Just finished watching the Oscars my way, which is to fast-forward through a lot of the festivities. To those of you complaining the show was long: It's supposed to be long. Commercial rates are astronomical and the network and Academy want to sell a lot of them. Next year, try watching it the way I do.
Neil Patrick Harris did fine, I thought…though at the moment all anyone on the 'net seems to be discussing is the bit with him in his underwear. That's a tough room joke-wise and I doubt anyone else could have done much better in that capacity. The opening number was fine, considering there's never anything to say in those things besides, "Hey, movies are great!" (Wanna read the lyrics to the tune, which was written by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, who did the songs for Frozen? Here they are.)
I liked his magic trick — the predictions in the briefcase — and I think I've figured out how it was done. But I'm not 100% certain…and no, I won't tell you my theory.
I made three predictions myself and got five right…though some were pretty obvious. So was the reason Michael Keaton didn't win. They disqualified him because every time he was on camera, he was chewing gum.
Also, I correctly predicted that there would be jokes about the whiteness of the nominees (again, obvious) and I guess I predicted that Idina Menzel would come out and maul John Travolta's name. Again, there weren't a lot of surprises. And oh, yeah: People on the web are complaining that Joan Rivers (who didn't make very many movies) didn't make the obit reel. Neither did Carla Laemmle, which surprised me more. I suppose the tribute to Joan was all the bitchy comments on Twitter about what everyone was wearing.
I thought he'd try something to out-Tweet the star-studded selfie pic that Ellen DeGeneres took last year. After I wrote that, I saw a couple of online articles that said something of the sort was planned. Either the articles were wrong or it got dropped. I was thinking it would be neat to pass a special Smartphone around during the show and give everyone in the first ten rows a chance to take one of themselves and have it instantly posted to some Twitter account.
All in all, a decent show. I've already seen some reviews saying it was a disaster and I think these people are expecting the Academy Awards to be something it can never be. Some were complaining about who won as if the producers of the telecast could have arranged for different names in the envelopes or more interesting songs to be nominated. There were a lot of good films this year but I didn't get that any performers were sentimental or emotional favorites. Again, not the fault of the producers of the program…but for some viewers, it seems like the best thing about the Oscars is complaining about them.