My Oscar Recap

Certainly an...interesting night. As last year, we'll do five good things, and five not-so-good things. Here we go...

THE GOOD (not necessarily in order)

1. Marion Cotillard is an Oscar winner. Marion Cotillard gave an absolutely amazing performance in La Vie en Rose and, though my pick and prediction were Ellen Page, I think we all knew Ms. Cotillard would pick up her well-deserved Oscar.

2. The speeches. Almost all of the winners--especially those in acting--seemed very genuine and honored, but not self-indulgent. Really lovely. And Jon Stewart is a class act for letting Marketa Irglova accept her Oscar.

3. I was wrong about Best Supporting Actress. The BAFTA turned out to be the most accurate precursor this year. Tilda Swinton is the strangest person ever, but did indeed give a good performance in Michael Clayton. And now Cate has the oppritunity to give a truly worthy performance (which, for her, won't be difficult).

4. The right locks won. Daniel Day-Lewis gave the best performance of the year; truly a deserved lock; Javier Bardem, though not my pick, was undeniably great, , Falling Slowly is the most gorgeous song ever written for a film and there is no way around the fact that it's impossible not to love No Country for Old Men. Excellent choices, Academy.

5. The troops announcing the Best Documentary Short Subject. A surprisingly well-done segment. Let's hope that soon they can do it from home.

THE BAD

1. The ceremony. About 45 minutes into the telecast, I was ready to sob. I found myself unimpressed with something I focus a great deal of my year around. However, I think that a lot of that can be attributed to the lack of time to write a ceremony. I really think that next year I will be able to enjoy it as much as I always do. Let's hope...

2. The montages. Why not just make the ceremony an hour shorter and avoid the most common complaint? Instead they had these mildly amusing montages of...just about everything. The thing is, these would really only appeal to Oscar enthusiasts, and we've seen the clips a million times before. Sigh.

3. Transformers goes empty-handed. I haven't legally seen this, but why not just throw the dog a bone and give it Best Sound Mixing?

4. My lowest score ever. This is both a plus and a minus...it's good because it meant the evening was full of surprises, but not so good because it's just a bit embarassing to get a 71% (that's if you score it my way: 2 points for the prediction, 1 point for the runner up, divided by 48). The worst part is that many of the winners, namely Cotillard, The Bourne Ultimatum for editing, Taxi to the Darkside for Documentary Feature, Elizabeth for Costume Design and Sweeney Todd for Art Direction, were my first instinct, but I denied them in favor of the frontrunner. How unfortunate.

5. The lowest ratings ever. I knew this would happen, but the Oscars deserve better than 21 million.

Overall, this was a very disappointing night entertainment wise (you can thank the AMPTP for that), but very satisfying in that most all of the winners were deserved, or were at least good choices. And now, the one day of the year where I give a shit about fashion...

BEST DRESSED
Jennifer Garner
WORST DRESSED

Sarah Larson
Well that's that for this year. This was a remarkably strong year for movies, but a weak Oscar year. Very anticlimactic. Well, at least they had a very genuine excuse, and it was all for a good cause.

We've got another year until we do all of this again, so we'll start hurling out some early predix, and just covering some general film news as we usually do. I'm also getting really bored with this template; I think we've had it all year; so that will probably change. 2007 was a great year!