The Oscars almost didn't happen this year, thanks to the Hollywood writers' strike, and some people said that was a bad thing.
However, when the strike ended, the producers of the Oscars had a brainwave. "What's better than The Oscars That Didn't Happen?" they reasoned, "Why, The Oscars That Nobody Cares About!"
And, as such, the big winners at last night's Oscars were No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, La Vie En Rose, The Counterfeiters and Michael Clayton – a selection of films whose combined box office grosses would just about stretch to buying you a particularly nice clothes peg. Oh, and Ratatouille won an Oscar too, but hopefully the tremendous oversight of giving an award to a popular film that people actually liked will be rectified by next year.
This year's Oscars had something of a traumatic birth, thanks to the writer's strike. As the Golden Globes and the People's Choice awards fell victim to the strike, no amount of wheezy rhetoric could ever fully convince anyone that the Oscars would really go ahead unless the writers went back to work.
But the Oscars were saved by the bell when the strike ended in the nick of time, setting up the most talked about Oscars race in decades – who'd win Best Picture? Would it be that film that nobody went to see, that other film that nobody went to see, the other film nobody went to see that had George Clooney in it, Juno, or the film nobody went to see about British people bimbling sadly at each other?
Not a showstopping year for the Oscars, then, all said. In fact, the nominees for Best Picture were Michael Clayton – the 55th biggest movie of the last year – Atonement (the 53rd), There Will Be Blood (the 78th), No Country For Old Men (the 39th) and Juno (the 18th). More people went to see Alvin And The Chipmunks than any of the nominated movies, and that's a film about a shit-eating rodent for christ's sake.
But still, the Oscars are becoming synonymous with high-end, deeply unpopular movies, so this wasn't really a surprise. But, hey, who won the Oscars this year?
Well, if you've been keeping an eye on awards season prior to the Oscars, you'll have noticed that the two frontrunners were No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and that's the way it went last night, with No Country For Old Men winning four Oscars for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Directing, and There Will Be Blood scooping Best Actor and Best Cinematography.
Although hopefully there'll be some decent ridiculous Eddie Murphy-style controversy bubbling up from this year's Oscars in the next few days, the only really interesting things to happen during the ceremony were Steve Carell possibly saying the word 'shit', the three billion mindless clip montages and Helen Mirren doing something so preposterously actorly during her time on the microphone that we wanted to shatter her ankles. Oh, and if you missed the Oscars and have been looking for clips on YouTube, we should probably point out that Miley Cyrus wasn't the only person to turn up, despite what it looks like.
But, if not, this year's Oscars might just go down in history as the one that people cared least about. Perhaps next year a big Oscar could go to a film that's done well at the box office, just for a change. Yes, we're basically saying that Jumper deserves to win an Oscar. God help us all.
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gir says
Huh. I feel like I just saw this story.