Oscars 2014

I've been thinking about starting to blog for a long time now. As an Oscar fanatic, this year's Oscars are like a now-or-never chance for me to start. So here are my thoughts on this year's show, chronologically (not everything, just "highlights"):

• Anne Hathaway presents Best Supporting Actor. Everyone knows it's gonna be Leto, so let's get him out of the way. AnnE acts weird. Jared Leto seems as though he is on some kind of drugs. His eyes... and it takes him weirdly long to perform whole sentences... He's not just on some harmless drug, and he has not taken just a little bit of it, if you ask me...
• A few awards later, Indiana Jones himself introduces three of the nine Best Picture nominees. He is so bored by all of that...
• An undistinguishable dude that I learned was Channing Tatum introduces... what was that? As far as I understood... winners of some sort of talent competition... whatever!
• The botox victim Kim Novak and Texas T-Rex (thank you to the hilarious posters on www.crazydaysandnights.net for his nickname!) present Best Animated Short and Best Animated Feature.
• Sally Field presents "ordinary heroes", and she is one of them. I don't really dig it. Nice to see Sally, though.
• JGL + Hermione Granger present Best Achievement in Visual Effects. I love Emma, but honestly, she doesn't look too excited the whole night.
• Kate Hudson + Jason Sudeikis present Best Live Action Short + Best Documentary Short. I wouldn't have recognized either of them. A tweet by a semi-famous person I won't name just now, whom I like very much, and who's a hilarious tweeter in general, mislead me to mistake Jason Sudeikis for Ezra Miller...
• Kevin Spacey presents the Governor's Awards. If I bitch about how they should be part of the show it would just seem like copycatting some more savvy Oscar bloggers, so I won't... in the montage, Geoffrey Rush presents an honorary Oscar to "Jessica Fletcher", Tom Hanks presents one to Steve Martin, a guy whose name I didn't catch presents one to a guy I've never heard of by the name of Piero Fosi (or something like that), which Claudia Cardinale accepts on his behalf - and ... fuck, I can't decipher my own writing ... whoever presents the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award to "Saint Angie" (whom I will either ignore, or bitch about much in the future...)

Just for the sake of loosening it up: the most retweeted picture ever... or is it?

• Tyler Perry introduces Best Picture hopefuls "Gravity", "Her" and "Nebraska".
• Brad Pitt introduces U2 performing their Oscar nominated song "Ordinary Love" from "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom", which I find pretty... ordinary. I never really dug the claims by many people, mainly the creators of South Park - to whom I have a love/hate-relationship - , that Bono was a self-infatuated douche... until I saw him accepting the Golden Globe for this song earlier this year. He made it sound like he inspired Nelson Mandela to become a freedom fighter... what the fuck?!
• Michael B. Jordan and Kristen B. Ell (hahaha) present the scientific awards or whatever they're called...
• Christoph Waltz presents the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. His win last year felt like the kind of stupid thing the Golden Globes would do, but the Oscars wouldn't. And yet they did it. So I was really afraid they would burden Jen with it. Thank God, or the Academy, or whomever... Lupita wins. Great heart-felt, emotional speech. Did I hear Jen scream "Lupita!", you know... like a fangirl... *lol* I like Jen, I really do. Me and her have one thing in common I guess: we're both glad she didn't win this!
• Amy Adams and Bill Murray present Best Achievement in Cinematography. Bill Murray does a shout-out to the late Harold Ramis, and apologizes for it immediately. The way he did it seemed very odd, but I'm sure he did it with the best of intentions, so I loved it. I looked it up today, Ramis never was a cinematographer appearently, so that makes it even more strange, but whatever.
• Flashback to 2010: Anna Kendrick and Gabby Sibide present Best Achievement in Editing to Alfonso Cuarón and Mark Sanger. Cuarón doesn't even get the chance to speak. Guess everybody knows he'll get another chance later... d'uh!
• Whoopi Goldberg briefly presents Judy Garland's more or less famous children in the audience, just to have P!nk perform a "Wizard of Oz" tribute then. Whatever, I don't give a fuck about the Wizard of Oz anyway...
• Mrs. Ben Affleck and Benedict Cumberbatch present the award for Best Achievement in Production Design. "The Great Gatsby" won two awards tonight, and both were won by the same person, one Catherine Martin, appearently the wife of director Baz Luhrman.
• A guy who looks like any other guy, who as I learned the next day was Chris Evans, presents another montage, something like "most popular heroes", I think. Katniss, yeah!
• Glenn Close presents the "In Memoriam" montage. As I guessed, Philip Seymour Hoffman gets the last spot, and I'm damn sure that means something. Afterwards, Bette Midler sings "Wind Beneath My Wings".
• Goldie Hawn presents the last three of the Best Picture nominees. Oh my God, she looks awful. Another tragic Botox victim indeed.

