Largely what I expected, funnily enough.
The Oscars are done for another year, and again I was an avid watcher, even though they didn’t finish on our telecast until midnight local time. But they always go quickly for me, and I’ve always been a sucker for a good awards ceremony, so I lap it all up.
It helps when Jon Stewart is the host of course — his delivery is very different to someone like Billy Crystal, more droll standup and political humour, but definitely what I like.
The various winners were good to see — I haven’t actually seen many of the movies yet, but No Country for Old Men was heavily favoured to take the top prizes and deservedly won. My personal favourites included Ratatouille taking Animated Feature, and Diablo Cody winning for Original Screenplay for Juno (both of which I’ve seen.)
At the least, the various winners are great pointers to plan my DVD viewing around for the next few months, now that we gloriously actually have a good local video shop again.
And there’s something about a show like the Oscars that really moves me. Hollywood may be so full lof shit so much of the time, but there’s something very honest about the Oscars — the celebration of creativity and achievement, of honest emotions and the happiness of lives being led doing what you love — that is so inspirational, and probably much of what I love about the show. Moments like Diablo Cody breaking into tears with amazement at her Original Screenplay win, or co-star and songwriter from Once, Marketa Irglova, amazingly coming back to the stage to deliver her perfect little speech that she’d been cut off from earlier after her and Glen Hansard won Original Song (incidentally, that has to be the first time ever that Original Song went to song writers were were song performers and actors in the project all at once).
I guess it’s part of the dream to see people doing just what they’ve wanted to do and being rewarded for it. It makes me, and I guess all of us, feel like we can get there too.
(To add: There’s also the Oscar tipping comp at work, that I probably did quite well at, though I’ll have to find out tomorrow whether I did well enough to figure in the prizes … )