Worst. Oscar. Telecast. Ever.

Hey Oscars you just had your best telecast ever, what are you going to do now? Well apparently the answer was blow the whole thing up and start from scratch. Because one year after the show's artistic highpoint, the new Oscar producers decided not to follow the perfect blueprint that had been laid out for them, but to instead totally overhaul what was barely, if at all, broken. Why present the awards in a logical way that tells a story and is able to rapidly fire off several like-themed categories in quick succession when you can hand them out haphazardly with no rhyme or reason whatsoever with a ton of dead air as presenters walk on and off stage? And why have a touching segment where all the acting nominees are honored by past winners in their category, when you can have random people of widely varying degrees of connection talk about only the lead acting nominees and then have the tributes to the supporting acting nominees being nothing more than ridiculously long clips packages that in several cases give away the endings to their movies? Why give out the Lifetime Achievement Award on the telecast when you can do an overlong tribute to someone with no connection at all to the Oscars? And why perform the nominated songs when you can have people from So You Think You Can Dance do interpretive dance routines to the nominated scores? Because that’s never not been a good idea.

I could go on, but I just don’t have the energy. I love the Oscars more than anything and every year I feel like I have to defend them against the usual “overlong, boring, pointless, etc.” critics. And I always read the same negative reviews and am baffled as to how these people could have been watching the same wonderful show that I was. So it brings me absolutely no joy to say that the Oscars last night were a boring, overlong, terrible train wreck of an awards show. And if I'm saying that about them then what hope is there for anyone else? It’s like when Lyndon Johnson said he knew he had lost the country when he lost Cronkite. (And yes I did just compare myself to Walter Cronkite). Even some incredibly deserving and popular acting winners and one all-time great speech couldn’t save the proceedings. And those things are usually all I need. All the producers needed to do was just stay out of their own way and the show was perfectly lined up to be a massive success. And that's the biggest shame of it all. Not only did they have deserving winners but they had to know they were going to have one of the biggest audiences ever. It’s not every year you have Avatar, Up, District 9, and The Blind Side. They didn’t need to do anything other than not fuck up. And yet they did just that at every turn. They lost The Masters on a gimme putt. And now I have to wait a whole nother year for a shot at watching a decent telecast.

(And let me just say now that if Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic are brought back as producers again next year, so help me God, I might have to write a very sternly worded letter to The President of the Academy’s personal assistant, or whoever opens his mail.)

Anyway, on to the details of and thoughts about the abomination that was:

*Morgan Freeman’s daughter is named Morgana Freeman? How did I never know this before? That’s amazing. Well done New James Earl Jones.

*Hey, what is Meryl Streep doing at the Oscars?!?

*I was just thinking, how can the Oscars get more gay? And then I saw the Neil Patrick Harris song and dance number.

(No offense to NPH, but do we all love him so much now that we’re not going to call bullshit on that thing? He did the best he could with it, but it was painfully unfunny and had absolutely nothing to do with anything. It wasn’t quite Snow White dancing with Rob Lowe but it wasn’t as far off as most people are pretending it was.)

*You know what the kids are into? Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin doing awkwardly silted stand up. Seriously, whose idea was this co-hosting thing? Steve Martin was great hosting by himself. Why pair him with someone with very limited live comedy experience. Hell, why pair him with anyone? And if you’re trying to make your show hipper and more mainstream, why Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin? What, were Dan Aykroyd and Christopher Walken not available? It never made any sense and it played out about as terribly as I thought it would. Just let Steve do it by himself next year okay and we’ll forget this whole thing ever happened. No really; we will. Trust me.
(Wow, I’m bitter. I’ll stop soon I promise.)

*Hey Oscars, Lawrence Welk called and he wants his bumper music back.
(You know what else the kids are into? Lawrence Welk jokes.)

*“That damn Helen Mirren” FTW

*“Uber Bingo” FTCENSW (For The Completely Expected Not-So Win)

*They’re not having performances of the nominated songs this year? What, was Beyonce busy?

*Wow, The Academy is really committed to this “Paris 36 is a real movie” ruse. They filmed a clip for it and everything.

*District 9 was inspired by events in South Africa? I thought it was inspired by “I couldn’t make Halo”.

