8:33: Critics said Hugh Jackman would jump at the chance to sing during this broadcast – he won a Tony Award in 2004 for “The Boy from Oz,” a play on Broadway. He wastes
no time here, opening the show with a solid performance.8:36: Anne Hathaway – love her for some reason – is dragged out of the audience by Hugh. I think it is spur of the moment for about 0.27 seconds.
8:40: Hugh acknowledges Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Everyone on earth crosses their fingers for a shot of a psycho Jennifer Aniston. No dice.
8:45: OMG, such a boring little piece with a bunch of former Best Supporting Actress winners. Best part is the shot of Marisa Tomei. Wow, she is beautiful. Penelope Cruz wins here in the night’s most wide-open category. Seriously no one knew who was going to win this.
8:54: Nice appearance from Steve Martin and Sarah Pal..uh Tina Fey. Tina once again looking nice. Did any entertainer make a bigger leap than Tina Fey last year? Her 2008 was like Dustin Pedroia’s MVP season. We liked her as is, a bit player with a little niche who was easy to like. But she blew up and exceeded anyone’s wildest expectations. In comparison Steve Martin was Julio Lugo.
9:03: Jennifer Aniston and Jack Black out together. Aniston looks awful. What happened to her hair? Did she stick it out the limo window on the way over? The two lead us into an animation bit. I don’t know why, but I am very anti-animation. I would NEVER see an animated movie in the theatre. Whenever I watch one I’m always entertained too.
9:09: LOL. The animated short film award. You’ve got a better chance of me actually making one and accepting my own nomination then you do of me watching one of those.
9:16: Sarah Jessica Parker has huge boobs. They are real as well. I think Maxim was a little hard when it dubbed SJP the Unsexiest Women Alive in 2007.
9:23: Actually, the more I see her, SJP is pretty sucky…
9:30: The Oscars were revamped this year with two main goals:
1) To have more of a storytelling and historic feel, hence all the props and sets for each category and
2) To celebrate the entire year’s most popular pictures (not just the nominees). The first montage, on 2008 romance, is awesome.
9:32: YES! Natalie Portman! If it were up to me she’d be on that poll to the right. And Ben Stiller with a spot-on impression of a delusional Joaquin Phoenix. Just unreal.
9:43: James Franco and Seth Rogan just killed it with a Pineapple Express short of them watching a bunch of this year’s most popular films. I RLOL’d 3-4 times. Picture Judd Apatow. Guy’s a baller. He’d so big he can just write a short for the Academy Awards now. Meanwhile as I’m writing this, James Franco butchers the name of the foreign guy who wins Best Cinematographer and Rogan dies laughing. Not sure if that was part of the skit or not but don’t think so.
9:59: Damn, what a huge performance by Jackman and Beyonce. When you see performances like this it make sense why those two are famous. Just tons of talent.
10:04: Here we go. What most of us have been waiting for: Best Supporting Actor. Jared just IM’d me and is wondering the same things: how are they going to do this for Ledger? Who accepts?
10:07: Just got goosebumps has Kevin Klein described my favorite scene in Dark Knight: when Ledger sticks his head out of the cop car and licks his lips as the movie goes silent. They just announced Heath won, becoming the second posthumous actor to win an Oscar. His family is accepting it. Nice gesture, much better than to have someone who worked on the film up there. Standing ‘O’ of course. All in all: classy. There should be another crazy applause when they do the montage of all the people in the film industry who passed away.
10:16: Man on Wire wins for Best Documentary. Mark Cuban was a producer on this. The Oscar will be the only hardware he wins this season.
10:27: After a sweet action movie montage, Benjamin Button wins for Best Visual Effects. I’m not sure if people realize how advanced the technology is that they used here. It’s a system called Contour which can create digital reproductions of the human body that are as accurate as photographs. So in the scenes where Brad Pitt is an old man, it is his face on an old man’s body. It’s breakthrough stuff and something you are going to see a lot more of. I guess the video game market is all over this too.
10:44: Nice tribute to Jerry Lewis. I feel like I don’t appreciate his career as much as I should. Might be a Google/YouTube of him in my future. Eddie Murphy presented the award. He looks old.
10:59: Strange music performance by the music guy from Slumdog Millionaire and John Legend. Sorry for the vagueness, but I’m hating this right now. Bored outta my tree. Mostly just F’n around with my laptop. This reminds me that South Park the movie had a nomination for Best Song for “Blame Canada” and Robin Williams performed it at the Oscars.
11:11: I was wondering why Queen Latifa had a front-row seat out of all the possible stars and celebs. Turns out she’s singing to accompany the “passed away” montage. I forgot about Bernie Mac. Still weird to me that he died. He was fantastic. Sydney Pollack and Paul Newman too. Wow Hollywood lost some legends.
11:20: Danny Boyle brings home the hardware for Best Director, keeping this night a Slumdog affair. Best Picture is a mere formality at this point.
11:26: Time for Best Actress. Nicole Kidman and Halle Berry are stunning. I’m thinking Kate Winslet (The Reader) here. After being denied five other times this should be a career reward for her. Meanwhile, Anne Hathaway is crying for like 5th time tonight. She should do spots for Kleenex. And the winner is…Winslet. I’m a genius. Now that I’m on her Wiki page, how did she not win for Titanic? What a good speech too. It’s nice to see multi-millionaire superstars humbled and grateful.11:40: You can tell the awards are going over time (big surprise) when there’s no commercial between Best Actress and Best Actor. Adrien Brody, Michael Douglas, Robert Dinero, Ben Kingsley, and Anthony Hopkins are here to introduce this one. I can’t decide between Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke
here. I haven’t seen Milk, so that’s probably why I’m rooting for Rourke.11:43: Damn it, Sean Penn wins. After Kingsley’s unreal intro for Rourke (the last nominee introduced) it was almost a letdown when Penn won. “Thank you, you Commy, homo-loving sons of guns.” That was sweet.
11:52: Finalllllyyy it’s time for Best Picture. Zero surprise here. Slumdog caps off its historic night with the evening’s top honor. Just think, this movie almost went straight to DVD. It was bought by Warner for $5 million before they sold half of it to FOX Searchlight. Yea, it only grossed $150 million and won Best Picture. Would love to be the exec who pitched that idea.
Finally I can put the comp down. Great, past-paced start to the night that eventually got too long and boring. Overall I give the night a B. I liked the new set up, but maybe a few more clips of the movies next time?
--Nick
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nice pace with the recap williams. i thought the show was really good but it definitely got bogged down in the middle with a bunch of awards that we didnt care about. next year they might call the show the slumdogs.
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