Dear god are the academy awards boring this year. It would be much more entertaining if Jon Stewart just did three hours of standup. I’m watching my built up queue of vlogs instead because I can’t stand it anymore.
I think you can deduce everything you need to know by the fact that they rush the award winners in their speeches, but seem to have all kinds of time for innumerable tedious montages about things like the fact that once movies were made about tough guys, or sometimes they are about real people. Hollywood is willing to make the time to jerk itself off.
Update: Ken Levine weighs in with a great quote:
Oh, and one other thing while I’m ranting. All through the show the Academy’s message was bludgeonly clear – see movies on the big screen not on DVD’s. So what do they do? Show montages all night long of classic movies that are ONLY available on DVD. When was the last time you saw KEY LARGO at your local Cineplex?
Dave,
Couldn’t agree more. I loved how the Academy did their best to continue to bite the hand the feeds them by actually making DVD owners feel bad about owning DVDs when they really, I guess, wanted to send a message to pirates(?). At least one of the presenters cracked up when he went into his preprogrammed speech about the evils of DVD. That was classic. I guess too many people rent instead of going out to the box office. Here’s a solution – MAKE BETTER MOVIES!
Jon Stewart shouldn’t have accepted hosting it. He even went on Oprah the next day so she could gush about what a good job he did. Ratings were down 10 percent from last tear and the Grammys lost to American Idol of all things. A sign of the times. They can’t blame the downslide on file trading. There are just way more entertainment options such as Evil Genius and that is good.
Heh, yeah, that “watch movies in the theatres” subtext was as subtle as a bludgeon. So what did I do after the Oscars? Watch Ray (thanks, Netflix) one of last year’s best picture nominations.
(btw, re; movies in theatres: Is it the bad movies, or the bad prices that are keeping people away? methinks the latter)
I’m pretty sure Jake Gyllenhaal didn’t know what hit him when he read that condescending bit about portable DVD players from the teleprompter. Both he and I shared a laugh after he said it.
I didn’t see a lot of that stuff, because I bugged out in the middle to watch a stupid Scottish soap opera instead. I enjoyed it much more. We just watched the Independent Spirit Award show, which was orders of magnitude better than the Academy Awards.