For the first time in years I watched the Academy Awards program from end to end. It was the same as I had remembered it: completely lame. At least we’ve determined one thing definitively. Neil Patrick Harris is unable to sing. As my wife put it why does every gay guy think he can do musical comedy?
The good news is that there were no musical numbers choreographed by Debbie Allen.
On the hosting the combination of Steve Martin and Alex Baldwin was not particularly felicitous. Two funny guys does not twice as funny make. There was no straight man. Or there were two straight men. Was it Ed Wynn who said “A comic says funny things, a comedian says things funny”? By that standard Steve Martin is a comic or, said another way, I think he’s a lot better with his own material than he is with the restrictive, dumb stuff they came up with for him.
I now wish that I’d published my predictions for the awards. I called every single major award correctly although I did think that Avatar would take home more of the technicals than it actually did. This is, perhaps, another way of saying that the awards were completely predictable and unsurprising. Precious won for writing and Mo’nique’s performance; Sandy Bullock won at the same point in her career and for the same reasons as Julia Roberts did for Erin Brockovich;Hurt Locker won for direction and picture. It was nearly all the favorites.
With any luck next year I’ll remember and resist watching more strongly.
I don’t think it’s fair to judge Neil Patrick Harris’s singing ability against a terrible song that was all over the place, tune-wise. The man’s a Tony-award winner for musicals, for Pete’s sake. He’s got a great voice. But even a great voice sounds terrible when it’s forced to sing a lousy song.
Shouting is not singing.
It’s no shocker that The Hurt Locker took home the “Best Picture” award. War movie with limited appeal?* Relatively low-budget production? Limited theatrical release, at least initially? That’s more or less a recipe for blatant Oscar Bait.
Sorry, forgot to add the “*” part:
* War movies focusing on the recent conflicts don’t tend to do so well financially.