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| Well, at least he's not Jimmy Kimmel. |
There’s no way around this fact: the 2013 Oscars were weird.
Seth McFarland said he honestly could not believe that he was there. No could, Seth, no one.
The Oscars have a "Theme" this year? What is this? The Rose Parade? This year’s theme was "Music in Film." What will next year’s be? "Progress Through Advancement"? "Vegetables: the Entré’s Poor Relations"? "Semi-Universal Brotherhood"? "Victory Through Airpower"?
The reason almost no one laughed at the idea of Ron Jeremy being offered the Oscar Host gig (which is a pretty funny idea) wasn’t that no one there knew who he is; it’s that no one there would admit they know who he is.
Could Jean Dujardin be any more gorgeous? I don’t see how.
You know, many of Seth’s jokes were funny and yet failed to land. It’s the smugness. His smirky smugness makes you want to punch him, not laugh with him. "I’m told it’s okay for Quentin Tarantino to use [the n-word] because he thinks he’s black" is a terrific joke. It fell with a thud, and provoked not even a single mild titter in the entire audience. Seth is so amused by his own jokes before he even tells them that no one feels like laughing afterwards. On SNL and again here, he’s proved to be a disaster as a host.
Captain Kirk asking "Why can’t Tina and Amy host every show?" was supposed to be a joke, but frankly, it’s no joke. They should.
Why does Captain Kirk look 20 years older than he did when he died in Star Trek: Generations?
The Gay Men’s Chorus singing about lady’s boobs? What’s next? Mel Gibson judging on RuPaul’s Drag Race? Did they know what the song was about, or were they singing it the way they would sing a song written in Latin? Did the Superbowl halftime show include a "Guess Which Player’s Package This Is" quiz where they projected close-ups of the player’s crotches in wet jockstraps while gay football fans (all 3 of them) try to guess whose junk is whom?
Seth, you are not Steve Martin, you’re not Fred Astaire, and you’re not Lenny Bruce, but you may be turning into the American Ricky Gervais. (Three years ago, that was a compliment. This is not three years ago.)
Best Supporting Actor was a hell of a category. All five nominees already have Oscars. Was Tommy Lee Jones up for Best Supporting Toupee?
With his now-second Oscar, do you think Christophe Waltz could afford to buy an "r" for his first name?
Paul Rudd and Melissa McCarthy joking about how their phones are not ringing with job offers, when they are both working non-stop, and her movie is in its second week at #1, must have played as downright hilarious to the thousands of actually-unemployed actors watching at home.
Not one of the nominees for Best Animated Feature were traditional hand-drawn animation. Am I the last person in the world who loves hand-drawn animation? The award went to Brave. Yawn. I’d have preferred Frankenweenie, but I’m just that type of person.
So Mark Andrews, who directed Brave, "just happened" to be wearing a dress? He didn’t know he was going to the Oscars? Did he dress in the dark and accidentally put on his wife’s clothes? (Look, Little Dougie is Scottish, and is mildly unembarrassed to be descended from a proud race of transvestites.) Mark mentioned his wife and four kids, which is understandable when accepting an award on international TV in drag.
So why wasn’t the tiger in Life of Poi nominated for Best Performance by a Big Pussy? They nominated that little Wallis girl. (Who is also CGI.)
How does Claudio Miranda, winner of Best Cinematographer for The Life of Cake, see well enough to light and photograph a movie with his blanket of hair in his face? If he took off 50 pounds I’d have thought he was Ann Coulter. (Claudio, it turns out, is not into completing his sentences. His speech consisted of a rambling stack of half-sentences, all abandoned mid-clause.)
Someone tell me, because I’m too lazy to Google it: is Claudio Miranda the first person to win a Cinematography Oscar for photographing a 3-D movie?
Life of Pudding won Best Special Effects over The Hobbit? They stuck Siegfried & Roy’s act adrift (good idea) and stirred in a lot of religious faith bullshit and psychedelic imagery that would have gone over great in front of a 1968 LSD-besotted audience of hippies, and that trumps bringing Tolkien’s gigantic fantasy world to life in 48 fps 3-D so well you felt you could touch it? Not to me. They made a fake tiger. I’m impressed. Where’s their army of goblins? Where’s their Smaug the Dragon? Where are the mines of Moria or Rivendell? Where are the armies of Mordor?
