Well, first and foremost, if you're like the people who normally populate my Sunday Night Mexican Restaurant where my friends and I like to end our week (i know, we think monday starts the week, liberal urban heathens that we are) you are at home watching the tube. So use this as an Open Thread for Oscars.
I just watched the first 5 minutes and it was Oscar saluting it's past. And that's important because there really is no Oscar present. There are almost no great American films being honored this year, a few good ones, some English language and foreign imports and not much else.
What is happening with art and culture in our country? Is there any serious examination of it? In other years there have been articles saying `this is a weak year for films' but this year, when the candidates are the weakest group I've seen in a decade there is literally no discussion of it. Could it have anything to do with the fact that the media is owned by the very corporations that make the films that are being honored tonight?
Let's look at the films that are nominated that don't deserve to be noticed more than nominally. The two that spring to mind are "The Aviator" an over-long miscast film about Howard Hughes. Poor Leonardo is 10 years to young for this film and Cate Blanchett looks like his mother. If only Warren Beatty could have made his Howard Hughes pick 15 years ago after his brilliant "Reds" but sadly no one would give him the financing.
Then we have "Million Dollar Baby" which is a tired pastiche of cliche's woven together to make the most over-narrated lame film to be touted in ages. Morgan Freeman narrates to beat the band and plays a 2005 version of his Driving Miss Daisy character. It was one thing to play this in 1950's Mississippi but another thing to play this in the present day. We also have a one note white trash family who might as well just twirl their collective mustaches for all the colors they play in this movie. It's one badly stacked decked that culminates in a pathetically dishonest denoument.
The only things worth lauding were the wonderful "Sideways" which in a normal year would be a very good film, not the best film but even so it won't win what it should. The best female performance was at least nominated as Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake has been recognized. But poor Gael Garcia Bernal in both Bad Education and Motorcycle Diares has been overlooked as well as Javier Bardem for The Sea Inside, a much better treatise on euthanasia than one of our other nominated films (sorry, no spoilers here because you guys don't seem to see many films!).
What else to say today? My horrifying moment today was heading to see a film this afternoon (the truly banal "Constantine") was passing by a truck on E. 10th St. and seeing the back window covered with an American flag. The caption read "Fear Us!". I was sick to my stomach to see this idiot with NJ license plate flaunting this. What does this say about us, as both NY and NJ are "blue states" and yet this person doesn't worry a hoot about putting something so sad and disgusting on display.
Oh well, it seemed Morgan "step and fetchit" performance was just honored over Thomas Hayden Church's comic revelation in Sideways. And Morgan exits to the strains of "Star Wars".... how appropriate is that when Chris Rock talks about our troops fighting for `freedom all over the world". Really? I thought that was just goal-post moving after the Bush Admin. had to cover their asses after there were no WMD's. It's a sham my friends, this whole shebang.