Oscar Wrap-Up

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Well, that was all quite anti-climatic. A bit less than a year of following the wires, watching the contenders, and forming opinions built up to a crescendo that was ultimately predestined. Here's the Good, the Bad, the Ugly for the 83rd Academy Awards.

The Good

The spread of awards ended up being quite democratic. Two films (Inception and The King's Speech) won 4 awards, The Social Network won 3, and three other films won 2 Oscars apiece. It's hard to quibble too much with any of the awards leading up to the end. I was very happy to see Reznor and Ross win for their excellent score for The Social Network and Inception heartily deserved the technical category wins it got.

The Bad

Even with the awards spread, this will still go down as the year that The King's Speech took some awards from far stronger contenders. Let me state this right here, I don't hate that film. I think that its legion of fans is entitled to their opinion and I have to respect the film's producers, the Weinsteins, for consistently being able to bend the opinion of voters to their will.

I'm going to leave Best Picture out of this, because this is the category where short-sighted historical decisions get consistently made, and it's not like it was much of a surprise this year. What I do think stunk to high heaven was Tom Hooper's win for Best Director. He is a talented director, and I'm looking forward to future efforts, but he is no David Fincher. This is the same body that never awarded Kubrick or Hitchcock for direction, and while Fincher isn't at their heights it's ridiculous that he'll have to keep making superior films and lose to inferior talent time and again until he gets his "overdue" award a la Scorcese. Nowhere do the broken politics of the Oscar process show through more than this category.

The Ugly

The show itself was just, well, ugly. The Oscars seem dead set against ever letting a pure comedian host again, probably to avoid having their delicate sensibilities offended. I didn't hate the idea of James Franco and Anne Hathaway hosting, although I was a bit confused by how they got the gig.

However, it became apparent right from the less than funny, trying too hard opening skit that this wasn't going to be all that good. About the time that Hathaway sung a song to Hugh Jackman and Franco appeared in drag with a highly disinterested look on his face I knew that it wasn't going to get any better.

Considering the vast array of talent to choose from year to year to do the hosting duties, you'd think they could have come up with somebody with a little more experience and inherent comic skill. Maybe they will next year.