The first time I did it in 2004, it was one of my better early posts. Last year, I was considering chewing off my paw before the night was over, so this year, I’m skipping the show and doing some artwork. with the Red Hot Chili Peppers turned to a decibel level that’s generating dirty looks from the dogs.
But Jim Treacher is on the case;
One of my favorite fun facts about Clooney is that he didn’t shave his head for that movie because he was scared it wouldn’t grow back. Unfortunately, there’s no category for Best Guy Who Doesn’t Understand Biology, so they had to give him Best Supporting Actor.
Mockery link roundup at Instapundit.
It sounds as though it was a Jon bomb. It seems that for all the left loves Stewart when he mocks Republican presidents, satire directed at the Hollywood left is just so unfunny.
The MSNBC item by Andy Dehnart that I’ve linked to, though, is pretty humorous by itself as Andy Dehnart explains;
Those who believe “The Daily Show” is actually “fake news” don’t understand either satire or the exceptionally smart, informative humor that the show invokes on a daily basis. Stewart and “The Daily Show’s” team emphasize and demonstrate the importance and gravity of the day’s news by making fun of it.
That’s what he’s doing? And all this time I thought he was just another member of the Democratic Party’s entertainment wing.
‘Crash’ won!!!
And for very good reasons;)
Phillip Seymour Hoffman has been stealing movies in bit roles for about a decade now.
Nice to see him get his due.
I agree about “crash”, btw.
YAWN! Hollyweird: 95% garbage movies and 95% talentless, left-wing actors who are legends in their own minds.
Agree with Dave. Haven’t seen a really good movie in years. Pablum for the masses. Sigh.
Mindboggling. For the first time in years excluding any of TLOR, I actually saw one of the winners, Wallace & Grommit. And dammit, I’m glad claymation won over computer graphics. But the ties were pretty tacky.
Thanks, Kate, for about the 10th year in a row I missed the actual telecast, but for the first time I realized that I truly missed nothing.
I have to bookmark Manolo & Jim-Jim! It’s all about the shoes.
I will see Crash as it is on the Movie Network, although I am pretty sure it will show us all how racists white people really are. I probably will never watch Brokeback Mountain, I am really not interested in seeing cowboys who like to put on their chaps backwards.
I haven’t been to a movies theatre in years. Hollywood is producing nothing new. Why would I want to sit through bad remakes of bad TV shows or the same plot line done over and over again with different faces.? You certainly don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out whodunit in a whodunit movie anymore. In fact, the person who all the evidence points to, it ain’t them. If their is a black guy it ain’t him (he will in fact turn out to be the hero in the end) if there is a woman who may just be the murderer it ain’t her. It will be the white guy you would least expect and that is only because he had a bad childhood.
Oh well there’s always the Discovery channel. At least you can learn something.
‘Glad to see I’m in good company, Kate. For the first time ever, except the years I lived in Latin America, I didn’t watch the Oscars. ‘Decided to boycott the show: ‘can’t stand Jon Stewart and, like above commentators, couldn’t be bothered to support the left-wing loonies and their (off-)message-movies, not to mention have to endure the half-naked starlets and their inane patter at the mike.
Hollywood has taken the get-small pill and has jumped into the Rabbit Hole; Clooney-tunes and his clones are all delusional. Who needs it?
Hollywood: Just Another Niche Market
Excerpt:
There is another, even more radical shift in today’s pop culture that is helping to undermine the Oscars and other tradition-bound award shows. For years, the Oscars have mattered because the awards served as a barometer of cultural heft. Just the name alone � the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences � has the air of high-minded authority.
Millions of moviegoers who would’ve been wary of seeing a challenging film like 1969’s “Midnight Cowboy” or 1999’s “American Beauty” caved in and plunked their money down, soothed by the academy’s best picture badge of distinction.
But this elite, top-down culture is being supplanted by a raucous, participatory bottom-up culture in which amateur entertainment has more appeal than critically endorsed skill and expertise.
The most obvious example is “American Idol,” which has tested its ratings clout against the Grammys and the Winter Olympics, easily trouncing its competition.
