Oscar Recap!

Okay, so a few of my Oscar picks were wrong, but in this case I'm totally happy being wrong.

I am delighted that Diablo Cody won. I just hope that this award doesn't Callie Khouri her career. Likewise I'm fine with Ellen Page not winning, as she's a really great young actress and I would hate to see this sort of triumph so early Timothy Hutton her career.

Using proper nouns as verbs is fun!

I was also fine with Tilda Swinton's win. My favorite performance in the group was Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone, but Tilda Swinton was really good in Michael Clayton so I can't really get too worked up about it.

The show itself was pretty low key, but amusing enough. For me the high point was Jon Stewart bringing Marketa Irglova back out on stage to finish her acceptance speech. I'm very curious to know how that happened. Did Stewart just make an executive desicion and do it, was there a lot of back and forth with the producers?

It was both funny and sad that Jon Stweart's joke montage celebrating "binoculars and parascopes" was better edited than some of the actual montages from the evening.

The biggest upset/cock-up of the evening: The Golden Compass winning best Special Effects. What the fuck? "Best" in the Oscar sense is usually such a subjective thing, but this is just flat out, objectively wrong. Even if you take that movie on its own, those effects are, at best, okay. They did the best they had with a very limited budget, but nothing in that movie ever feels particularly real. Then if you compare the Compass effects to those in Pirates 3 and Transformers, Compass looks like the kid in the helmet. What happened there?