*A Conversation
Sigourney Weaver to the Avatar Art Direction winners as she escorted them off the stage: “Hey remember that time when we just met for the first time right now?”

*Okay, playing “Don’t You Forget About Me" as the entrance music for Anthony Michael Hall, Macaulay Culkin and Ally Sheedy was unnecessarily cruel don’t you think?

*So just to recap:
Year of Marlon Brando’s death - no tribute
Year of Katherine Hepburn’s death - no tribute
Year of John Hughes’ death – seven minute long three-part tribute

Sure, it was a moving tribute and it made me want to go rewatch a bunch of John Hughes’ movies, but the man was never nominated for even a single Oscar. His tribute had absolutely no business being on that show. It was an inexplicable, unnecessary, and overlong bit of pandering to mainstream America that the Oscars should be better than. What’s next, a salute to Nora Ephron? Leave that shit to the People’s Choice awards. That was definitely a low point in my years of Oscar watching.

“Hey, Lauren Bacall I know you’ve waited fifty years to get your lifetime achievement award but we’re gonna have to limit your acceptance speech to clips from an off-site pre-taped dinner party so that we can make room for Judd Nelson to talk about what it was like to work on The Breakfast Club.” Speaking of which…

*Wow, Judd Nelson was available to come to the Oscars? Who would’ve thunk it?

*Damn it! The Coen Brothers screenplay snippet featured the word “equanimity”. I had “lugubrious” in my “Which Pretentious Word Will Be Featured In The A Serious Man Dialogue Snippet” office pool.

*You know what would be hilarious and unexpected? If one year Ben Stiller came out dressed in normal clothes and didn’t act like a total moron.
*Wow, major upset. Charlize Theron introduces a movie that’s not District 9. Did they choose her for Precious (based on the novel Push by Sapphire) because she’s African American?

*Something I actually said in all seriousness – “Why is Robin Williams presenting Best Supporting Actress? Where the hell is last year’s Best Supporting Actor winner? Was he too busy or something?"

*Sure Farrah Fawcett was missing, but to me the bigger question is where was Demi Moore’s career in that In Memoriam montage?

*Is James Cameron’s wife wearing blue on purpose? Please tell me she is.

*The Cove is the first Oscar nomination and win for Fisher Stevens? How is that possible?

*I didn’t see Burma VJ, but if its anything like Burma BJ then lemme just say that it got robbed.

*Hey, it’s Keanu Reeves introducing The Hurt Locker. I knew Point Break would someday be relevant at the Oscars.

*“Stay tuned for special guests”. More special than Tyler Perry? Not possible.

*Jeff Bridges: Now officially an Achiever

*It may have been my worst year ever for picks, but at least I won the “What’s the Forest Whitaker-Sandra Bullock Connection” contest almost instantly.

*Holy fucking spoiler alert Peter Sarsgaard!

*Okay Sandra, whatever I may think of the merits of your award, your speech was outstanding. Really. One of the best I can remember. Funny and touching and well written, but not overly written. And when you thanked your husband it was one of the realest moments I can recall ever seeing at the Oscars. The exact opposite of Mo’Nique’s speech which seemed like it had been test-marketed and rehearsed for weeks. So well done Sandra. Since you got an Oscar for in essence being a nice likable person, you at least came off exceedingly nice and likeable. I’m happy for you.

(At the same time – mothers never get thanked?? Don’t we have a whole day set aside for that very thing?)

*I was really praying that Barbara Streisand was going to follow up “The time has come…” with “for James Cameron to win a second Best Director Oscar!”

*Congrats Kathryn Bigelow. You’re now officially the best working female director who didn’t also ruin the Godfather saga.

*So the Best Director race really turned out the exact opposite of the 2008 Democratic Party Primary race didn’t it?

*Whoa there Tom Hanks, you didn't even have the condom on yet…

*Although part of me thinks we’ll look at The Hurt Locker in 50 years the way people look at Marty today, I’m certainly happy it won, and it was far preferable to the alternative, even if for only symbolic reasons. It was a good win for women, for art, and for the movie industry as a whole. May the art house movie live to see another day!