After the Oscars

I guess the best thing about the Oscars broadcast was that it was so long and boring, I was able to work on my income taxes and read some of China Mieville's wonderful novel for young audiences, Un Lun Dun, while watching it. Even by Oscars standards, the ceremony was lame, tame and interminable, starting with the early effusions that this year, the show would be about "the nominees." (As opposed to what? The wonderful films that didn't get nominated for Academy Awards? Great, I'm sick of hearing about them.)

As host, Ellen Degeneres' amiable cute/awkward shtick simply made the evening seem even longer than it needed to: How about getting somebody who just tells fast, efficient jokes? Jerry Seinfeld was funny presenting the Best Documentary Oscar: Could he host next year? Cintra Wilson of Salon.com aptly summed up Degeneres' style: "While wandering through the intimidatingly A-list audience, chock-full of her wonky, trademark Yep! I sure am me! silliness, Ellen proved that Ellen is always just Ellen, and always just talks about Ellen."

Certainly it came as a palpable sense of relief that Martin Scorsese won Best Director. Probably nobody wanted to see Scorsese denied yet again, and affection for him probably gave The Departed the edge in winning Best Picture over Babel and Little Miss Sunshine. One of the evening's most amusing moments came when Stephen Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas coming out to present Best Director. Spielberg and Coppola said they were there to talk about the joy of winning one, and Lucas saying, "Wait, I never won a Best Picture Oscar."

Jennifer Hudson won Best Supporting Actress but the Academy continued to diss Dreamgirls: Alan Arkin won Best Supporting Actor instead of Eddie Murphy (the decision to release Murphy's Norbit during Oscar season probably didn't help). And Dreamgirls' three Best Song nominees seem to have cancelled each other out, letting Melissa Etheridge pick up the statuette for her An Inconvenient Truth tune. Between her win and Degeneres' hosting, lesbians were arguably the evening's big winners.

And while I enjoyed the classy acceptance speeches from Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker, I'd just as soon not be reminded that Ben Affleck is an Oscar-winning screenwriter, or that composer Ennio Morricone, who deserves his lifetime achievement award for such classic soundtracks as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, also scored such films as Orca and Exorcist II: The Heretic. And boy, those celebrities sure are proud of themselves for being green. It's like they just can't get over the fact that they know Al Gore personally.

Mostly, the show was neither hip enough nor tacky enough to hold much attention. Probably the most entertaining moment of the show was Will Ferrell, Jack Black and John C. Reilly doing a hilarious musical number about how the Academy never rewards comedy. I was similarly amused to see those weird, Mummenschanz-style interpretive dancers create the shape of the Snakes on a Plane logo – otherwise, the show seemed to be in a cultural vacuum, apart from requisite references to YouTube and MySpace.

And I don't know why a program that's so long invariably includes so many "themed" movie montages, but it was fun to see clips of Ed Wood and Barton Fink in the one about writers; Talladega Nights and O Brother Where Art Thou? in the one about Americana; and Babette's Feast, The Official Story and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the montage about foreign film winners. Oh yeah – movies are fun and interesting! Why can't the movie awards follow suit?