Normally, I really look forward to watching the Oscars, but did that thing drag? Not counting the arrival show, the ceremony itself went on 10 minutes shy of 4 hours. 
The problem is the little things. Did we really need acrobatic making silhouette logos? Or sound effects choirs? Or clips for 50 years of foreign films?
Ellen Degeneres didn't help. She had to be the lamest host yet, no edge at all, like she was doing a larger version of her TV show. What happened to the days when people used the Oscars for personal views? It makes me almost wish Michael Moore would come back.
Also, I now think the best song category is about the lamest thing going these days when a song inspired by an Al Gore global warming documentary wins it.
I guess it didn't help there really wasn't much to root for outside of Scorsese.
Agreed on all counts. Another very big problem with the telecast this year was that they didn't begin with a "major" award like they usually do (usually one of the supporting acting awards is given out at, or near, the beginning of the show), but instead, it took close to an hour, if not more, for those awards to get handed out, leaving the audience with only Degeneres (who, I agree, did not do a very good job hosting the awards) and some minor awards that simply took too much time to give out. Also very annoying was the costume design award (I think it was that one, anyway), where there was some very audible laughing coming from somewhere while the nominees were being announced, which was not a very good show of professionalism, IMO. If they're going to present this award on air, that's perfectly fine, but it needs to be taken just as seriously as the Best Picture award.
Also, I thought that last night proved that the host of the Oscars needs to be someone who can carry the show, not someone who just simply fills in the gaps while waiting for some of the sets to get in place and whatever else goes on behind the curtain. I've always viewed these shows as kind of an overblown "Tonight Show" or "Late Night w/ Letterman" type of thing. Honestly, I think that next year, having someone along the lines of Jay Leno, David Letterman, or Craig Ferguson would be a great way to liven up the whole thing, because I think that those types of people could carry the show in a way that the recent hosts have not been able to do.
Another thing about the awards last night, and this was something that I should have caught during the announcement of the nominees, was that the same two men were nominated for the sound mixing (or whatever they call the sound achievement award) on
Flags of Our Fathers and
Letters from Iwo Jima. They're both movies about the same subject (told from two different points of view), featuring, I would assume, largely similar sound effects (gunfire, explosions, basically, the sounds that you would hear in a war). Surely, films such as
Casino Royale, or any other film that was very much underrepresented at the awards could have had one of those spots rather than the same nominees getting two nominations for similar films in the same category. I'm not saying that they were undeserving of the award by any stretch of the imagination, and the fact that they were nominated twice showed that they had that category in a virtual lock anyway, but I think that the opportunity to get one more film nominated for an award was missed here......
Which leads me to the Best Original Song category. After listening to the songs that were nominated this year, I honestly feel as though "You Know My Name" was better than these songs. Why wasn't it nominated, well probably because it's from a Bond movie, which leads me to the biggest observation of the night. Did anyone notice just how many people associated with
Casino Royale were involved with this in some way? Daniel Craig was there as a presenter, as was Eva Green. Judi Dench was nominated for Best Actress, and Mads Mikkelsen was in one of the films up for Best Foreign film (or something to that effect). In terms of acting talent,
Casino Royale was very well represented at the Oscars (with all of the principle actors in the film involved in one way or another), which hopefully could be a sign of things to come for the Daniel Craig Bond films in the future.
I think what was most irritating about the whole thing for me was that it just wasn't a very well done awards show this time around. Usually, I get excited to watch this because I am very much a fan of movies. I usually sit and watch the entire thing from beginning to finish, and enjoy the majority of it. This year, I turned it off less than an hour into it, and waited for a while before tuning back in to catch Helen Mirren's win and the awards that followed it. For all of the focus that has been spent in recent years on making the show shorter, that clearly was not a goal last night, and it was as predictable as ever. Yes,
The Departed was a great film (and maybe even deserving of the award), but I was hoping that
Little Miss Sunshine (which I do see as a slightly superior film to
The Departed) would sneak in and win the award and open up things for comedies and other underrepresented films in future awards shows. Unfortunately, that did not happen, but at least Martin Scorcese finally got his long overdue Oscar.
