Death by Oscar

Apparently Mrs. X and I didn’t even make it to the halfway point of last night’s Oscars. We threw in the towel and turned off the lights a little after 10:15 when they started that montage on foreign films. The only Oscar that Mrs. X was interested in was Best Supporting Actress and I was only interested in the “In Memorandum” segment. Neither of us got to see what we were interested in. Instead, we had to parade through a boring siege of behind the scenes Oscars, all for movies that we had not seen. Our sprits were lifted a little when we saw Alan Arkin win Best Supporting Actor. We had actually seen “Little Miss Sunshine” (and found it very amusing) and we hoped we were getting into the meat of the show. But it drug out even more.

One columnist stated that they thought the ratings might be bad enough to get the show bumped over to cable (like on E!) but I think it’ll take a few more years of no one caring for that to happen. After all, what’s the point of cutting off boring speeches for the sake of time, if you’re going to fill that time with inane, unfunny crap? Going over a couple of the liveblogs of the event, it seems like I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Meanwhile, I’ve seen very little enthusiasm for the results. In fact, most things that I’ve seen on-line reflect an extreme ambivalence towards “The Departed” winning best picture. I think that’s because everyone knows that this was a “reward Marty” moment, despite the fact that it was not a great movie and certainly not up to the standards of Raging Bull or Goodfellas. I might also note that I have no intention of seeing this movie as I’ve seen Scoresese’s last two attempts to win an Oscar and both stunk in my opinion (Aviator and Gangs of New York).

So, unless there is a movie that I take a particular rooting interest in (and I don’t see one on the horizon) maybe I’ll just go to bed early during next year’s Oscars.