The Academy Awards show is a lot like Christmas. The anticipation always excedes the actual event and you never get what you really want. Just ask Peter O'Toole. Or Kevin Connolly, who just lost his 20th nomination for Achievement in Sound Mixing. Of course no one in the Academy is going to vote for "Transformers," a re-make of a 1980s kids' television show that was, in reality, a blatant attempt to sell toys.
Everyone loves to trash the Academy Awards show. Yesterday morning on NPR I heard snarky comments about the poor quality of the writing, seeing as how it was thrown together in five days. But be fair, was it that great last year when a professionally written Ellen Degeneres hosted the show? Or when Letterman hosted it? A great deal of the words spoken are not written by writers at all, they are the hastily scribbled acceptance speeches penned by the lucky winners. Or, even worse, the stream of consciousness of the totally befuddled but nonetheless lucky winner, for whom English is a second lanuage.
Anyway, I still make a point to watch the show. It is a remnant of my single days when I saw movies in theaters. (I always assumed that once I got married, I'd always have a date for the movies. Wrong!) I always root for the films I've seen, few as they are.
This year, again as always, the films I saw did not win any major awards. However, last weekend my husband and I watched the "Bourne Ultimatum," which won three awards for Sound Mixing, Sound Editing and Film Editing.
The film itself was a disappointment, not much of a plot. Matt Damon tracks down and confronts Albert Finney, the creator of the program that robbed David Webb of his humanity and turned him into killing machine Jason Bourne. But there are plenty of shoot outs and car chases. It did have a lot of sound in it. Amazingly, the guns sounded just like guns and the car crashes sounded just like car crashes. They were loud too. So those two Oscars were well deserved. I suppose the film editing award was also well deserved, I remember there were a fair number of camera angles all seamlessly strung together in the car chases and gun fights.
Too bad those guys didn't have a better movie to work on.
Last year, I made a point of renting DVDs for all the winners and lived to regret it. "The Departed" was laboriously long. "The Last King of Scotland" was depressing beyond words. This year, I won't be renting "No Country For Old Men," or "There Will Be Blood." However, I think I'd like to see "Juno." It sounds kind of cheerry and there's no greed, no murder, and no Conflict with a Capital C that spans across decades until it explodes in a bloody final scene that takes ages to get to.
And since "Juno" is outgrossing "No Country For Old Men" at the box office, it looks like most of the movie going public is with me here.
