I thought you guys didn't buy into the Academy Awards hype. Is it that the Oscars are too big a cultural event that you guys feel you can't not cover it live?
Personally, a mention of the major awards won later in the evening or even the next day is plenty. Watching several hours of sometimes beautiful and sometimes talented people weep over some secret cabal of media moguls recognizing their work doing the most coveted and overpaid job in the world is not my idea of a good time.
I'm done. The ten or so tweets I read remind me of how I never want to sound. But perhaps I've already been assimilated. Please God, deliver me. I'll even go to Palm Sunday mass this year.
@1 and @3: Sorry it's not for you. When CoverItLive moved too fast, people stopped reading. When we moderated CoverItLive comments, people got upset if their comments didn't show up in the feed and stopped reading.
So what I'm saying here is that no solution is perfect for live-Slogging. People come away unhappy no matter what we choose to do. That's just the nature of running a blog. As it is, Twitter is the easiest solution we've encountered, more people can participate when we use Twitter, and the comments are open for conversation and for things we have to say that don't fit in the Twitter-box. I hope you know we're not doing this to annoy you; we're just trying to figure this stuff out as we go along.
Coveritlive was fun. Since that's not happening, with no community flavor this thing can't compete with the people who actually are blowing it up on Twitter. Have fun though! Maybe it'll be profile-raising, or something.
I have no idea how people are going to write about this thing tomorrow. I don't think it was a disaster, any more than the other recent Oscar shows, but I do think it was too self-referential to be very good. Also: Not funny.
@ 2, I don't give a crap for the Oscars, either. I haven't since I was a kid. But lots and lots of people do, including lots of regular Slog readers. Let them have their fun. (Slog used to liveblog the Super Bowl, too...)
I don't get the gimmick of "sung live" about Les Miz. It's not live; it's a movie. They could have manipulated it to hell and gone and the audience wouldn't know. It's not better for it; it's not better music, either. It's not even close to the best singing in a movie, "live" or not.
The scene where Matt Helm's round bed tilts up and slides him into the pool for a morning dip, followed by the round things that rise up out of the floor covered with towelling, that spin so he can dry off against them, blow away anything Bond ever dreamt of.
The Oscar writers said "let's do a show with a tribute to musicals", but everyone in the room was only twenty years old and so all they could think of was Chicago. Be grateful they were too young to remember Romeo + Juliet.
Holy shit. Holy shit that was awful. Holy fucking shit that was awful. Everything about that was awful except for Daniel Day-Lewis, Jennifer Lawrence, Adele, and Christoph Waltz.
He wasn't THAT bad. Not good by any means, but not as bad as Franco, not by a long shot. His jokes didn't all work, but at least he was chuckin' 'em in there. Franco was a friggin' zombie. And another Billy Crystal show is just too painful to think about. Remember, it's the ludicrously pompous and self-impressed Oscars we're talking about; Tina Fey and Amy Poehler would never be allowed within a mile of them, let alone Ricky Gervais. It's a no-win situation.
My pick for next year is Liam Neeson, standing stock still and haranguing the audience with his stand-up material that he worked on with Ricky on "Life's Too Short". Totally grim, totally deadpan, totally uncomfortable. That's the show I want to see. I want to see actors in tears. I want to see people walk out.
1. MacFarlane wasn't the worst host ever (sadly, that must go to James Franco, much as I love him otherwise), but he was a long way from good. Please ask Hugh Jackman to host next year. Or anybody with an ounce of talent.
2. Loved Adele's acceptance speech. Also, Daniel Day-Lewis. Terantino looked drunk (but he always looks sorta drunk, so who knows).
3. I love Michelle Obama, but the live feed was a bit weird.
4. The closing number was cringe-worthy. Just painful. MacFarlane should be banned forever on the basis of that alone. A particularly dickish way to insult all the nominees that didn't win.
Minus one million points to the Academy, for including all manner of executives and publicists and car parkers and whatever the fuck on the death reel, but leaving off the immortal HAL DAVID, who wrote about a hundred top movie songs including the Oscar-winner "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head", "Alfie", "The Look of Love" (from "Casino Royale"), "What's New Pussycat?". He died in September.
At least James Franco was terrible. He was 10000000x more interesting by being horrible than Seth was by being thoroughly mediocre. Seth was purely boring, and there's nothing worse than being a boring host.
Jack Black turned in the best acting performance last year. Sounds insane but if you saw it think about how he absolutely channeled Bernie Tiede. The movie completely pivoted on Black's performance and he nailed it. Linklater is a great director too, and the film was very interesting in how it hybridized acting with documentary testimonial. Wouldn't call in a snub, just a type of film that doesn't show up on the academy's radar.
Was there an actual awards ceremony? I turned it off after 20 minutes of Seth MacFarlane masturbating and telling misogynistic and near-racist non-jokes. Yawn.
long live CoveritLive
Personally, a mention of the major awards won later in the evening or even the next day is plenty. Watching several hours of sometimes beautiful and sometimes talented people weep over some secret cabal of media moguls recognizing their work doing the most coveted and overpaid job in the world is not my idea of a good time.
Also, git off my lawn!
Oh wait. I guess I also hope Zero Dark Thirty wins nothing. Fuck those torture justifiers.
So what I'm saying here is that no solution is perfect for live-Slogging. People come away unhappy no matter what we choose to do. That's just the nature of running a blog. As it is, Twitter is the easiest solution we've encountered, more people can participate when we use Twitter, and the comments are open for conversation and for things we have to say that don't fit in the Twitter-box. I hope you know we're not doing this to annoy you; we're just trying to figure this stuff out as we go along.
Best Bond Film?
/writingmyownlamejokes
Thunderball was solid, but it also felt like Connery's most cornball performance as Bond.
OK, I'm about an hour behind y'all, and I just saw Travolta's hair. Wut.
Not that I thought either of them would ever win another oscar ever again
My pick for next year is Liam Neeson, standing stock still and haranguing the audience with his stand-up material that he worked on with Ricky on "Life's Too Short". Totally grim, totally deadpan, totally uncomfortable. That's the show I want to see. I want to see actors in tears. I want to see people walk out.
2. Loved Adele's acceptance speech. Also, Daniel Day-Lewis. Terantino looked drunk (but he always looks sorta drunk, so who knows).
3. I love Michelle Obama, but the live feed was a bit weird.
4. The closing number was cringe-worthy. Just painful. MacFarlane should be banned forever on the basis of that alone. A particularly dickish way to insult all the nominees that didn't win.
Fuck the Academy.
http://safetynotguaranteedmovie.com/