Is anyone else overwhelmed by the amount of whining and nitpicking over the Oscar ceremony?
It starts with complaining about what the women are wearing, and goes on to complaining about each speech, the politics (from both the left and right), the bad jokes, how x didn’t deserve the award, how the stirring emotional statement by a winner is evil because of something mentioned in passing (or not mentioning something else) etc. And, of course, all the variations on “the host sucked this year.”* It’s like sharks tearing into raw meat.
Look, folks. It’s an award show. The most deserving winner in your eyes often doesn’t win. People overwhelmed by the honor make ad libbed speeches and blurt out things that don’t sound so good when replayed and analyzed hundreds of times. The Academy doesn’t “snub” anyone; they just decide that someone else was better.
Other than the general snarkiness of the Internet, I don’t see the point.
*Well, Neil Patrick Harris was nowhere near his best, but there have been far worse. James Franco, I’m looking at you (but not Anne Hathaway, who was forced into a role she was unused to and got no support at all from Franco).
No, I’m not overwhelmed because nobody makes me watch it. I don’t watch the red carpets, I DVR and then fast forward through the show and then I don’t read much of post show breakdown.
It’s really not that hard to avoid if it isn’t your bag.
In all the complaining, (which I agree has risen to new heights!),(I didn’t watch it! Just caught random bits of a few moments only.), I’m a little surprised that I have heard not a single voice speak to the whole make up issue.
They all looked incredibly overly made up to me. Like their make up had been applied with a freaking trowel. I get that it’s a big night and they want to look flawless, but they’ve crossed into not looking human, to me. They look like mannequins or creepy dolls. The eye make up alone was jaw dropping. Who WANTS to look like that?
I hope at some future date some starlet, in an urge to stand out, steps back from the mega make up look, and successfully draws the spotlight by looking strikingly real!
They all seemed like Kim Kartrashian knock offs, at least the few ones I did see. Everywhere you look this overly, overly made up look seems extremely popular. Not to me though, ick!
The thing that irritates me no end about this years Oscars is the dildoes who are going around complaining that Joan Rivers (whom I love) wasn’t mentioned/honored.
Uh, give me a break, please.
While I’m not complaining, that DOES strike me as a little odd. I mean, she died last year, and it’s not like she’d never been in movies. I’m curious about the reasoning, when they’re listing random marketing execs who no one has ever heard of in the “list of talent who passed on this year”
The fact is that it’s hard to put on a 3-hour show where less than 1/3 of the two dozen winners are even remotely household names. This means you need to add a lot of production or “entertainment” value to keep people’s attentions and that is no mean feat.
Does it run long? Yes. Are some segments in poor taste? Invariably. Will you encounter pointless digressions? Probably. Welcome to the Oscars. I thought NPH was fine–not great, not apocalyptic, just fine and good-natured with some great moments and some clunkers. Pretty much par for the course for what has to be one of the most thankless gigs in the entertainment industry anywhere.
It seems the issue was she was not a member of the academy, apparently. They did memorialize her on their web page however, along with some others, I believe!
I am kind of fed up with the groaning over the use of Ruby’s costume Storm Troopers during one of the NPH musical numbers instead of a screen accurate version, myself. Yes, people are complaining about this.
Not really. There are plenty of directors and artists from foreign countries memorialized every year, virtually none of them Academy members. I highly doubt Alain Resnais was one, for example, but he (quite deservedly) got included this year.
I think the truth is that while she was part of the tradition of Oscar, she was not in any way a significant part of the filmmaking industry. Her significant contributions to comedy and television are beyond dispute, but her filmography itself is negligible. Would it have been nice to include her? Sure. But there were far more important names within film history who were left out. Here’s a list that includes Joan, but plenty of others quite more notable if you’re a cinephile.
What annoys me with this is that what they usually mean is “The jokes sucked” and they forget that the whole thing had a team of writers to come up with jokes. They don’t just send NPH out there and tell him to wing it.
I’d say if the host lacks the sense to read the jokes in advance and insist that new writers be hired if they aren’t up to snuff, then, yeah, the host sucks.
Er, that’s the entire point of the two or three “red carpet shows,” isn’t it? There’s a reason “Who are you wearing?” is almost invariably the first question (despite what Reese Witherspoon wants them to ask).
Don’t those pretty much go hand in hand?
That’s not what “snubbed” usually means when talking about Oscars. Movies (and, to a lesser extent, people) are snubbed at nomination level. This year, it was Selma; The Color Purple and Waiting to Exhale also come to mind.
I didn’t intend to single out three films with predominantly black casts for the “snub” list, but, to be honest, those were the three films that came to mind. Then again, to be fair, Waiting to Exhale was probably snubbed more for being a “chick flick” than a “black movie.” (Fried Green Tomatoes and The Joy Luck Club didn’t exactly rake in the nominations either.)
Also, some people may use “snub” to mean any case where “the best person/movie didn’t win” for whatever reason, instead of a dedicated effort not to vote for the “snubbed” entry in question. For example, quite a few people say that Mickey Rourke was “snubbed” for The Wrestler, but I think it was more because Sean Penn happened to portray Harvey Milk right around the time of California’s Proposition 8 than for “voting against Rourke.”
The problem is, there are just so many people involved, and so many reasons to point out things that “could be improved,” that it’s hard to keep the list short when you put them all together.