Somewhere along the lines, the one and only Meryl Streep ate pizza. Harvey Weinstein paid for it, or so Ellen has us believe.

•  John Travolta presents the song "Let It Go" from "Frozen". Appearently, he pronounced the name of the singer wrong. Whatever. His voice sounds so gay. Wouldn't it be wonderful, if he and Wacky Uncle Tom both came out of their respective closets, and found true happiness with each other?
• Ray Charles Jamie Foxx and "Jessica Biel has horse teeth" (see this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTix7FDHZcA) present the awards for Best Original Score and Best Original Song. Despite my issues with U2, I still would have rooted for them, just because I hate Disney. But the Lopez' sure aren't what you'd expect the faces behind Disney to look like, do they?
• Now we get closer to the Big Uns: Penelope Cruz and Bobby De Niro present the Writing Categories. Just when I thought that against my prediction, swiping everything, "Gravity" will inevitably be Best Picture, "12 Years a Slave" wins in Adapted Screenplay and I think: hmmh... maybe not?!
• Original Screenplay. The applause for Woody Allen seems very restricted. Hmmh. Spike Jonze wins, and this is when my twitter feed exploded: everyone I follow seemed to be so happy about this...

• "Saint Angie" and Sidney Poitier present "Best Director". It hurts to watch Poitier, but then for God's sake, the man is ninety years old! Don't blame him, blame the assholes who invited him!

• DDL presents the award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. There was a 98% chance Cate Blanchett would win this. Surprise surprise. Blanchett first thanks her fellow nominees. I found her tribute to Amy Adams, who was probably the closest to a real threat to her win, very nice. The others I found not so convincing. She gets thanking Woody out of the way rather quickly. Hmmh. Shoutouts to Australian talents (Yeah!) and women in Cinema (Yeah, too, but I hate that this is an issue! I am a man, I am heterosexual, and I feel accused of sexism by default without having done anything whenever this is brought up!)
   
  Best performance by an actress pretending to be genuinely happy for another actress winning: Amy Adams!
  
  Seriously, though, this wasn't the first time in this evening that I thought: Just how loveable and sweet is Amy Adams?! I have to see more movies with her! Though unlike with Jen, I'm not completely sure how happy she really was for Cate. It could have been just acting. I'm sure Jen didn't want to win it. I can't see how Amy wouldn't have wanted to win it, but who can blame her?

• Jennifer Lawrence presents the award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and the winner is: Texas T-Rex! Now this would have been the one category where an upset would have been totally possible. Matthew has won everything in the precursors, but still everyone except Bale seemed to have a realistic chance. But they just don't do it anymore. To my feeling, 2009, when Penn won while everybody was predicting Rourke, was the last time an upset happened. But maybe it wasn't really, since my research today has learned me Penn was the SAG winner that year. So this would make 2008 the last year with upsets, with Tilda over the universally predicted Cate, and Marion over the universally predicted Julie. And his speech... alright, alright, alright... okay, he left this for the end this time. But seriously. I found his Golden Globe speech horrendous already. I thought: okay, all stereotypes about Texans seem to be true... and the truth seems to be even worse than the stereotypes. But this time I thought: wait a minute... could it be that he is seriously mentally retarded??? Hmmh...
• Will Smith presents the award for best picture. To me that reads: Will Smith, who just received two well-deserved Razzie Awards less than 24 hours ago. Nice job, Academy, really. "12 Years a Slave" wins. Splendid. Brad Pitt can finally call himself an Oscar winner now, though not for acting. If Clooney deserves it, Brad deserves it a dozen times!