At least they admitted that most of what you saw in Life of Equals Sign (Assuming you were one of the ten or twenty folks who saw it) was "fake" That sort of nullifies its Cinematography award. "Gee, he really transferred those images directly off the computer onto film well." Shouldn’t Life of Infinity have been Nominated for Best Animated Feature? Or was it afraid of taking on Frankenweeie?
Wow! The effects team for Life of Cherry Tarts received the strictest "play-off" I’ve ever seen. When Bill Westenhofer simply would not stop talking, but just got louder and louder, they sent the shark from Jaws to eat his voice! They cut his mike off just as soon as he mentioned co-workers in "Financial Difficulties." Can’t have any reminders that not everyone in Hollywood is rich and successful spoiling the evening. Eat his tongue!
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| "GET OFF THE STAGE, BLABBERMOUTH!" |
Channing Tatum presenting Best Costumes? That’s ironic. The man should not be allowed to wear costumes, or anything at all.
Just once I’d like to see a contemporary-set film nominated for Best Costumes. It went to Anna Karanina. Well, I must admit, Garbo did look stunning in that movie, but what took them 78 years to get their award out?
Les Misérables won Best Make Up over The Hobbit? Hello? All they did was make everyone look filthy, and give a few of them horrific haircuts. Let me tell you, I know Barry Humphries, and he looks nothing like a giant goblin. And many of those dwarves, in real life, are not repulsive! Well, the guy who played Kili anyway.
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| Barry Humphires in character make up. |
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| Barry Humphries au natural. |
So far, Spielberg’s Lincoln sweep has been riveting!
Hallie Berry introducing the Bond tribute? How about a real Bond girl, like my friend, the divine Martine Beswick?
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| The Divine Martine Beswick, Bond Girl Extrodinaire, with Dougie, Little Dougie. |
Hey! What happened to the reunion of all the James Bonds we were promised?
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| Sir Sean, George, Rog, Tim, Pierce, and Danny. Give me the bookends; you can have the others. |
Even though Dame Shirley Bassey was severely out of voice, and did not sing Goldfinger anywhere near as well as her classic soundtrack recording of it from almost 50 years ago, nonetheless, I got chills when she came on and began to sing. And she found some of the old magic for her last big note.
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| "Bond, James Bond." Sir Sean creates the icon. |
The presenters for Best Short Subjects tried to tell us Spielberg started in short subjects. Spielberg started in TV. His 8mm juvenilia doesn’t count.
Seth apparently thought we would be surprised to learn that other actors had played Lincoln before, like we’ve never been to Disneyland. I remember having lunch in the Polo Lounge once, back in 1975, and seeing Raymond Massey walk in, slowly and majestically. He looked so much like the real Abe Lincoln had arrived for lunch, I found myself looking about for his Secret Service detail. (You’d think they’d learn.) Part of the effect came from the fact that Massey looked old enough to be the real Lincoln.
The orchestra is a mile away? Hello? Why? Were they bad? Boy, they must be playing LOUD!
Maybe that’s why Catherine Zita-Jones Douglas sang her song from Chicago flat. The number had nothing to do with handing out awards and only added to the running time, but it’s hard to complain about three minutes of actual entertainment, even if it was flat.
I could have done without Jennifer "I’m Sorry My Gay Fans Are All Going to Hell; It’s Not My Fault; I Don’t Make The Rules; God Does" Hudson shrieking that painfully overdone American Idol audition number at me. I could do without her on Smash also.
After Catherine’s slightly-off-key song and Jennifer Hudson screaming banalities at us, what a relief and joy it was to have Hugh Jackman walk out on stage (Okay, Hugh Jackman walking out on stage any where, any time, is a joy), singing a good song simply and beautifully. That it grew into Les Miz’s wonderful Act I finale only added to what was turning into a momentary evening highlight.
Well, it took balls for Russell Crowe to "sing" live on The Oscars. If only he could sing. They "compressed" the number a bit for time constraints (They needed more time for Seth’s jokes to bomb), which necessitated having Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham-Carter-Burton-LeStrange sing at the same time as Crowe rather than after, as in the full arrangement of the song. This helped to disguise the fact that none of that trio has any business singing anywhere but their own shower, and ONLY when showering alone.
Admittedly, live-mixing the sound on a complex number like that is tricky, which is why we heard way too much Russell Crowe (That would be any Russell Crowe) in the song’s final build. The wisest thing the sound mixer could have done would have been never to turn on Russell’s mike in the first place.
