Oscar Quickie

A very belated Oscar quickie, before sheet gets too stale:

• First off, I liked Chris Rock. I always liked Chris Rock and I realize that many thought he was fish out of water. Well, that was the point. The whole award broadcast genre's been getting stale and anything that breaks away from the same ol' is a positive. Well, almost.


• Speaking of people missing the point, dude, I love Sean Penn for his brilliant acting and Jeff Spicoli, but good lord, is he a humorless punk.
  
• Couple of memorable Chris Rock lines - "You won't be able to keep your eyes off our next four presenters, Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek" and "Cuba sent me $80".


• Rock was funny, I don't care what you say. Sure, his jokes were hit and miss, but some of those jokes, he made the audience really uncomfortable. That's a good thing.


• Though the best comic moment was completely unscripted. He introduced Jeremy Irons as "comic superstar", to which Irons responded "It's so good to be recognized at last." Then, when what sounded like a gunshot rang out in the background, he deadpanned "I hope they missed." Genius.


• The awards themselves? Blah. After a few years, you learn to expect deserving nominees to get shafted and get over it. The sky is blue. The toilet flushes the other way in Australia. The Academy voters always vote safe. BFD.


• I'm not going to repeat the Leo DiCaprio joke I made in the BigSoccer play by play. I wish I hadn't made that joke - I can't get that visual out of my head now.


• Clint, Morgan and Hilary all seem to be nice people.


• Nice to see Charlie Kauffman pick up a statuette. But why didn't he thank his brother Donald?


• Man, they seriously need to chill with the "get your ass off the stage" music. Look, it's perfectly reasonable to ask a costume designer or a short animate film director to keep it short, but you have to let the major winners like Best Actress or Best Picture finish theirs. It wasn't like they were going excessively long and thanking their dog's shrink. And this was a relatively short broadcast too. No excuse for that.


• When I'm filthy rich, I'm going to finance an overly sappy movie written by Kauffman, directed by Richard Linklater and featuring Laura Linney as the wife of a deaf, blind and mute quadriplegic played by Paul Giammati. This will cause such a maelstrom of make-up Oscars, the Academy voters will mess themselves.

C'est tout, folks.