Somewhat disappointed in the responses to the tribute. I mean, what did people honestly expect, that the Oscars would devote all 3 hours to Bond? A few notes:
Halle Berry introduced the segment because she is a Best Actress winner. The only Bond actress to have an Oscar (and she won it while filming Die Another Day, in fact).
Why 2013? Because it would have been stupid for them to honor Bond at last year's ceremony without an actual Bond film in contention. And anyway, Dr. No wasn't released in the US until 1963. So that makes 2013 the 50th anniversary of the films in the US. Remember, Oscars are American. BAFTAs are British, so 2012 would have been appropriate in the UK.
Why Shirley Bassey? Because Bondmania began with Goldfinger. No one in the US gave a damn about Dr. No or From Russia with Love. It was Goldfinger that made Bond as far as the US (and half the world) is concerned. Also, Matt Munro is dead, and they already played the JBT in the montage, so it's the earliest theme they had to play with (and Goldfinger turns 50 in 2014 anyway, and I'm sorry not everyone agrees but a lot of people think of it as the ultimate Bond film, like it or not). Nobody Does it Better could not have been used because a) it's not as well known to mainstream viewers as Goldfinger and it would have preempted the Academy's plan to have Streisand pay tribute to Marvin Hamlisch with "Memories" later in the show. Did someone earlier in this thread actually suggest You Know My Name? Give me a break; good song, but totally inappropriate for something that is to celebrate the longevity of the franchise. Goldfinger was screwed over for not being nominated Best Song back in 1964 anyway, so this was payback. The standing ovation and huge influx of renewed interest reported in Shirley Bassey from people who had no idea she was still alive is proof they made the right decision.
As for the montage, I thought it did the job. They only had a few minutes to play with in order to do it and get Bassey on stage. I'm fine with what they did - because most viewers only wanted that. It's like someone turning around a saying they'd like the Emmys to devote 10 minutes to paying tribute to Doctor Who's 50th this fall. Ain't gonna happen. And I never believed for a minute anyone actually planned to have the Bond actors appear (though Connery, being an Oscar winner, would have been a natural candidate).
I don't think it was a mistake for them to split Adele and Bassey into different parts of the program - Bassey stopped the show (to use one reviewer's term) so it would have been immensely unfair to Adele to have to follow her directly.
So let's see: montage, Bassey, Nobody Does it Better played during one of the presentations (with its composer honored during In Memoriam), Adele doing Skyfall and becoming the first Bond singer to win the gold, and Bond gettting a rare Oscar in another category, making it one of the few films to win more than one Oscar this year. It might not have been the Bond love-in everyone expected (if you wanted that, then you need to contact EON and ask them where the hell the 2-hour TV special was, or the "making of Bond" docudrama like the one the BBC is doing for Doctor Who), but I thought it was fine.
Edited by 23skidoo, 08 March 2013 - 09:42 PM.