It was now clear that by "A Tribute to Film Music," they actually meant "A Tribute to John Williams’s Screen Music," as it was one John Williams cue after another. Hey Academy, ever hear of Max Steiner or Franz Waxman or Bernard Herrmann?
Gee, they had both Captain Kirks, the new one and the old, old one, on the show.
The teddy bear from Ted is just Seth McFarland’s voice over a bit of animation. Hardly seemed worth the effort. He’s standing right there, and his jokes still aren’t getting laughs.
Mark Whalberg looked crestfallen to announce a tie. Yes, Mark, how awful that more people get Oscars rather than fewer.
Why is it that every time I see Christophe (What’s good for the Nazi, is good for the guy who escaped the Nazis with his dreary singing moppets) Plummer, it seems like an ever-bigger pleasure? Is it the rising awareness of how few great performances we have left coming from him? Love you, Chris.
In Sally Fields’s "comedy" bit with Seth at the beginning of the show, about a year ago, she did a couple jokes that acknowledged that Anne Hathaway was going to beat her for their Oscar. If only she’d said: "Because they like her, they really, really like her." Anne was, needless to say, the least-surprising winner of the evening, save one.
Anne was trying to be classy, but an unfortunate accident of staging and angle as she expressed respect for the women she’d just trounced, caused her to say "I look up to you all so much," as she looked DOWN at them in the audience below her. I confess I giggled.
They seated some of the nominees this year in the stage boxes, but not Daniel Day-Lewis. They didn’t want to risk putting Abe Lincoln in a stage box again with so many actors on the premises. There was an ugly incident about 148 years ago.
Okay, there were three measures of Bernard Herrmann music when the wife of that American Idol judge came out.
What the hell is wrong with Kristen Stewart, apart from her taste in movie roles and men? She limped out like she’d been shot in the foot, her hair was a rat’s nest (Really, it looked as bad as Mitzi Shore’s hair), she had apparently been made up by a blind raccoon in the dark, and she stood in an awkward posture, and grunted loudly while Harry Potter read nominees. I thought they were setting up some lame comedy banter "bit," but no; it turned out she was trying to hide crutches behind her back. Apparently she injured herself when she fell out of public favor when it came out that she was a huge slut, even for Hollywood, and I speak as a huge slut myself. (And I've always had sense enough to use liquor as a crutch.) So it wasn't just her being graceless and sullen while upstaging the only actor of her generation whose movies have made more money than hers. She did not have to go to the bathroom, nor were the drugs wearing off early. What is the appeal of this ratbag? Admirable young Mr. Radcliffe deserved better than to have to present an award with Cedric Diggory’s hand-me-downs.
They gave the Production Design Award to Lincoln? Hello? I’m sure it recreated the Civil War nicely, and didn’t just use leftovers from Gone With The Wind, Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, and Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter, but in The Hobbit an entire world had to be created from scratch. It’s a vastly larger achievement. No wonder the winner was unprepared to speak. He never expected to win. (The cutaway shot during his speech to William Shatner asleep in his seat broke me up.)
Why was Life of Lemon Meringue even nominated for Production Design? All there was to design was a small boat, a large kitty and the ocean. That must have taken the better part of an hour.
Selma Hayek’s outfit was trying to strangle her. Don’t blame it a bit. She was announcing the "Not-Important-Enough-To-Be-Awarded-On-TV" awards. Since when is the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award swept off the TV awards? Has even Hollywood been so infected by the Ayn Rand craze among the Teabaggers that they’ve become embarrassed by philanthropy? Will it become "The Ayn Rand Sucker Award for Entitling The Largest Number of ‘Parasites’"?
It was nice that they included Herbert Lom and Ray Bradbury in the Dead Folks montage. Then they brought out Babs, to remind us that Death has an upside. (One can’t help wondering if Babs agreed to sing on the show just to show Dame Shirley Bassey that she, Babs, still has all her chops intact.) I’m no fan of Babs, but her singing Marvin’s song, and doing it so simply and so well, was a sweet moment, even if it made Marvin’s death look like the Academy considered him a greater loss than, well, Ray Bradbury, or Richard Zanuck, or Charles Durning, or even Robert B. Sherman and Hal David, both of whom made a fair penny with their ditties also.
