Weighing in on the Oscars

Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey in DALLAS BUYERS CLUB
Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey in DALLAS BUYERS CLUB

Yeesh, what a bore – and I used to LIVE for the annual Oscar show.

There were heartfelt and classy moments from Jared Leto, Lupita Nyong’o and Bill Murray.  Jamie Foxx added some unscripted foolery and Best Song winners Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez delivered a clever rhyming acceptance.  That was it – five worthwhile moments in a three-hour drudge through self-congratulation and scary cosmetic surgery.

How does one celebrate our most vivid, immediate and accessible art form and make our eyes glaze over?  Apparently, the most effective means is to devote a fifth of the telecast to live musical performances, mostly from the worthless Best Song category.  This show is supposed to be about cinema, not the mediocre songs that dot a few of the films.  Wasting yet more screen time with Twitter jokes didn’t help.  They’ve also sucked the pathos out of the In Memoriam montage, which has generally been my favorite part of the show.

As to the winners themselves? They all seemed deserving to me.  I would have preferred The Act of Killing to win Best Documentary and Before Midnight to win Best Original Screenplay, but there weren’t any forehead-slapping boners this year.  12 Years a Slave is undeniably a fine film, but I don’t know many folks who will actually ENJOY the two-and-a-half hours of unremitting brutality before Brad Pitt shows up in an Amish beard.

Bottom line: good year for the awards and bad year for the award show.

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