<p>Clothes not so interesting this year. Nothing awful enough to be funny and I didn’t think any dresses were clear winners. My favorite was Jennifer Garner’s.</p>
<p>I liked Nicole Kidman’s necklace - it took your eyes off her “baby bump” ;)</p>
<p>I thought Marion Cotillard had the best dress. But the two red things (Heidi Klum and Katharine Heigl) were pretty spectacular, though I can’t see myself in them. ;)</p>
<p>I liked Helen Mirren’s dress.</p>
<p>After the bombs laid by Jon Stewart, I think Billy Crystal can name his price to be permanent host of the Oscars.</p>
<p>I was rooting for There Will Be Blood to win Best Picture. It’s quite unconventional; it would have been nice to see it win, I think.</p>
<p>Dresses…</p>
<p>I really hated Tilda Swinton’s “sack”. Nothing pretty about it. Nice figure and what a waste. While Nicole Kidman’s very expensive necklace is pretty, it just was too long for that dress and just didn’t look right. The worst dress I saw was on the red carpet…Daniel Day Lewis’ wife (or SO?). This woman had on a black dress and the shoulders had big red bows and then down the center of her bodice were two very very large plastic looking black flower trinkets and she looked like a package that was gift wrapped. </p>
<p>Many dresses were nice. I liked Marion Cotillard’s. Helen Miran’s looked lovely and unique. Hilary Swank looked swanky. Renee Zellweger’s dress was befitting a movie star and very lovely. Katherine Heigl…hardly recognized her having just seen 27 Dresses. Her hair at the Oscars reminded me of Marilyn Monroe. She is very pretty. Stunning dress on her…kinda meant for the red carpet. Amy Adams looked pretty on the red carpet but I did not care for the dress she wore on her first song…the one that was mid calf length…just didn’t work. Laura Linney had a classic simple nice look. It seemed like several actresses were wearing their hair the same way…pony tail with loose long side swept “bangs”. Many nice looks and nothing too outrageous as in some years. </p>
<p>None of this is what matters but hey…</p>
<p>Didn’t see Once, so the song had no meaning for me, but was anyone else disappointed in the song nominees? I thought they were awful. None I’d be humming the next day! Especially the last one…the singer (John McLaughlin? or something, not the real JM), what a weak voice. Definitely wouldn’t make the cut on American Idol. Of course I’m listening out of context, but still. I thought August Rush performance was the best, but song itself…OK I guess.</p>
<p>And I’m a Stephen Schwartz fan from way back. Oh for three imo for him.</p>
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<p>I agree, and I’m glad that (for a change) they let Marketa Irglova(the female half of the duo from “Once”)come back onstage to give her acceptance remarks. I was just pleased that “Once” got that recognition, plus I didn’t find any of the three nominated songs from “Enchanted” particularly interesting.</p>
<p>As for Jon Stewart, I love The Daily Show, but hosting the Oscars just seems too bland for his talents. He had hardly any good comic material to work with.</p>
<p>What’s unconventional about a (barely) revisionist re-working of Citizen Kane, minus the meaning (that’s the revisionist part), and some of the subtlety?</p>
<p>I liked There Will Be Blood, but I didn’t feel passionately committed to it the way I did to, say, Pulp Fiction or [insert Great Movie That Got Robbed here]. Or Boogie Nights, for that matter. I was rooting for it, too, but mainly because I’ve seen it (unlike No Country), and because the son of a friend was involved (and had his own Oscar nom for it, but didn’t win).</p>
<p>I watched Across The Universe over the weekend. There should have been a special Oscar category for that: Best Picture With Unredeemably Awful Concept And Writing. Julie Taymor is one heck of an artist, but not, um, a narrative artist.</p>
<p>My favorite moment of the night was when Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova won. It’s not the type of song that is best appreciated in a venue like the Kodak but it’s beautiful and I’ve loved him ever since The Commitments! I was glad that she was able to give her comments. It was an error on the part of the music director who inadvertently cued the music at the wrong time. When he realized it, he urged Jon Stewart to get her back onstage.</p>
<p>Biggest surprise was Tilda Swinton’s win. I was pleasantly surprised as I loved Michael Clayton. I knew it wouldn’t win Best Picture but I thought it was a fabulous script with a gripping storyline. What made it more than a typical corporate thriller movie was the performances by Swinton and Tom Wilkinson. Both were excellent. I loved the subtlety of the movie and the thread throughout with the connections between Clayton’s son and Arthur, and the book. I have spoken to so many people who had no clue what the significance of the horses was, they had totally missed that theme. I enjoyed my second viewing of Michael Clayton even more than the first.</p>
<p>Hansard was in The Commitments???</p>
<p>(a) Wow. Cool.</p>
<p>(b) Doesn’t that make him at least, say, 40? Doesn’t that make the chemistry with Irglova (sorry for the earlier misspelling) just a bit, um, creepy?</p>
<p>JHS… My response to you got insanely long. Take it all with a grain of salt though. :)</p>
<p>There Will Be Blood is simply a shocking film. That’s what makes it unconventional. The main character is shocking, the end is shocking, the story is shocking… But it’s still an honest story, one that flirts with that edge of believability so that viewers are left at the end feeling awed, and–yes–shocked, but not so much that an average person can’t connect this movie to their world and question how it applies, if at all. </p>
<p>It’s different than most movies from the beginning: I didn’t even notice until about eight minutes into the film that not a word had been spoken yet. It comes across as an epic in many ways, but I think it’s also engaging on a very personal level.</p>