When you've got a movie that pushes that most pernicious of human follies, Faith, you expect to hear blather like "A movie which transcends religion." Give me a movie that refutes religion, thank you. So I was unsurprised when that very blather came from Michael Danna as he accepted Best Score for Life of Pa. Consequently, when he pointed upward as he thanked "My mom, who’s ..." I was waiting for "with God" as one earlier winner had said of his dad (No, dear, he’s dead), or "In Heaven" or some other sort of magic thinking malarkey, so when he finally finished his phrase with "...who’s ... in the balcony here watching," I was surprised into laughing. His Mom isn’t with God, she’s with the paupers. Good for her.
It was starting to look like more of a Life of Pooh sweep than I - or Spielberg - ever expected. His smile was becoming more and more forced.
Two Oscars for Skyfall. It’s been 47 years since a Bond movie won Oscars. That’s a real tribute to Bond.
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| The reigning 007 reaches for his weapon. |
Adele darling, we adore you and all, so I say this with love, just one word: salads. (Where does that thick, unintelligible, working class accent of hers go when she sings?)
Was Charlize Theron on stilts or is Dustin Hoffman a hobbit?
Quentin Tarantino won the Original Screen-Writing award. I may vomit. I have no jokes to make about his speech because I fast-forwarded through it. I really can not stand that skin-crawly creep and his vastly-overpraised violence-porn trash films.
Tim Burton is doing commercials now? Tim darling, I know that neither Frankenweenie nor Dark Shadows did terribly well at the box office but come on, you can’t have spent all of that Alice in Wonderland money yet. For the record, I enjoyed both Dark Shadows and Frankenweenie. Not loved (Like I loved the original Frankenweenie live-action short subject), but liked. I didn’t want my money back either time, which is more than I can say for Spielberg’s Hook. (Two decades have passed, and I still want my money and the 150 minutes of my life spent on Hook back!) I’d take Burton’s worst over Tarantino’s best any day. (Though Tim still has penance to serve for what he did to Sweeney Todd.)
Jane Fonda, who is 300, looked stunning. As she walked out, you could hear Teabaggers and right-wingers changing channels all across America.
Well, between the way the evening had been going and the fact that neither Tom Hooper nor Ben Affleck were even nominated (A fact that grew more and more embarrassing as the evening went along and Les Misérables and Argo piled up awards while Silver Linings Playbook won only one, and Beasts of the Southern Wild was conspicuous by its not winning anything at all, in a year when a James Bond movie won two!), Ang Lee’s win for Life of Pu surprised no one but Spielberg, who may have spent more on his Lincoln Oscar campaigns than he did on the film itself, and the movie was pricey. Thank Hollywood Tarantino wasn’t nominated.
Someone tell me, as I’m too lazy to Google it (or write a truly fresh sentence about it), but is Ang Lee the first person to win an Oscar for directing a 3-D movie?
Did they give Ang Lee this Oscar because, after winning for Brokeback Mountain, at least this movie was about a boy learning to like and get along with a pussy?
You know, there’s something very cruel about dangling an Oscar before a 9 year-old child that she hasn't a chance in Hell of winning. Yes, we all need to learn to deal with disappointment and failure as we grow up, but having to deal with losing an Oscar at 9 is a bit more harsh than losing a little league game.
Seth introduces the overwhelmingly-charming, astronomically-gorgeous Jean Dujardin (The way the evening had been going, I caught myself almost saying "Jean Valjean"), he strolls out, my legs go all rubbery, and they cut to Kristen Stewart, who looked bored to the point of rudeness, and impatient to get back to whatever crackhouse she appears to have just crawled out of. I’ve woken up in gutters from a three-month-long drunken binge looking better than she did last night.
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| Kristen Stewart finally cheers up a bit at last night's Oscars. |
I wonder how Jean Dujardin, a genuine Frenchman, felt all evening long as several honors were given to a movie in which France is shown to be entirely populated by Australians and Britons.
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| If he got any more gorgeous,I'd explode. |
I’ve watched a number of Jean Dujardin films over the last year, since falling in love with him in The Artist: the hilarious spy spoofs OSS-117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and OSS-117: Lost in Rio (These are really funny movies. Trust me. See them. You’ll thank me), his oddball western comedy, Lucky Luke, and especially his bizarre, goofy and unique non-surfer surf comedy Brice de Nice (A very odd movie, but very, very funny), and even after all that Dujardin worship, his Best Actress presentation speech was still the most English I’ve ever heard out of him. I hope he’s learning English fast, because I want to start seeing him in movies without subtitles. He is terrific.
