82nd Annual Snooze Festival

The Academy Awards definitely sneaked up on me this year.  I didn't even know they were going to be tonight before I checked my e-mail and saw an announcement on the Yahoo homepage.  For some reason, I wasn't really looking forward to them enough to keep track of the date.

However, I tuned in at 5:00 sharp and watched the whole thing.  Now that I have endured the three-plus hour award ceremony, I know why I wasn't excited for this.  To put it lightly, it was a load of bore.

It's often exciting when you see a movie or several movies that you really liked snatching up awards left and right. Here, this effect only really applied when "Inception" started sweeping the technical awards.  The rest of the awards were distributed amongst movies I either haven't seen yet, don't ever want to see, or just plain didn't like.  

The effect I described worked in the opposite when I saw movies like "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Wolfman" getting awards.  Sure, they were for things like costumes and art direction, but still.  Those movies were awful, and their names don't even deserve to be uttered alongside this year's greats.  By the way, how the hell did "Alice" win for Best Comedy/Musical at the Golden Globes?!  There were way better comedies that came out this year (*ahem* Scott Pilgrim *ahem*).

Now, let's run down the major award winners.  "Black Swan" surprisingly only netted like one award that I can remember, a long-overdue Best Actress nod to Natalie Portman.  Out of all the Best Picture hopefuls, this is the one that I have the most interest in seeing.  "The Social Network" is up there, but I probably won't see it just out of defiance of this movie about Facebook being the movie for my generation.  That one really locked horns with "Inception" over the technicals, and it ended up being a pretty even split between them.

"True Grit" is one that I want to see, "The Kids Are Alright" and "Winter's Bone" are ones that I can take or leave, but the one that I really have no desire to see, at all, ever, is this year's Best Picture "The King's Speech."  Blah blah blah, the King has a speech impediment, blah blah blah, historical significance, blah blah blah, overcoming adversity, blah blah blah, blatant Oscar baiting, blah.

There were several notable snubs this year.  The only recognition Chris Nolan's film-making genius got this year were shout-outs in special effects editors' acceptance speeches, and Daft Punk was never even considered for their radically cool and different score for "Tron: Legacy."

Even more notable were those that we lost this year.  Leslie Nielsen?!!  Pete Postlethwaite?!! IRVIN KERSHNER?!! DINO DE LAURENTIIS?!!! Hollywood lost a lot of great, talented people this year.

So there you have it, last year in cinema.  A lot of people failed to get recognition, even more people died, and the best picture of the year was the same movie it seemingly always is.  The prospects for this year seem much better, but we won't really know what the Oscar lineup will be until those movies start coming out the month before next year's awards.  We can only hope.

And now, I took my laundry downstairs during the cheesy grade-school song sequence at the end, so I better check on that.