Oscar thoughts

Blogging to you from the greater Los Angeles area, your CaliBlogger is obligated to post his thoughts on the Oscars, so here they are, in no particular order.

Scorsese should have a trunkload of Oscars, and the fact that The Departed is not his best work is beside the point.

And by the way, when he joined the group of Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, and later Nicholson, the entire center of gravity here in LA shifted to the sidestage of the Kodak theater. So many heavyweights in so small a space ran the risk of coalescing under its own gravity like some kind of cinematic black hole.

I love Pilobolus Dance Company and their silhouette images were clever, but every time they did one (after the first) the show, clunky to begin with, came to a grinding halt.

Ditto Ellen DeGeneres' set pieces, though they did show how darned cute and funny she is. Hint for next time, before trying impromptu banter with an actor at the Oscars, be sure to give them a script first, or a least warn them, Mark Wahlberg and Scorsese looked like deer in headlights, though Eastwood and Spielberg were a tiny bit better.

The band playing off Al Gore after his bit with Leo DiCaprio was a nice self-mocking touch (for both Gore and the Academy). Am I the only one wondering, though, just how does one make an awards ceremony "green"?

Least surprising moment: An Inconvenient Truth wins for best feature length documentary.

Most surprising moment: Melissa Etheridge wins best song over the Dreamgirls juggernaut, (though frankly Mrs. CaliBlogger agrees with James Wolcott).

Talk about coattails.

And one final thought, quoting Mr. Wolcott:

The most dispiriting thing about the Oscars so far is how good everybody looks. There's no hope for the rest of us. No one we can point to and say, Hey, he's in worse shape than I am. (Or she.) We might as well cancel our next facial and forget about every follicle of our hair glowing like a Van Gogh wheat field or polished mahagony.

Or, more succinctly, damn but these are good looking people!