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| This movie is highly peculiar, but funny. |
Let me get this straight, Jennifer Lawrence starred in The Hunger Games, which was, among other things, a grueling physical ordeal involving lots of dangerous stunt work, but she can’t walk up on stage without falling on her face? There goes her image. The first actress in history to need a stunt double to collect her Oscar. (To be fair, she might just have fainted, which is understandable, given she was getting closer to Jean Dujardin, and also to the lesser experience of winning an Oscar. Dujardin could make me faint easily. In fact, on viewing the replay, I think she fell on her face deliberately just so Jean Dujardin would run over and rescue her, as he did. Smart girl.)
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| Jennifer Lawrence goes down for Jean Dujardin. Who can blame her? |
Daniel Day-Lewis won for playing Abe Lincoln, something a robot could do, in the process becoming the first actor with three Best Actor Oscars. That was the first sentence I wrote for this piece, hours and hours ago, so I’ve come full-circle. That’ll show Raymond Massey. He was merely nominated for playing Abe Lincoln. (Not that Fredric March won anything for his Jean Valjean, even a nomination. But then, he didn’t sing.) Meanwhile, Tom Hanks, with his paltry two Best Actor Oscars, is understudying the role of John Wilkes Booth. Meryl Streep merely said: "Men! Aren't they silly?"
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| Spielberg's Lincoln, Gore Vidal's Lincoln, or Disney's Lincoln? |
So Daniel Day-Lewis ended up being the funniest speaker all evening. How embarrassing for Seth. (And for me. I had to go back and remove a "Spielberg doing Lincoln as a musical" joke I had already put in earlier in this review. DOH! Thanks a lot, Danny boy!)
Seth felt Meryl Streep required no introduction (True), but Jack Nicholson needed a long list of his credits? Well then, why did Seth omit The Raven, with Jack Nicholson, Boris Karloff, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre? Now those are stars! In fact, I was married to at least one of them, maybe more.
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| Jack could be learning acting from Peter Lorre and Vincent Price, but there's a woman in the room, so he's a bit distracted. |
Boy, the White House Oscar Party looks like a bunch of overdressed stiffs. Who were those Gilbert & Sullivan Lesbian Major-Generals standing behind Mrs. Obama? I thought we’d stumbled onto a Fire Island production of H.M.S. Pinafore. Well, at that point, the show had only run overtime by 24 minutes, so they needed more pointless filler before everyone could hit the bar.
They did not trust the First Lady of the United States of America with The Envelope until the last second? The woman knows state secrets. I’ve seen them give those envelopes to Andy Dick and Robert Blake.
Argo. So the Best Picture was directed in such a lousy manner that its director wasn’t even nominated. Weird year, to put it mildly.
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| The crappy director of the Best Picture. |
On The Emmys as hosted by Neal Patrick Harris (to inexplicable overpraise), they’ve instituted a monumentally bad idea, finales. For some reason they've stuck in a funny song after the last award two years running, unseen by millions of viewers in the bathroom, the kitchen and the bar, and The Emmys only tend to run four or five minutes over. This year The Oscars picked up on this monumentally terrible idea and upped the "Bad Idea" anté by tacking on a finale to a show that had already run over by a full half hour, and then including in it that odious Chenowith creature, whom I guess got out of her evil church early enough to get to the theater.
Pay attention, Award show producers. After three and a half hours of bloated blather and butt-kissing, all ANYONE wants is to hit the bar, the winners to celebrate, the losers to drown their sorrows (Quvenzhane Wallis had finished every last drop in her hip flask and needed some more vodka NOW!), and the neutral parties to start having some fun. NO ONE wants another 5 minutes in their seats while Seth and The Chenowith Creature indulge themselves. Just say "Thank you and good night," and then shut up and go away!
So what did we learn from this year’s Oscars? Well, after looking at Hugh Jackman, Ben Affleck, George Clooney, Jean Dujardin and Abe Lincoln, beards are back! It used to be that the beards at the Oscars all wore dresses and wedding rings. No wonder Little Dougie has stopped shaving.
Cheers, darlings.
Want some more Tallulah to read? Buy a copy of her new book, Tallyho, Tallulah! You’ll laugh a lot more than you did at Seth!
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