The annual four-hour Oscars® telecast, aired on Disney’s ABC, fizzled as usual. The Best Picture winner (see 7 Jan 09 post for my review) is another smaller-than-life stinker that ought to be forgotten like Oscar’s other recent low-life Best Pic winners. Slumdog Millionaire (represented last night by an onstage collective, one of whom took the award as an opportunity to trash another studio) is like a sensationalistic cable television profile without the realism. Gran Torino (see 14 Jan 09 post), Milk, and Frost/Nixon are better movies. Hollywood’s best picture in 2008 was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a splendid motion picture that recalls Tinseltown’s Golden Age of making movies.
The show was as boring as the top winner. Host Hugh Jackman is talented, and he did his best, but having past winners present awards was a drag—like an award is the personal preference of a previous recipient—and having comments about each acting nominee’s merits puts the emphasis on an artist’s career, not on the artist’s nominated performance. Indeed, no acting clips were shown and the picture clips were mixed with old movies. You could almost see viewers reaching for the remote, especially whenever Slumdog racked up another win. Crash, The Departed, No Country for Old Men—I include my own favorites such as Little Miss Sunshine— Hollywood’s getting smaller than a parasite and often just as unoriginal.
Along those lines, and this is not to be catty, one of my favorite stars, Reese Witherspoon, looked like she’d been kidnapped by a modern art advocate and made to parade around in that gaudy eye make-up and a dress that resembled an oceanic oil spill. The Illusionist’s Jessica Biel looked as if she was trapped in a giant tablecloth, and poor Anthony Hopkins seemed like he couldn’t wait to escape the debacle. The pretentious acting award presentations alone—which were unbalanced and undignified—were a nightmare.
Oscar’s highlights were the ads—Hyundai’s raging German and Japanese competitors made a humorous impression—and, never sounding better, Queen Latifah performing a lovely rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You” (though she could have done without the black thing on her otherwise stunning dress). To finish the head-nodding affair, Barbara Walters did what amounts to a tasteless ad for a Christian singing group that’s sponsored by the company that owns the network. So much for being a pioneer; Walters—who wrote a gossipy biography last year—is as credible a journalist as her ex-boyfriend Alan Greenspan is a laissez-faire capitalist and the Oscars®, like the economy and the nation, are on a downward trajectory.
