After O
Another Oscar Night has come and gone. I mentioned earlier I wasn’t all that interested but Suzan insisted we watch together. I sat down and got sucked in.
I noticed this was the second year in a row the Best Picture winner was not the evening’s top story. Last year, the buzz was Halle Barry and Denzel Washington and African-American talent finally getting its due. There was also some stuff about September 11th, mostly bungled by Tom’s Cruise’s “Hooray for Hollywood” rotton egg of an opening speech and several more laid by the host Whoopi Goldberg.
Proceedings were again rather restrained this year, continuing a several year trend that has eased out fancy dance numbers and silly song and dance schtick by the host. The star wattage seemed positively dim as every third nominee was also a presenter. Richard Gere even presented Chicago, his own movie, as a Best Picture nominee. They couldn’t find one other star to read off a telepromter?
The highlights, for us at least, included Adrien Brody upsetting Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day-Lewis for Best Actor. The Pianist, easily the best yet most depressing of the Best Picture Nominees, also brought home a Best Adapted Screenplay and a Best Director Oscar for Roman Polanski, who Hollywood effectively banished from the industry 25 years ago. Michael Moore amped up the anti-war sentiment of the evening by devoting his entire acceptance speech for Best Documentry to scolding the President. The audience, which gave him a standing ovation just seconds earlier, now started audibly booing. Huh? It’s Michael frick’n Moore. What did you expect him to do? Thank his agent?
So anyway Chicago won best people and nobody cared. It’s fun movie, creatively filmed, with some OK songs. In ten years, no one will remember Chicago, just as we are already starting to forget Driving Miss Daisy, The English Patient, and A Beautiful Mind, all movies that won Best Picture when vastly superior alternatives were nominated.
I wanted to speak up a bit in defense of Driving Miss Daisy, which I admit, I didn’t go out of my way to see. It is a serene character study, with a bit of magic in how the two interacted with one another. Perhaps the sentiment is “politically correct,” but for me it shed light on the overlap between public and private roles. Actually, it reminds me of the amazing Remains of the Day (the book), although this story was more about friendship and less about a servant’s tunnel vision of the world.
True, that these sort of film is geared towards mainstream older audiences, but that doesn’t make it any less deserving. (Actually my favorite terrible Best Picture choice was Rainman, Dances with Wolves (especially horrible!) I do think that stories like Titanic and Forrest Gump, though not especially uplifting, have straightforward stories and lots of characters and events, so they make good cinema.
I wanted to speak up a bit in defense of Driving Miss Daisy, which I admit, I didn’t go out of my way to see. It is a serene character study, with a bit of magic in how the two interacted with one another. Perhaps the sentiment is “politically correct,” but for me it shed light on the overlap between public and private roles. Actually, it reminds me of the amazing Remains of the Day (the book), although this story was more about friendship and less about a servant’s tunnel vision of the world.
True, that these sort of film is geared towards mainstream older audiences, but that doesn’t make it any less deserving. (Actually my favorite terrible Best Picture choice was Rainman, Dances with Wolves (especially horrible!) I do think that stories like Titanic and Forrest Gump, though not especially uplifting, have straightforward stories and lots of characters and events, so they make good cinema.