BLOGGIN' BIN REVUE

Thoughts On That Other Award Show

Friends, as you well know, the winners of the 2010 Binnie Awards were announced last week. Well, there are a lot of other award shows out there that like to ride our coat-tails, and one of them had their little award show last night: The 82nd Annual Academy Awards.

I tried watching the Oscars last night and found the show to be, in a word, unwatchable.

This is not me having a snit over who won or didn’t win awards (congratulations to all).  And the stage looked very nice. 

Otherwise… YOWZA.

This might have been the worst Oscars I’ve ever seen.  The bit with Tina Fey and Robert Downey, Jr. was really good.  Otherwise, every scripted word of the show was so bad, I couldn’t sit through more than a couple minutes of the show at a time. 

I love how Alec Baldwin has reinvented himself from Leading Man to Cutthroat Suit, and Steve Martin still has some good will with me for his work from 1982 – 1992, but how did anyone think having host together was a good idea?  Could the organizers not agree on a single host?  And if they must go with multiple hosts (hardly unprecedented), couldn’t they at least get hosts who can riff off each other?

Maybe that’s unfair, because you can’t really blame Martin and Baldwin for the awful, awful, awful jokes they had to read off the teleprompter (if Steve Martin wrote them, he’s been smart enough to omit the show off the “Writer” portion of his IMDB page).  Let me put it this way: When the less-than five minute recap of the award show highlighting the funny parts is unwatchable, then your award show blows chunks.

Also, did anyone else find the tribute to John Hughes painful to watch?  And I don’t mean the way the stars of my youth have aged (sure, that made me feel old, but considering that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is nearly 25 years old, that’s just inevitable).  I just found it to be really awkward, particularly the way someof the stars of were unveiled halfway through the tribute, like we were supposed to applaud them for being behind the screen.  Was this supposed to be a surprise party?  And there certainly seemed to be a lot of no-shows: Was Andrew McCarney busy that night?  Did the Sheen brothers show up at the wrong building?  Weird.

Also weird: Having the clip of John Hughes talking about how he pulls from his own experience as a youth followed by the burlgars from “Home Alone” slipping on marbles and being beamed in the head with paint cans.  I really hope that was just poor editing and not an example of what John Hughes’ childhood was like.

Last thought: I found the story behind the Oscar’s “Kanye” moment here at Salon.com.