Hollywood Love Fest - The 82nd Annual Academy Awards

It was fun to watch the 82nd Academy Awards and once again see all the beautiful people kick up their heels and throw their annual shindig. I thought Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin did a great job co-hosting, and for me, it was fun to see a Hollywood sacred cow like good old democratic socialist Ed Asner in the crowd, as well as an old timer like Christopher Plummer there as a nominee, even if he did not get his due. Christoph Waltz was a difficult actor to beat, I suppose.

I love the work of cinematographer, Robert Richardson, especially when he was working with Oliver Stone. He was hard to miss tonight sitting behind Quentin Tarantino with his trademark long hair and beard, now snow white, looking like a character in a kung fu movie, the old man from the mountain. He was nominated for best cinematographer for Inglourious Basterds. (I have to get the spelling right on Inglourious and Basterds!)

I was happy to see a young, acoustic guitar-strumming song writer like Ryan Bingham win the Oscar for Best Song for the theme song from Crazy Heart. He went from rodeo cowboy breaking bones riding bulls and living in his pickup truck to Oscar winner in a few short years. He paid his dues and came up the hard way. I bet his life story would make a great movie.

Quentin Tarantino did not look too happy when Mark Boal won for Best Original Screenplay. QT’s script was definitely original, but too silly, I think, to win the top screenwriting honor, and had too much white space.

There is no way any director other than James Cameron should have won for Best Director. The dedication, innovation and persistence behind Avatar cannot be equaled for a long time to come. I guess The Academy thought the time had come for a woman to win Best Director. So be it. I loved Strange Days and Point Break, by the way, both directed by Kathryn Bigelow, but no way The Hurt Locker was better directed than Avatar.

And The Hurt Locker wins Best Picture? There is like no way! James Cameron was robbed, probably by the military industrial complex and the necessary glorification of the war. I actually fell asleep at the theater watching the last twenty minutes of The Hurt Locker, but I was wide awake at the climactic ending of Avatar. The Hurt Locker was a propaganda snooze fest compared to Avatar. I know a lot of film purists and Cameron haters didn’t want to see a special effects-heavy production like Avatar win, but the movie is way too grand and magnificent to be overlooked. What a travesty! Plus it has almost grossed a billion dollars domestically! Let’s face it, it’s entertaining. Oh well, it’s not the first time a movie or director has been robbed at the Oscars. I’m sure it won’t be the last. Just look at Martin Scorsese and Raging Bull. Movies are so much fun to watch when they are good, and good is such a relative term when it comes to cinema and the Academy of Motion Pictures. An audience is a fickle thing.

We place actors on such pedestals, and make them into demi-gods, yet they are for the most part normal people who just happen to have a cool job. Just for an instant tonight watching the Academy Awards I thought I was watching an homage to great statesmen or perhaps the scientist who invented the cure for polio, not a bunch of people playing house and cowboys and Indians. I have to admit, I loved every minute of it. As an industry, cinema has only been around for a little over one hundred years. That’s the blink of an eye in historic terms. I hope I’m around long enough to see many more movies and many more innovations.