I was a little concerned during parts of the show that it was going to be swept up by The Aviator, it seemed like just about every category was going to something from that movie. It is understandable since it is such a great film, but the competition for awards this year included an unusually high number of great films. The Aviator, Million Dollar Baby, Finding Neverland, and Ray all deserved the Best Picture Oscar, for example. And so did Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, by the way. Here's an interesting little factoid Eternal Sunshine received six times as many votes by IMDb users for Best Picture than The Aviator!
Chris Rock delivered a completely unexciting performance as probably the most anticipated host the Academy Awards has seen in years, at least in terms of the potential for controversy. People were afraid he was going to do something obscene or vulgar, and all he did was get up there and make a lot of bland, dumb jokes like so many others before him. He had some moments, but I know that he is a much, much funnier man than the one we saw during the show. For much of the second half he seemed to disappear completely.
Pierce Brosnan was the only person forced to announce an award winner alongside a wildly unamusing animated cohost, which was one of the options that the IMDb gave in a daily poll that asked what event would make you immediately turn off the show. Interestingly enough, another option was if someone referred to Million Dollar Baby as some gigantic cliché like "a knockout," which strikes me as funny now because, in announcing the winners, the quote on the IMDb home page is "With a one, two, three punch Million Dollar Baby proved to be the one, the darling of the Academy as Clint Eastwood's boxing drama put the competition out for the count." Clever.
I was glad to see Eternal Sunshine awarded in the Best Screenplay category, although I think it deserved more. I also agreed with most of the main acting categories, which is rare, although I was surprised that Jamie Foxx won Best Actor, I was sure he was going to win Best Supporting Actor for Collateral, if only because I really think Don Cheadle deserves an Oscar for his performance in Hotel Rwanda, which was brilliant all around. But Foxx delivered an astonishing performance in Ray as well, and it was also good to see Morgan Freeman recognized for his work in Million Dollar Baby.
Troy should have won costume design over The Aviator, The Passion of the Christ should have won Best Makeup over A Series of Unfortunate Events, I, Robot should have won over Spiderman 2 for Visual Effects, and I really think SuperSize Me should have won Best Documentary, although I haven't seen any of the other nominees, so what do I know. These are just a few categories that I had other opinions on, but I really had a problem with the Best Foreign Film category this year. I haven't seen any of the films in the category, so I won't say that they don't deserve to have been nominated. I'm sure they do, in fact. But here are a few films that not even recognized Hero, The Motorcycle Diaries, and Maria Full of Grace. What is that? The Motorcycle Diaries certainly deserved much more than recognition than Best Original Song. Catalina Sandina Moreno was at least nominated for Best Actress, but how about Hero for Cinematography or Art Direction? Anyone with me on this?
Oh, that's right. The Motorcycle Diaries wasn't exactly a foreign film, and Hero was originally released in 2002. But still.
Ah, nobody cares. The winners won and that's the end of it, I'm just another in an endless line of people who have to rant and rave about how it should have gone. But I should mention that while I disagreed with some of the awards this year, it's like that any year and I think that all of the winners this year deserved the Oscars that they were awarded. There were just so many other films and people that deserved so much more than they got. Just see them all, that's my solution.
