2005 Oscar Recap
March 12, 2006
Due to my vacation, this piece is a few weeks belated, but I’d be remiss not to mention the Oscar broadcast in one way or another. All told, it was an average telecast, a few good bits, too many nostalgic montages, some funny lines from host John Stewart, some sappy acceptance speech music that should never have been commissioned, generally by the books acceptance speeches from generally by the book winners, and a last minute upset that threw me for a shock, but in retrospect probably shouldn’t have. I’ll admit that I had “Brokeback Mountain” taking Best Picture, most everybody did, and in twenty years, there will be little to justify it’s sudden loss, considering that it won virtually very other Best Picture prize on the planet (and “Crash” won virtually none), but in the heat of the moment, it’s easy to see that the L.A. based Academy could feel more comfortable voting for a film based solely in contemporary Los Angeles, populated with a couple dozen familiar actors all giving weighty performances in a film about a weighty subject, racial prejudice. There are theories floating around the internet about a confusing voting ballot, and how at a glance, the check box for “Crash” looked to be positioned directly next to “Brokeback Mountain”, suggesting that hasty voters looking to check off ‘Brokeback’ may have accidentally checked off “Crash” instead, but I don’t buy into those theories, I think when it came down to it, “Crash” was just good enough, and just respectable enough, to take enough burden off of the voters who may have felt compelled to vote for “Brokeback Mountain” based on industry pressure and possible over-praise, to vote for the less controversial, less uncomfortable film in the group. “Crash” is a great film, for sure, just like “Shakespeare in Love” was a great film when it bested “Saving Private Ryan”, but ‘Brokeback’, like ‘Ryan’ was heads above it’s competition, and there’s something ultimately unsatisfying, despite all of the other wins, including Ang Lee’s Best Director award, that this groundbreaking masterwork will never be considered, in the Academy’s eyes, the best film of the year.
As for the other awards, I was generally off on my picks, save for Best Actor, Actress (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Reese Witherspoon, the two slam dunks of the night), Art Direction, Original Score, and Original Song. I decided to go against everybody else in the Supporting Actor and Actress categories and naturally lost to the common pick, George Clooney in “Syriana” and Rachel Weisz in “The Constant Gardner”, two decent performances in political films I wasn’t in love with. I was off on Best Documentary when the lovable “March of the Penguins” bested the more profound “Murderball”, and though I never actually made a pick for Best Animated Feature, my odds were for Tim Burton’s “Corpse Bride”, but that too was a wash, losing to the equally as wonderful ‘Wallace and Gromit’, whose makers accepted their awards in colorful, oversized red bowties. The awards show usually gets bogged down in the technical categories, but I like to see the behind the scenes masterminds get their due, and their acceptance speeches are usually more colorful than the actors who tend to go on about their agents for ungodly amounts of time. The montages, which were so plentiful even Stewart made a crack about running out of clips halfway through the show, made good use of classic scenes, but were random at best, and the introduction to an innocuous Film Noir study by a terribly aged, and shaking, Lauren Bacall was the night’s most awkward and painful moment, considering how lively and beautiful she was in the featured clips. I’m all for honoring cinematic giants, like the tasteful and appreciated moment when Robert Altman accepted a lifetime achievement award, but dragging out old and disoriented actors to introduce film clips is kind of tacky (thank God they relegated a melting Mickey Rooney to one cutaway at the very beginning of the telecast).
In all, it wasn’t a terribly memorable Oscar broadcast, but it wasn’t a terrible one either, with a few stirring musical numbers (especially Three 6 Mafia’s winning rendition of “Hustle & Flow’s” “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp”), and a surprise ending that probably fooled the most savvy of predictors, including myself. I’ve seen “Brokeback Mountain” a few times now, and still hold that it was the best of the five nominated films, but the surprise win for “Crash”, voting mix up or not, only makes me want to see it again for verification, and anytime something propels me to want to see a top notch film like “Crash” again can’t be all that bad, just hard to swallow.
by Adam Suraf