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The Good…the Bad…and Oscar’s ugly
My thoughts on the show? Definitely a mixed bag, with more chaff than wheat.
THE GOOD
As much as I dislike Gil Cates, if it was his idea to resurrect the showing of actual CLIPS (instead of trailers) for the Best Picture nominees, then kudos to him. Clips represent the movies much better, since we see trailers on TV all the time. They tell us NOTHING about the films.
THE BAD
The ENDLESS montages. Usually, I really like clip-fests if they’re done well. But there were simply TOO MANY of them, and they added NOTHING to the show except length. Gil Cates makes such a show about about keeping the speeches short, and then he throws 4 or 5 montages at us!. Three words: Pot. Kettle. Black.
I will stop short of saying Jon Stewart was bad—I think he did the best he could given all the sub-par material —but he was clearly out of his element.
THE UGLY
The MUSIC! That awful, AWFUL musical wallpaper that swamped every single speech with a sea of sap! That may have been the WORST producing decision since Alan Carr got Snow White and Rob Lowe together. And even that was hilariously bad!
Why they keep asking Cates back completely mystifies me….whenever someone else handles the show, I have always enjoyed it more. I agree with my best friend and fellow film buff Scott Copeland, who says Cates ought to take a tip from the Golden Globes, which are always more fun to watch because Dick Clark’s team doesn’t strait-jacket everyone.
Actually, I have even better advice for Cates—-learn how to quit us, will ya?
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Oscars Sunday Night
Comments
By SRCputt
March 6, 2006 8:07 AM | Link to this
The background music was easily the worst idea since having a tap dancer perform to the Life Is Beautiful score. One other ugly: the sad attempts of the orchestra to perform the Brokeback Mountain score. Don’t any of those guys own a guitar?By Allison
March 6, 2006 3:53 AM | Link to this
Now I actually enjoyed Jon Stewart. Maybe it’s because I’m a huge fan of his already, but I thought he was a huge improvement on the overly acerbic Chris Rock from last year. I thought the fake political ads were hilarious, and obviously his touch as anyone who religiously watches the Daily Show can attest. :) The rest of it, I am in complete agreement. I thought that production-wise, it was a pretty freakin bland show. I’ll be bloggin on more of this at my own site tomorrow. lol