In Lehmann's Terms: Dead-Blogging the Academy Awards

What’s that, you ask? Well, if live-blogging involves running a real-time stream of observation during some or other event to best preserve that “you are there” sense of immediacy….then this is the precise opposite of that. This is jotting down some notes during the awards, fucking off for the night, and then proceeding to spend a couple days at health insurance conferences before realizing “oh yeah, now that everyone’s good and over it already, I should probably blog something about the Oscars.”

So, here goes:

Stewart seemed to be off to a slow start, but I mostly blame the audience. Back on his home turf that "night of 1,000 sweatpants" bit would have KILLED. But here in La-La-Land, the second commandment is “Thou shalt not mock fashion.” (Of course, the first commandment, as Chris Rock learned last year, is “Thou shalt not mock Jude Law.”)
The Dick Cheney-Bjork joke seems to have won back the crowd. Too bad it stinks of Bruce Vilanch.
Awww, c’mon, George. I give you a pass from the Bill O’Reilly pile-ons because, unlike most Hollywood lefties, you get the sense that you can actually laugh at yourself. Plus, you’ve generally shown good taste in scripts. But this is pure horseshit. “We are the ones who talked about AIDS when it was only being whispered.” Oh really? When was that, exactly? The first Hollywood movie about AIDS that I can recall was Philadelphia, which was in, what, 1993? Yeah, you guys were real trail-blazers there. Lord knows no one was prepared to talk about AIDS out in mainstream America two years after Magic Johnson was diagnosed, and almost 10 years after Ryan White died.
Good to see they’ve put the ixnay on last year’s nonsense of giving out the technical awards to folks sitting in the audience, as if to underscore that these folks just aren’t pretty enough to share a stage with the glitterati.
Yay, Wallace & Gromit! Yay, big fugly bow ties! (A brief aside – I recently bought The Curse of the Were-Rabbit on DVD, along The Aristocrats. The check-out gal at Best Buy remarked that, while both of those titles had been popular, she never thought she’d see someone buy them both in the same trip.)
It’s official. Dolly Parton has morphed into Howard the Duck.
Chicken Little and Buck Cluck? Is this a set-up for another Dick Cheney joke? How do two characters from a kiddie flick that totally tanked at the B.O. make it onto the Oscar tele…. oh… yeah, that’s right …ABC ….Disney …never mind.
Oh, come on, that Scientology joke pwned! What do these humorless dickwads know from funny? They deserve their Billy Crystal and their goddamn Whoopi. Fuck that, they deserve muthafucking Nathan Lane!
The non-nude Rachel McAdams proves her status as this year’s “it” girl by hosting the Scientific and Technical Achievement Awards. A.k.a., the Nerdscars. In the caste system of the Academy Awards, these guys are the untouchables. Forget accepting an award out in the wings, they don’t even get a ticket to the show! They have their awards handed out two weeks ahead of time in a Holiday Inn conference center out in the Valley somewhere. But as a token of appreciation, the Academy dispatches whatever young starlet seems to be an up-and-comer that given year to both host the ceremony and give the nerds a mental image to wack off to for the rest of their lives.
Usually, being tapped for the honor is a pretty darned good sign for one’s career trajectory, but there have been a few odd clunkers in there. For instance, the last eight Nerdscars hosts have been: Rachel McAdams, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Garner, Kate Hudson, Charlize Theron, Renée Zellweger, Salma Hayek, and….Anne Heche. Yeah, the guys were pretty pissed THAT year, I bet.
Lauren Bacall…just, yikes. Awwwwwwkward….
Holy shit, what have they been feeding J-Lo to make her turn that shade of terra cotta?
The Lily Tomlin-Meryl Streep tribute to Robert Altman proves to be the first truly inspired bit of the night. Which means, of course, that it’s flown clear over the heads of most of those watching.
Ahh, yes, Stephen Colbert doing fake campaign ads, of which he is the kung-fu master.
“And none of those issues were ever a problem again." Hee!
This is about the eighth time tonight the Academy is blowing pro-theatre, anti-video and DVD propaganda up our collective butts. And they choose to do this by running montages of clips from movies that no one this side of Larry King is old enough to have ever seen on anything BUT video and DVD.
Penguins and frogs, perfect together. But then they cut to a shot of Morgan Freeman standing in the wings looking flummoxed, like he really wants to join them on stage but isn’t sure if he has permission.
I don’t know anything about sound mixing or sound editing, or what really separates the one from the other. What I do know is that I walked out of War of the Worlds having no strong opinion on the film whatsoever other than “Those sound effects were awesome!” Since this had previously happened in approximately zero out of infinity situations, if that film doesn’t deserve either of these two awards, then let’s just stop handing them out.
Three-6 Mafia reenact the “Satan’s Alley” showstopper from the credit that Sly Stallone would most like scrubbed clean from his curriculum vitae – the doomed Tony Manero sequel Stayin’ Alive. But with more hos.
So it’s about two hours into the show, and I feel like something should have happened by now. Something compelling, or interesting, or embarrassing, or...I don't know. Something where people talked and moved around in front of a camera and it was entertaining.
Wow, let’s hear it for Jennifer Garner getting the absolute MOST out of her post-pregnancy body changes. Enjoy them while they last, cuz then it’s back to the Itty Bitty Tittie Committee for you.
I didn’t see Capote, and what bits I have seen in clips make me think this is not up to P.S. Hoffman’s usual caliber of work. But just like Denzel and Paul Newman and countless others, I’m willing to chalk it up to a make-up prize for all the times he should have won, and didn’t. And there’s no other actor I think would be better suited to play me, when my biopic gets optioned.
The cameras are focused intently on Ryan Phillippe during Reese Witherspoon’s acceptance, almost like they’re pre-emptively setting up for a Chad Lowe-style snub. Alas, she remembered, robbing all us fans of shadenfreude.
There exists a parallel universe where the 19-year-old Uma Thurman thought she was too serious an actress to flash her tits in Dangerous Liaisons. And in that universe, she can be seen regularly in late night commercials imporing you to "call now," because she's "lonely" and "waiting to talk to you."
And playing the role of Jack Nicholson tonight will be…Jack Nicholson.
Crash wins. Paul Haggis quotes Bertold Brecht. Interesting choice.

Not sure I see what the fuss is about the win. Crash and King Kong were the only two of the nominated pics I saw this year, and I thought Crash was, though not a perfect film by any means, certainly deserving of recognition. Am I seeing a vase where really there's just two faces? Could Brokeback be THAT much better? It doesn't seem likely.

Anyway, the film I thought clearly was the best of 2005 was A History of Violence, and that hardly got nominated for anything at all.

Get over it, folks. Crash was a hell of a lot better than Chicago, Gladiator, or The English Patient, yet I don't recall anyone storming the barricades when those pieces of shit won.