In top-down culture, subtlety and sophistication rule. But like so much of today’s bottom-up culture, “American Idol” is far more about aspiration than art. It is a musical kissing cousin of MTV’s “The Real World,” allowing us to wallow in its subjects’ depressingly banal dreams and show biz ambitions. +
http://eddriscoll.com/archives/008701.php
via instapundit.com
Largs,
Don’t want to ruin the movie for you, so I won’t say much about Crash, except to point out that while it is about racism, in a broad sense, it definitely DOESN’T focus on white people. It’s true that there are white people in the film who are rascist, but there are also Asian, and Persian, and African-American and… well, pretty much everyone in the film is racist to one degree or another… that was kinda the point. I thought the film was interesting in how it shows that racism isn’t just “black and white” (no pun intended) and how even good people can sometimes be racists, and even racisits can sometimes be good people. Anyway, I won’t say more for fear of spoiling it. I know some people didn’t like Crash, and others loved it, and I’m definitely the later. But go into it with an open mind, and I think you might find it compelling.
Also, for me, I always cheer for the Canadian, so congratulations to Paul Haggis for his TWO Oscar wins for Crash. Whoohoo!
Finally, I haven’t seen Syriana yet, so I can’t comment on Clooney’s performance (though people I know who have seen it, say it was quite good) but regardless, I can’t believe in the future I’m going to keep seeing “Oscar Winner George Clooney”. How weird is THAT! Although, he certainly deserves accolades for his performance in “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes”!!!
LOL
Reviews For Jon Stewart As Oscar Host Are Mixed (UPDATED)
The reviews are starting to come in for Jon Stewart as host of the Oscars — and
Kate, I used to beleive as you do that Stewart was just a Bill Maher wannabe, but I’ve since changed my mind about him. Yes, he’s decidedly lefty, but he’s one of the “good” ones IMO. He doesn’t agree with the Right’s policies, but he also abhors the anner in which many on the left are opposing those policies. He’s certainly not afraid to skewer libs at all. Frankly, I’ve never seen fun poked at the Left on that show and I’ve been watching it forever. The uncomfortable looks some of the elite had on their faces as he made fun of their elective ineptitude was priceless.
If the Left had fewer Frankens and more Stewarts, they might actually have a shot at recovering from their current string of failures.
Kate,
I thought Jon Stewart did a very good job, and the article you link to is interesting. The article seems to point out that Stewart’s biggest problem was that the rich left-leaning celebrities didn’t always think he was being that funny… especially when he was mocking THEM. But I’d venture to say that the T.V. audience thought he was pretty funny, and generally entertaining as a host, and I’d imagine a lot of conservative viewers who might have been expecting to hate a more partisan performance might have been won over a little.
Jon is unabashedly “progressive”, as the article states, and his humour, on his show in particular, being largely political, reflects that. However. those who watch the show realize that he is not at all loathe to rip in to the left (mocking Cindy Sheehan for praising Hugo Chavez on his show, or his portrayal last night of the left-leaning tendencies of Hollywood (regarding Bush’s electoral success: “Tonight is the first time many of you will have voted for a winner” or “this is the only time I get to see this many stars without having to make a donation to the democratic party”). I especially liked his description of Hollywood as a (paraphrasing) “beach-front Sodom and Gomorrah where ethics and morality are thrown aside in an orgy of sexual depravity and greed”. “I don’t have a joke for that,” said Stewart, “I just thought you should know that’s what people are saying”. I thought it was a great moment where his delivery made it clear that while he was gently poking fun at conservative moralists, that he was just as much attacking Hollywood for being out of touch with the real America. His whole performance struck me as “balanced”, or perhaps even “balancing” as he off-set the overwhelmingly left-leaning tendency of the room by mocking the moneyed cultural “elite”, which probably surprised, and displeased, some of the Hollywood heavyweights.
It’s true that Stewart spends a lot of his time ripping into “conservatives” but that doesn’t mean he is without nuance, and it doesn’t mean he is incapable of being funny when he’s not mocking Dick Cheney (though, c’mon, that “Bjork couldn’t be here tonight because she was shot by the Vice-President” thing WAS pretty funny…). Anyway, I just find it interesting that a lot of the criticism of Stewart’s performance is that he didn’t get enough laughs from the leftie Hollywood establishment, and to me, that’s not the point of the host of the Oscars. The host of the Oscars, imho, is there to entertain US, the T.V. viewer… not the spoiled celebrities. If Hollywood insiders want entertainment, they can buy it with the mounds of cash they sleep on. The Oscar host is supposed to make ME laugh. And since Jon Stewart did that, I for one hope he comes back. And I’d be interested to hear any dyed in the wool conservatives out there who were also won over by his performance (not that you suddenly love Jon Stewart, or even like him, but that you were surprised at how non-partisan he was, at his willingness to mock “the left” and the “Hollywood establishment” and that he made you laugh) because I think some of you are out there.
