The Oscars
I was pretty impressed with the Academy Awards in general tonight: Ellen DeGeneres did a great job hosting, the in between acts were interesting (the Snakes on a Plane silhouette was classic), and, well, Jack Black and Will Ferrell did a duet—need I say any more? A few comments on the winners (and losers):
- I have to see West Bank Story. The tagline says it all: “A little singing, a little dancing, a lot of hummus.” Unfortunately, Netflix does not have it (yet), but I’m hoping they’ll have it available soon.
- Hollywood loves Al Gore. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise, but it seems like no matter what he did, whether presenting or accepting awards, the audience loved it. An Inconvenient Truth won both of the categories it was nominated for.
- Even if you have a 3 out of 5 chance of winning, it’s not a guarantee. Somehow, despite having three songs nominated, Dreamgirls failed to win Best Song, to, you guessed it, a song from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
- Rags-to-riches stories are in. Between Forest Whitaker of The Last King of Scotland and Jennifer Hudson of Dreamgirls, we got our share of impossible childhood dreams coming true. But, I guess every year there’s always a story like that.
- It’s too bad most of the movies aren’t on DVD yet. Because of my limited mobility without a car here, I haven’t been able to get to the movie theater very much, so I wasn’t able to see many of the films that were nominated (and also because of the insane prices charged for tickets). Since most of my movie watching is through Netflix, it would have been nice to get some of the films on DVD before they won the awards.
Not much more to say than that other than congratulations to Martin Scorsese; he certainly deserved the award. For more coverage, Wikipedia, naturally, is the place to go.
UPDATE: Here’s the Jack Black and Will Ferrell bit (unceremoniously stolen from YouTube):
