Tuesday, February 26, 2013

To Be Loved & Understood


Yep, still love Patton Oswalt. If you have ten minutes -- and you have ten minutes -- spend it with him.

(Isn't the Internet perfect for short documentaries?)

The Oscars' James Bond 50th anniversary tribute


Forgot about my disappointment with this until Alex Heimbach reminded me. He's right, this video is better than the one they aired the other night.

What I want to know is, how difficult would it have been to get Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig onstage together? Let's say on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being impossible, it would have been a 7 or 8. We're talking about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and ABC here. Between them, couldn't they handle any degree of difficulty up to and including 9?

Monday, February 25, 2013

The Oscars sucked ...


... and were too long, and had a lousy host, and were predictable, and blah blah blah.

Okay, did we get all that out of our collective system? Good. Because here's the deal: the broadcast was just fine. Seth MacFarlane was as good a host as any other over the last ten years, and better than a few of them. For the most part, the event was predictable. The exceptions:

The supporting actor split
Hope you didn't have Tommy Lee Jones or Robert DeNiro in  your office Oscar pool. Fortunately for Christoph Waltz, those two gentlemen were kind enough to split the vote. I hope Waltz sends flowers.

"No BS" -- it's a tie
How often do we see a tie, as we did with sound editing? Turns out it's happened five times. It's such a rare event that presenter Mark Wahlberg had to declare that it was "no B.S."

Oops
I've seen flubs before, but never a falling actress. Good for her, though: Jennifer Lawrence handled herself with aplomb after tripping on the stairs en route to accepting her statue.

Ben Affleck was not nominated for Best Director
This one becomes more surprising every time I think about it.

Every year, I tell myself I am going to DVR the first hour so I can move through the program faster. Still haven't done it yet. Rest assured, if a new episode of The Walking Dead is running opposite it again, I'll have no choice but to put just such a plan in action.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Watch this: Searching for Sugar Man


If you haven't seen Searching for Sugar Man yet, I strongly recommend you check it out.

The Oscar-nominated documentary tells the story of a mysterious, talented musician who cut two lauded albums ... and then seemed to disappear off the face of the Earth, urban legends sprouting up to fill the space he left behind.

Sugar Man is many things, but right there at the top (for me, anyway) is the reminder it serves that for every Justin Bieber- or Taylor Swift-level megastar out there, there are likely thousands of other artists either toiling away in utter obscurity or far removed from their calling because they simply had to find another way to put food on the table. That's not Justin Bieber's fault, or Taylor Swift's; that's just the way it is.

The film is available on iTunes to rent. It'll be the best $4.99 you spend all week.

Saturday, February 23, 2013