Oscar Prepare To Be Blogged
Today is a Holy Day in Los Angeles. Oscar Sunday of course, and in the absence of any pressing news these days — other than Iran’s nuclear weapons development crisis, [don’t miss my groundbreaking post ‘MSM Ignores Iran’s Admission Of Guilt’ which The…
If the Left had fewer Frankens and more Stewarts…
The Right could use a few more Stewart’s, too. You’ll never see Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity take a shot at anybody on the right for any reason. Hannity, especially, is just a humorless, spin-point spouting robot.
Ann Coulter is the Right’s version of funny? Pathetic.
I expected “Crash” to be one of those racists-are-bad, why-can’t-we-all-get-along type movies, but it was much better. The filmmakers had the gall to point out that racism is more complicated than evil bigots versus good people, and is sometimes just a product of frustrated people getting revenge for problems in their lives however they can.
That said, it was a bit too sentimental at times, and too ready to tug at the ol’ heartstrings. But that’s a small price to pay for a breath of not-exactly-PC fresh air in such a staid industry.
PS: I also thought Stewart was better than he’s gotten credit for. What a welcome change from the usual lugubrious, self-important celeb set. The phony “lobbying” ads were also funny.
PPS: Irony moment: the winners in the Sound Mixing category were unable to speak for several seconds due to a muted microphone.
You want an irony moment? (OK, maybe not “irony” in this strictest sense, but this really bugged me!) Will Smith gets up to announce the winner of the best Foreign Language Film (first, wtf), but then it gets even BETTER. The very next presenter? Ziyi Zhang!!!
OK, so maybe, if you’re having Ziyi Zhang presenting an award at the Oscars, you don’t HAVE to have her present the best foreign language film award, despite that fact that she appeared in one winner of this category, and also in another nominee. But what was up with her presenting the very next award (for sound editing I believe)? And what is Will Smith doing presenting the Best Foreign Language film Oscar???
Again, a big WTF!!!
Didn’t bother watching the Oscars since the past couple had the actors who accepted awards spouting off their leftist rhetoric. The last picture I seen at the theater was Lord of the Rings. Last night I watched “Patton”. It was a time we knew what we were fighting for and stood behind the cause. The more recent films are mostly about crap .
Haggis, a Canadian who wrote, directed, and produced ‘Crash’, could not find a studio in Hollywood to do his film.
He came to Vancouver and Lion’s Gate Films agreed to back him.
Who is the happiest today;)
Just a correction. Wallace and Gromit didn’t win over computer graphics. It was up against Corpse Bride, which is stop motion, much like W&G, and a traditional cell-animated Japanese film. For the first time since they create the category, no computer animated films were nominated. Chicken Little was just that bad.
I liked Jon Stewart’s performance. It’s not his fault that hollywood is so stuck up and can’t laugh at themselves. I loved the political ads. Can you imagine if actors ran smear campaigns against each other? 🙂
I was dissapointed that Crash won. It’s a very bad movie that sends a bad message.
I for one have not watched the Oscar Awards for years, however for some strange reason tuned in last night. Nothing has changed its the same old boring format that they have used for years.
The only entertainment value was the presence or Jon Stewart as the host. Whether you like Stewarts brand of humour or not a lot of people likely watched the show to the end to see what off the wall comments he would come up with.
We should remember that this is about the Motion Picture Academy recognizing their own people in the industry I don’t think they are to worried about whether we are entertained by the three hour marathon. The Television Networks have decided for us that we would really enjoy this epic lenght program. With their ratings dropping this year the messge maybe getting out that we are not amused or entertained.
My complaints concerning Oscar this year mostly centered around the apparent titlessness of the actresses up for awards. Comments can be found on my Blog BigCityLib Strikes Back, the relevant post being “Oscar, Straight White Boys, and Straw Shaped Women”. Check it out here:
http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/