<p>The main character is well-constructed so that little by little we see how disturbing of a man he actually is. We, the viewers, don’t know really know him, even two hours into the movie. Usually in movies (or books) we’re given a character who develops and changes throughout the story. That’s not what happened here. I think that the Plainview in the first scene of the film is pretty much the same Plainview as the crippled old man we see at the end; the difference is that at the end we have the information to comprehend who/what he actually is, whereas earlier we didn’t really know–we couldn’t know. So, I think that’s unconventional, the way we learn more about the guy in every scene until the very end when it’s brought to what I think it really an astonishing finish. I think the end is unconventional, too, since it doesn’t really end in a normal way. It’s certainly not a happy ending, but it’s not really a sad ending, either. We’ve been learning more about Plainview throughout the film, and I think the movie stops once we’ve seen enough to know who he is. It’s doesn’t fit well as a story in the beginning-middle-end sense. At the end, the title of the film comes onto the screen, and I think that’s perfect. That’s when the film hits home.</p>
<p>I haven’t seen Citizen Kane since a short film history class in 8th grade, so please excuse me if I’m totally off base here. Both films, of course, are about greed, ambition, true happiness, the “American dream,” etc., etc. If I’m remembering correctly, though, in Citizen Kane we see how Kane came to be. We see a happy childhood until he’s taken away from his mother, we see that he’s emotionally stunted afterwards, that his guardian is never a parent figure, and all the rest. In TWBB, that story isn’t told. I don’t think it was even hinted at. A viewer watching CK could give reasons why Kane became the way he is, while a viewer watching TWBB is left to question whether Plainview is the way he is because of his nature or whether it can be “blamed” on something from his past. The other major difference is the ending of each film. Kane’s last word is “rosebud,” from the sled he got before he was taken from his mother. That’s his last happy memory, even though he was poor, and Kane recognizes it at the end. There’s supposedly this realization by Kane before he dies about these “truths” about wealth, happiness, values, or whatever. Plainview has no such realization. He is never redeemed or explained. When it comes down to it, though, I don’t even mind that they’re similar. What’s wrong with renewing classic themes? I think I’ve seen Atonement in various forms, too. (Also, I don’t think a film that tells a similar story to one that’s been told before can’t be unconventional.)</p>
<p>Anyway, I’m far from a movie-buff, so this is just the 2 cents of an uneducated kid who saw CK once in 8th grade and saw TWWB once last Saturday. I see a couple of new movies every year normally, but on Saturday I went to a movie theater that was showing every film that had been nominated for Best Picture and watched 10-hours worth (of course, the one film I skipped was the one that won). I don’t know cinematography, film history, or anything like that, and I’m not saying that TWBB is the best movie ever, but I do think it was unconventional, and this is the film that stuck with me after watching all of the nominees in a row.</p>
<p>I found the song from Once to be quite capturing. At least that’s what it did for me. I was doing other things with the awards in the background. As each nominated song was sung, I might look up briefly, realize that there wasn’t much to it and went back to what I was doing. However, when the Once song came on I instantly liked it (which is unusual for me - most times I need to hear a song a few times before it grows on me). I was glad to see that it won.</p>
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While I agree that it wasn’t the most memorable hosting performance, you have to remember that the writers had about nine days to create this. So I won’t necessarily judge him once on this show. I like Billy Crystal, but I also liked it with Ellen. But the writers need more than nine days.</p>
<p>Hansard is 38 and Irglova is 19. That’s a pretty big age difference, but from what little I’ve read about it, it at least appears that he didn’t dump another wife and kids for her.</p>
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<p>Well, to defend it, it was trying to be a chilling existential mindtrip about the power and nature of evil, which is why there was so much violence and so little humor. Now, if that didn’t work for a viewer, all you’re left is a really violent, humorless suspense thriller (and, IMO, it does a fantastic job at that level, really scary. But yes, also really violent and without humor). The existential level only kind of worked for me, though I think I’d probably understand it better if I saw it again. </p>
<p>All and all, I’d probably have given it to There Will Be Blood (I haven’t seen Atonement or Michael Clayton, though), but it’s really a personal preference thing, IMO. NCFOM did have the most frightening serial killer I’ve seen on screen in a long time. Even more chilling than Hannibal Lector, IMO.</p>
<p>Also, I also loved that Falling Slowley won. I loved that movie, and Falling Slowley is one of my fav. songs from it.</p>
<p>corranged, you clearly saw the same movie I did, and you write a good brief for it. That’s exactly what I was using “revisionist” as shorthand for: the complete refusal to engage with insight, explanations, meaning – no psychology, no sociology, no economics, just a gaping maw of acquisitiveness. (I do think it was maybe a bit more open-ended than you describe. I don’t think the movie definitively comes down on the side that Plainview never changed, or than he never felt anythink like love for the boy.) I found it impressive – it’s a well-done, powerful movie – but in the end something of a cop-out, and not quite interesting enough to justify its self-importance. It may well have been the “best” new film I saw this year (I haven’t seen No Country either), but it’s not one I’m likely to watch again.</p>
<p>“While I agree that it wasn’t the most memorable hosting performance, you have to remember that the writers had about nine days to create this.”</p>
<p>It wasn’t just the prepared material that was flat. His off-the-cuff stuff was dull and borderline cruel - like the put-down of the award for editing. Did he really have to emphasize on world-wide TV that the award that may be the most thrilling thing that ever happened to the winner was for an art form so obscure that no one knows anything about it? Anything to get a cheap laugh (or in this case a pained wince).</p>