This user is no longer registered.

The gayest Oscars ever, Nikki Finke wrote. Until next year's anyhow. Hollywood movies are crap, and the need to sell to the international market with its perceived anti-Americanism bias requires going light on subjects that might have a domestic appeal. That's why war movies depict American soldiers as murdering, raping morons doing the bidding of dark corporate forces, the ones that manipulate Washington. Those don't sell here, but Tinsel Town makes it up overseas.

I thought Hugh Jackman was great as a host, but the staging and direction for television was awful. You often couldn't see the screen with highlights, they didn't show clips of the nominated actors/actresses/movies, and when they did a split screen, it looked like a computer monitor screen with distracting wallpaper of panda's, etc. All in all, a very amatuer production.

what crap!

Things I don't understand about the Oscars:

1) the importance of dresses on the red carpet ... some are pretty, many are not ... there is no more meaning than that.

2) the importance of hats, the nonchalance of faux royalty, the Hollywood humor of Hollywood inside jokes.

3) the importance of Sean Penn.

4) the importance of gays as oppressed class and saved by personal lord and savior Oscar -- the only god Bill Maher doesn't hate

5) the importance of Bill Maher

6) the importance of sex, exotic sex, transgressive sex, transgendered sex, forget-gender sex, and especially, stick-it-to-the-church sex

7) the importance of musicals: what crime of mankind could have possibly deserved a sequence that went from the lovely Somewhere and Maria to All that Jazz, At Last, and whatever was scatologized by High School Musical? Whoever invented this musical form should be sent to Gitmo quick before it closes.

8) the curious Hollywood belief that ironic solipsism is a religious act of cleansing from sin. Perhaps that is so in Oscar's Mass, but not in the real world.

9) the importance of the Oscars: doesn't anyone "get" the ultimate Hollywood inside joke? That this is a movie about a movie about a movie? That Hamlet's thespians have become powers and principalities?

heh. omg.

10) modern importance

Pardon me, but I really need to finish up my screenplay about a gay man during the Holocaust. ;-)

(Ricky Gervais is prescient as hell, isn't he?)

This year's Oscars should have been subtitled "Hollywood Goes Broadway." What does all the musical theatrics have to do with film, other than a small diminishing number of movies that are made each year? Is it Hollywood's homage to Bollywood since they have a bigger film industry than the one in the US?

I missed the clips of the actors in the leading and supportive roles. And while I liked having five of the previous winners, to give personal kudos rather than just introducing the nominees, was insulting at moments, besides being strained.

I get the idea there was nostalgia for days gone by, of an era that once was, but is no more. I would rather see more hip hop than the schmaltzy presentation we witnessed last night. Actually, I kept asking "Where's Billy Crystal when we really need him?" but I would have like to have seen John Stewart given another chance--I think he would have improved greatly from last year, and it couldn't have been worse than what we got.

The Oscars serve no purpose other than to sell more tickets to movies and up the DVD rentals. That's it. It's a business. Oh yes, and a place for all the bloated egos to gather together once a year in a big room and congratulate themselves on how they are saving the world. I mean, I like movies, and I like art. Art is important, but Hollywood sucks. These people act like they are the only ones making important art.
Jessica Klein is right: Martin and Fey were hilarious! I don't understand the importance of Bill Maher either. He's not funny, and he's mean.

It was fun
It's supposed to be fun

Hugh Jackman is spectacularly talented - some of the material did not do his talent justice --

There were a lot of high points
We needed a light evening away from reality

They did a good job

"Slum Dog" did not impress, to say the least. There the Oscars go again--trumping quality for touchy-feely, feel-good happy ending fairy tales. I regret having paid for the ticket to see this movie, which I would not have even considered had I not allowed myself to be duped by Oscar-hype. Lesson learned. Never again. P.S. The other movies are far superior to this technicolor third-world roller-coaster ride of a movie ( I live in the third world--don´t wanna go see a movie that immerses me in the ugliness and injustice that surrounds me daily). The Reader, just as an example, operates on another level of movie-making altogether. Oscar is very much disenchanting and disheartening.

Sign me on to all of Jessi Klein's comments too. Except that she has no need to drink from the pretty-fountain.