wins best animated feature.  which pretty much wipes out whatever tiny chance it had at winning best picture.  Pixar cannot be stopped.

  9:13 – Best Screenplay oscars.  paying close attention here.  these are the really good films of the year.  The Social Network wins its first major award of the night.  Best Adapted Screenplay.  The King’s Speech wins Best Original Screenplay, as i quietly boo in my apartment.  i thought the script was one of the WEAK points of The King’s Speech, not a strength.  it was formulaic and contrived.  Colin Firth and director Tom Hooper really worked hard to overcome the script’s weakness to ultimately make a good film.

  9:24 – Anne Hathaway sings a variation of On My Own from Les Miserables, a song i love, and she can really fucking sing!  i love her a little more now. 

  9:27 – Best Foreign Language goes to In A Better World from Denmark. 

  9:30 – Best Supporting Actor.  Christian Bale wins for The Fighter.  first nomination and first win.  he was due for something like this, i think.  listen to this cockney fool now.  he just said “dickhead” on tv!  hahaa.   actually he was saying dickhedlund.com.  say that fast.

  9:40 – Best Score.  i loved the Inception score.  if it doesn’t win here, i think it’s going to be shut out all night.  Trent Reznor’s The Social Network score wins.  you’ve come a long way from Head Like a Hole “i want to fuck you like an animal”  it was a decent score though, i have to admit. 

  9:47 – Best Sound and Sound Editing.  Inception wins!  possibly its only wins of the evening.  oh wait..  Wally Pfister won for Inception’s cinematography.  i take that back.  that’s a pretty big one.

  9:54 – Marisa Tomei is fucking pretty.  James Franco seems a bit stiff as the host.  Anne Hathaway on the other hand is a natural.  and wtf is Cate Blanchett wearing?  it’s like a battle armor of a jungle war tribe or something. 

  10:02 – Randy Newman always gets nominated for best song and performs his nominated song at the oscars every year.  and it’s always so very very boring to me.  is this good music?  are you fucking nuts?  and hey look at that.  Zachary Levi who plays Chuck on NBC’s Chuck, can really sing well.  who knew. 

  10:07 – did i just miss something?  why the hell did they just show a clip of Senator Carl Levin at a senate committee hearing?  wtf does that have to do with the Oscars?

  10:12 – Amy Adams is pretty enough in the face, but is so charismatic, because i think a genuinely happy and effervescent personality shines through.  i’d love to spend some time with her.  doesn’t she just seem like a genuinely good and happy person? 

  10:16 – the winner of the Best Short has a crazy fro.  it’s awesome.  Anne Hathaway just did a great shimmy in a silver dress with lots of tassle-type shits hanging off it.  that was…  pretty incredible. note to self: look for a clip of that on the interwebs somewhere tomorrow.

  10:20 – Oprah (?!) is presenting for Best Doco.  Inside Job wins.  have to see that.  the doc is about the financial crisis.  the winner just noted in his speech that three years after the financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive went to jail.  i guess the movie makes the case that the crisis was caused by maliciousness, and not simple incompetence?  interesting.

  10:35 – Inception just won another technical award: Best Visual Effects.  The Social Network wins best editing.  i always considered writing the unsung contribution to a great film, but editing is truly unsung and undeservedly so.  i was involved with a few small video projects a while back and saw that the editing process is simply magical.  before editing, it’s nothing.  it’s footage.  it’s components.  and those components are not ready made to fit like pieces in a puzzle.  and also unlike a puzzle there is no finished image to work towards.  they have nothing, but they create the finished product.  it’s really an amazing process i’m very happy to have seen up close even if it was on a small scale like that. 

  10:42 – AR Rahman and Florence from Florence and the Machine performing the song from 127 Hours.  Florence is very… orange.  and now Gwenyth Paltrow is singing her song from that country movie.  all these songs are so friggin boring.  what was that one song from that awful movie Once?  that was a great movie song.  (found it!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoSL_qayMCc)  awful awful movie though.  Randy Newman wins Best Song for his exceptionally unexceptional song from Toy Story 3. 

  10:53 – the montage of death where they scroll through all the people who passed away this year.  i always get nervous during this part because the crowd starts clapping for popular dead people, and i feel bad for the families of the people who don’t get any clapping.  no clapping this year though.  maybe they finally told them not to clap.  or maybe the people who died this year were all unpopular or unliked.  haha.

  11:03 – Best Director.  Tom Hooper wins for The King’s Speech.  i wasn’t nuts about the film, but if it’s good at all it’s because of that man and Colin Firth, so it’s deserved, imo.  i still can’t believe Christopher Nolan wasn’t nominated for best director.  i was silently hoping Black Swan would swoop in and take Best Director or Best Pic.  unlikely, but i still hoped. def not happening now. 

  11:12 – Jeff Bridges is presenting Best Actress.  Annette Benning has not aged well.  so happy to see Winter’s Bone and Blue Valentine get recognition, but Natalie Portman is not walking away from this a loser.  …  waiting…  see?  Natalie Portman wins.  it’s pretty amazing how well she did in Black Swan, especially considering how wooden and lackluster she’s been in nearly all of her adult career.  seriously.  after The Professional, she’s just been a pretty face, but Black Swan was different.  anyway, if you’re single, go see Blue Valentine.  married people shouldn’t see that, but you should.

  11:20 – Sandra Bullock presents Best Actor.  Jeff Bridges and Jesse Eisenberg do not belong here.  Ryan Gosling should have gotten a nom for Blue Valentine.  anyway, even if he were nominated, he’d still lose to Colin Firth.  Firth started the momentum that is clearly rolling in The King’s Speech’s favor right now.  Colin Firth wins.  *yawn*  surprise us, Academy! 

  11:32 – Spielberg presenting Best Pic makes a great point that some of the awesomest films in history have been Best Picture losers.  now it’s a montage of the ten best pic noms.  i love these montages.  surprise me, please!  oh how great it would be if they pulled some shit out their ass like Inception or Black Swan for best pic…  but of course it won’t happen.  it will be The King’s Speech.  and…  The King’s Speech wins.  i liked it, but best picture?  really?  ugh.

  11:39 – they flew in schoolkids from Staten Island to sing a finale, which is new.  and i have to say this is pretty fucking cool.  they sound great and they’re singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow.  a perfect song to celebrate these dreamy things called movies. 

   

  • 7:38 pm
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