Outrageous Double Standards

Oscar Roundup

I half watched the Oscars while watching episodes of 30 Rock on my computer. The Oscars were difficult to watch since the sound on my television is broken and I had to use the closed captioning. I don't know if you've ever used closed captioning during live television but it's annoying as hell. The words are about four seconds behind the action on screen which ruined all of Jon Stewart's delivery. The closed captioning system uses some sort of voice recognition software for automatic captioning, but it's far from perfect. At one point the word "nominated" was printed as "no ma'am nated", and "documentary" as "dom unitary". At one point you could actually see mistakes being deleted on the fly, by whoever monitors the closed captioning, just to make sure that Penelope Cruz's name came out right.

In any case I was pretty happy with the winners overall. Especially Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova winning for best song. Huzzah! I missed Javier Bardem's acceptance speech, unfortunately, but I'm sure all the Oscar highlights will be on Youtube tomorrow. Daniel Day Lewis was awesome during his acceptance speech. Marion Cotillard and Diablo Cody both gave very moving speeches as well. Did anyone else notice how excited Cate Blanchett was for Cotillard when she won? Very classy.
I really, really must see La Vie En Rose when it comes out on DVD this week.

The major category winners were mostly very predictable this year. But that's fine, since the movies that won were generally very good.

I was a bit shocked that Brad Renfro was snubbed during the memorial montage, however. He died a couple weeks before Heath Ledger, and I think it's a shame he wasn't recognized. I know he wasn't a major star, but The Client and Apt Pupil were pretty big films. Maybe I blinked and missed it. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Video Addendum (enjoy them while you can):

"Falling Slowly":


Random Wii appearance: