So, yeah. Birdman, Or (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu Finally Pulls One Over On The Academy) won Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director and Best Cinematography at the Oscars last night, shivving Richard Linklater’s Boyhood wherever possible — except for Best Supporting Actress, which went to Boyman‘s Patricia Arquette instead of Birdhood‘s Emma Stone — and generally demonstrating that when it comes to the Academy, you cannot fucking go wrong with a movie about how great it is to be a committed artist in this business we call show.
Oh, also you should play someone with a disease, as Eddie Redmayne and Julianne Moore did, or eat the frame like J.K. Simmons in Whiplash. That works too.
I wrote a few hundred words about it for the NOW site. Read ’em if you want. Whatever. Everything is decidedly not awesome.
Oh, wait: Hot Tub Time Machine 2 tanked over the weekend while McFarland and The DUFF did okay, so maybe it’s just the Oscars that have lost their minds. The rest of us seem more sensible.
FYI, Grand Budapest Hotel won four Oscars last night, not three. Original Score, Costume Design, Production Design, and Makeup & Hairstyling.
Fixed!
I wish more (or any) people were talking about the song I’m Not Gonna Miss You, nominated from the documentary about Glen Campbell. Both my husband and I currently have or have had close relatives affected by Alzheimer’s, and this song hit both of us hard. I know it wasn’t splashy, frenetic eye candy like Everything is Awesome and it certainly didn’t stand a chance against Glory, which was incredibly well staged and well performed, but it was an honest, moving song. It sounds like maybe it was more honest than the movie Still Alice, no matter how good Julianne Moore may have been in it.
I don’t think enough voters saw the film, honestly. And subtle songs almost never win that prize — it always goes to something more bombastic or stirring. In addition to being both of those things, “Glory” also had the good fortune to represent a movie that had no chance at winning anything else …