Shouting Grounds

Live blog for the 2008 Academy Awards:

• Already starting off on the wrong fucking foot…I got everything done by 7CST so that I could LiveBlog this garbage, and at the stroke of 7 ABC starts their “Red Carpet Countdown”. I double check oscars.com to see what time the show is supposed to start, and it shows 8EST. What the fuck is this bullshit? If you’re gonna do a shitty pregame, post the REAL time of the awards on the website at least. If I wanted to see the red carpet masturbation with Regis “Traded my balls for notoriety among middle-aged women” Philbin, I would have turned into E! for their crap. The last thing I want to see is semi-retarded people like John Travolta speak out-of-character. GODDAMNIT.
• I would say more about this part of the show, but I’m still just pissed off that I’ve been trick-fucked into watching. I’m gonna turn the channel until the real shit starts.
• Flip back to the show just in case this crap won’t run an hour, and there’s a timer counting down to 7:30. Regis is interviewing some really sad looking citizens, asking them about Mylie Cyrus. WHO THE FUCK CARES ABOUT THIS BULLSHIT. Channel changed.
• The intro sequence is cool in that there’s a ton of movie characters interacting in a CG Hollywood, but ruined by the fact that we’re moving through it following a UPS truck driven by the Terminator. Jesus Christ, is nothing sacred?
• At least Jon Stewart is back. If it were Ellen again I’d not be writing this right now…nor watching the show.
• OH SHIT! Wesley Snipes is in the crowd?! Someone call someone.
• The opening monologue was pretty good, I did laugh at one or two points.
• Ben Affleck’s wife is pretty hot, but something about the way she’s reading her lines makes me queasy.
• Why the goddamn academy insists on keeping awards like costume design on the big show I’ll never know. This is the reason why the whole damned thing runs 8x too long…move the bullshit awards to a preshow like the technical awards. The asshole that slaved for hours to make Eddie Murphy look like an 80 year old man is NOT more important than the asshole that slaved for months to make a more comfortable and environmentally sound director’s chair.
• Steve Carell annoys me.
• Best makeup…file this with costumes…nobody cares goddamnit. Strike that, I’m sure about 6 people care, but they suck.
• Since when is Hollywood calling the Rock Dwayne Johnson? What did he do besides his awesome performance in Be Cool to drop his wrestling moniker and become a serious actor?
• Golden Compass beat Pirates 3 and Transformers for best special effects?! Jesus christ. CocaCola has been doing animated Polar Bears for over 10 years…lame.
• Redscape and I have spoke on this before, Cate Blanchett and sometimes look hot and sometimes look terrifyingly manish. Tonight she looks pregnant.
• Johnny Depp is just cool all the time…but his wife is missing a tooth. Hockey?
• How fair is it that the art directors for Sweeney Todd win? The movie’s based on a Broadway musical, and my opinion, half of their work was done…am I wrong?
• Jennifer Hudson couldn’t have been anymore wooden reading her lines for best supporting actor (which I hope little Affleck wins, although PSH is a great actor, and I can’t wait to see Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men)
• Bardem wins Best Supporting, I’m extremely happy for the Coens…they’re great at their craft(s).
• The two Best Songs performed so far have sucked. I hearken back to the days of “It’s Hard out here for a Pimp“
• If we’re lucky, Owen Wilson will succeed where he failed months ago while on stage.
• Okay…foreign shit. Make an “Academy for Foreign Awards” and cut this shit out too. It’ll save us all about 45 minutes of time that we’ll never get back. I’m an American and I want to watch the Oscars for American cinema. If you don’t agree, there are other websites for you to be reading, I’m not breaking your arm.
• The animated-character presentation that started way back when, can that nonsense too. We’re not fooled, and if you think that a 10 year-old made it through the last hour of bullshit awards, speeches and montages, you’re fooling yourself. I’m seconds from turning this crap off, you really think this is more interesting to a kid than Guitar Hero?
• Tilda Swinton hurts to watch.
• I love Sydney Poitier.
• WHY is Mylie Cyrus involved with the Academy Awards?! She’s not nominated for anything…she’s never won anything…and see my argument above about there not being an audience of young people to cater to. Keep the fucking show on task…GODDAMNIT.
• Jessica Alba’s got some mommie-bags. And she did the tech-pre show…should have done the fuckin other useless shit then too.
• w00t! Jack Nicholson.
• Yay! The Coens win for screenplay from existing material. Good.
• I don’t understand how a movie like Bourne Ultimatum (awesome) beats out Transformers in sound editing…I think Transformers had pretty outstanding audio effects, while Bourne had relatively mundane action movie audio effects…
• Great…best actress award goes to someone from a completely foreign film.
• While the third Best Song was complete crap, the forth is relatively good, and no, not only because it’s from an Irish movie. Contrasting this song to the first three is like contrasting an orgasm to a cockpunch.
• As a man growing old in Hollywood, are you forced to wear a white scarf?
• FUCK…was there any OTHER music in Hollywood this year than in this crap from Enchanted?! Three of the five songs are from the same fuckin movie. Put Johnny Depp’s ass up there to sing something from Sweeney Todd or something. Shit…this knob singing the last one looks like a Real World reject.
• Piss…Sweeney Todd wouldn’t have original songs.
• w00t! The Irish song won…take that Enchanted, tricking the odds doesn’t always win you shit. Assholes.
• Shit on me…the original Moneypenny died.
• They actually had some real soldiers in Iraq present an award. That’s pretty awesome. Way to acknowledge that we still have soldiers over there and there’s still a war going on.
• If SiCKO wins for docu, will they let Michael Moore speak? It didn’t.
• Man, Harrison Ford is aging well. Though it seems like his speech is getting slower. I hope that’s just the way he’s reading and not something wrong with the guy.
• Juno wins best original screenplay. My wife just saw that movie today, and claims it was really good. I just have no interest in seeing it. This writer woman has a badass tattoo on her right shoulder.
• I’m inclined to root for George Clooney, if only because he’s been my guy for many years…but this fight has Daniel Day Lewis, Johnny Depp, Tommy Lee Jones and VIGGO…christ. Quite a sampling of great modern actors. I’m torn. Whoever wins I’m happy. It’s DDL…I gotta see There Will be Blood.
• We just tripped over 3 hours runtime…c’mon.
• They just showed the last bit of James Cameron’s speech from when he won for Titanic, he said “I’m the king of the world”…what a fuckin tool. You wanna impress me get off your asshole and make another True Lies.
• Marty Scorcese is wearing the same tux from last year I think. Maybe they just freeze dry him and rehydrate his shit for these shows.
• I hope the Coens win Best Directors.
• w00t!!! They did! Fuck yeah!!
• Shit on a dog! They just won best picture too.

Aside from a few bits of Jon Stewart, some of the awards and getting to see some of the familiar faces, I could have skipped this whole thing. It was far too drawn out and seemed that most of it was all about honoring itself.

If anyone’s reading this and has some pull with the Academy, trim the fat next year. Please. There’s no reason why this should run longer than 120 minutes, and you’ll still have time for the montages and shit if you just cut out the unnecessary garbage.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.