I had the Academy Awards tuned in to the background last night. I’m not a fan; like many of us, I just like to gawp and snipe at overprivileged rich people, so it was just occasionally entertaining noise to catch my attention in between papers. Here are the things that made me bother to look up.
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Ellen Degeneres was generally amiable and pleasant, but the stunt where she ordered out for pizza and delivered it to obscenely wealthy, pretty people in clothes that may have cost more than some people make in a year? That was…disturbing and klunky. It wasn’t Macfarlane-awful, but just vaguely icky.
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Gravity won best director. No, that was a terrible movie! The star was Orbital Mechanics, but Orbital Mechanics was falling-down drunk every day on the set, and Orbie kept sticking his face in front of the camera, even in scenes where he shouldn’t have been, and Cuarón just let him get away with it.
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John Travolta seemed to be stoned on smug, and couldn’t even manage to introduce someone properly, and called Idina Menzel “Adele Nazeem”. That was probably the name of a clam he knew in a past life.
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The award for the most embarrassingly stupid acceptance speech goes to Matthew McConaughey, who, in accepting an award for the role of a guy dying of AIDS, rambled on slickly and at length in praise of a god. I was already peeved — I was hoping Bruce Dern would win — so it did not console me that someone deserving had won it anyway.
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Oh, yeah, Nebraska got skunked. I had expectations that it would do well…it was one of my favorite movies this year. Something about a cranky old guy in a small midwestern town just spoke to me.
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Cate Blanchett thanked Woody Allen.
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Lupita Nyong’o gave the best speech of the evening. She won for a harrowing role, and it was well-deserved.
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12 Years a Slave won best picture. For once, I could agree with the Academy’s choice in this category — that was a powerful movie.
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Holy crap, it ended on time?