Oscar recap 2015
The Academy Awards telecast passed the first test of the night. Every year I quietly demand to see Charlie Chaplin's image on screen within the first ten minutes of the show, and last night I did-- during Neil Patrick Harris' opening musical number.But then the musical number is all we got from Harris. There were no jokes in the first act, and then only some lame ones to follow (Harris: You could eat Reese Witherspoon up "with-her-spoon." Wow.) I shouldn't have expected many gems. Harris isn't a comic. He's a song-and-dance man. If a category is required. He's the breakout star of Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. His two big jokes on Oscar night were walking on stage in his underwear and a running gag about his Oscar predictions that led to a confusing payoff. You hire the Tonys, you get the Tonys.
David Letterman, Chris Rock, Jon Stewart, and Seth MacFarlane each gave us something edgy. Ricky Gervais might give us something really edgy. (It's worth finding out, in any case.) Harris tried to be edgy. Once. Less than a minute after Laura Poitras, producer and director of CITIZENFOUR, walked off with an Oscar for the most dangerous and important documentary in decades, Harris cracked that the subject of her film, Edward Snowden, couldn't be in attendance "for some treason." Nobody in "liberal" Hollywood seems to have had a problem with that joke, but MacFarlane will never be invited back because he sang a song in 2013 called "We Saw Your Boobs."
Harris also delivered the lowest ratings for the annual telecast in six years, the lowest since Harris' Broadway comrade, Hugh Jackson, hosted. (Who's left to host the Tonys?) This year's show should have even had the ratings advantage of having breakout Middle American hit, American Sniper, nominated in multiple categories.
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In other news Oscar, Sniper tanked it big. Clint Eastwood's film spread the message that Islamophobia is justified, that places other than the United States don't matter, and it turns out that there are a lot of Academy members that come from places other than the United States.
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I love Joan Rivers, but her absence from the "In Memoriam" segment is not a scandal. She had almost no presence in movies. Her "red carpet" show had everything to do with fashion, and nothing to do with movies. A legitimate scandal is still Gene Siskel being omitted from the video tribute in 1999. An academy spokesperson explained at the time that Siskel "did not work in the film industry." Uh huh. Luckily, Whoopi Goldberg was there to save the day.
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The nominated songs, and their performances were great. All of the music was. John Legend and Common, Tim McGraw honoring Glen Campbell, Lego madness, and Lady Gaga surprising me for roughly the thousandth time this year.
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Every time Orange is the New Black gets overly-praised at a television awards show, it's another slap in the face of the show it's shamelessly stealing from-- HBO's Oz, the pay network's first-ever hour-long drama that aired from 1997-2003. Before OITNB gave us violence, homosexuality, drug use, institutional corruption, ethnic and religious conflict behind bars, Oz gave it to us in precisely the same serio-comic tone. So it's nice to see J.K. Simmons, Oz's big bad-- the white supremacist Vern Schillinger, claim an Oscar win. The academy loved watching Simmons emotionally abuse young jazz musicians this year in Whiplash, but I promise you that it was nothing compared to the shit Schillinger did to Tobias Beecher.
posted by CM @ 8:40 PM
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