Wednesday, March 10, 2010

And the Oscar goes to...The Hurt Locker!


Well, that’s a wrap folks. What an anti-climax for “Avatar”! After all the hype, it only managed to walk away with 3 Oscars, while rival “The Hurt Locker” picked up a whopping 6. I realized that I forgot to make my predictions, but the awards went mostly as expected. The big surprises for me were:

“The Hurt Locker” winning Best Picture (couldn’t quite imagine such a low-grossing film winning the big one)

“Precious” beating “Up in the Air” for Best Adapted Screenplay.

“The Hurt Locker” preventing an “Avatar” sweep in the more technical categories.

General Thoughts on the ceremony:
- It was quite evident that Avatar wasn’t going to win, pretty much everyone who went on stage had a wisecrack about the film and it was clear that “Avatar” didn’t have much respect within the Academy.
- We love you on So You Think You Can Dance, but Adam Shankman, you did a poor job producing the Oscars. In particular, the dancing to the nominees for Original Score was a hot mess. As the good people at Awards Daily described it, the music was great, the dancing was great, but together not so much. It didn’t make sense at all to have street dancers with the music from films like “Up” and “Sherlock Holmes”. Bring back the Orginal Song performances!
- The show was definitely better last year (which I thought was one of the best Oscar ceremonies in recent history), it had such a classy feel to it. This year’s ceremony had a somewhat cheap Vegas feel to it.

Looking back, I am still unsure of what I feel about the 10-nominee situation. Although I am glad that it allowed great movies like “District 9” to get in, I also think that it also cast the net a bit too far in allowing “The Blind Side” to get nominated. The Best Picture nominees this year however, were some of the most compelling and diverse films I have seen in recent Oscar races. Let’s go 2010!

Full list of winners

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