Oscar Aftermath
The Oscars are over and I managed to stay awake for most of the program. Every year I rationalize the value of staying up well beyond my bedtime on a Sunday night just to watch the glorification of Hollywood. As usual I have not seen most of the movies nominated for awards in 2008. Adam and I often rent the award winning movies after the fact and find ourselves disappointed. Oscar winners in the past few years have been artsy (in a strange way) or politically motivated (can we say Al Gore?). I thought the program last night was a little dry. Jon Stewart delivered some funny lines but he seemed nervous starting out. I would be too. Adam entertained us reading Oscar related Twitter comments, especially of women swooning over Javier Bardem.
I am pleased that two of my picks won an Oscar. Diablo Cody, writer of Juno, won for best original screenplay. (Watch an interview of Cody here.) In my opinion Ellen Page deserved an award too. I also picked the winner of best original song, Falling Slowly, by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová from the film Once. Once is a like-able film (a modern musical of sorts) made even more impressive by the fact that Hansard and Irglová wrote twelve of the thirteen original songs from the soundtrack. Hansard and Irglová are in fact musicians and not trained actors. The film was shot in seventeen days on a budget of $160,000. Jon Stewart gets props for allowing Irglová to have a second chance at the microphone after time ran up before she got an opportunity to give her acceptance speech. It was one of the finer moments of the evening. I would love to see more of these kinds of films in the Oscar runnings for 2009.
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