I always enjoy watching the Oscars show, and this year was no exception.
I liked having a host back on stage. The tag-team approach I recall from last year didn't work as well as Jimmy Kimmel providing a continuous presence -- for the whole 3 1/2 hours or so of the 3-hour show. One thing I've learned is to always add an hour to our DVR recording time, which came in handy this year.
The way I see it, watching the Oscars is a lot like watching sports. If you have a favorite team, you're going to root for them to win, even as you recognize that they may not be the absolute best team in the league.
I'd only seen three of the films nominated for Best Picture: Top Gun Maverick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. I loved the first two films. I didn't like Everything Everywhere All at Once.
So I was pleased when All Quiet on the Western Front and Top Gun Maverick won a bunch of lesser awards.
It wasn't a surprise when Everything Everywhere All at Once walked off with Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Screenplay, and a couple of other awards. But I felt that this film was overrated and the Academy went overboard on giving it so many awards.
That said, I enjoyed the acceptance speeches of the Everything Everywhere All at Once winners. Jamie Lee Curtis gave appealing remarks when she won Best Supporting Actress. I just don't think that this film is going to be remembered as a marvelous bit of movie-making.
It was quirky, creative, and trendy, given how the multiverse has captured people's attention, even though obviously there's no evidence it actually exists. A few years from now, I suspect Everything Everywhere All at Once will be viewed as a production that doesn't age well.
On the plus side, I was thrilled when Navalny got Best Documentary. The acceptance speech for Navalny was the only time Putin's horrendous invasion of Ukraine and his authoritarian rule of Russia was mentioned at the Oscars.
And having watched and hugely enjoyed RRR, an Indian film, I was rooting for it to win Best Original Song, which it did for the catchy “Naatu Naatu.” The dancing that accompanied the song was as infectious as it was in RRR itself.
Jimmy Kimmel had some good jokes. Naturally I can't remember most of them. One that sticks in my mind came near the end of the show when he observed that whoever edited the voluminous footage of the January 6 insurrection at the nation's capitol into a "film" that made the riot look like a tourist visit deserved an Oscar.
(It was Tucker Carlson of Fox News who fashioned that lie, of course.)
Lastly, my wife and I kept feeling sorry for whoever had to sit behind the woman wearing a large floppy white hat, or head covering. It seemed to us that this was a selfish thing to do, especially since no other people in the Oscars audience had anything comparable on their heads from what we could see.
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