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Well, the 2014 Oscars are history and the offensive Seth MacFarlane hosting era has been replaced by the bland Ellen Degeneres hosting era. In the Nerd Categories, FROZEN won best animated film, and Mr. Hublot by Laurent Witz and Alexandre Espigares (above) won Best Animated Short, a big upset for those who went with Torsten’s voting guide.This steampunky French offering looks great, though, but then so do all the nominees these days.

The SF film GRAVITY, a favorite at Stately Beat Manor, won best visual effects, cinematography (another snub for the great Roger Deakins!), editing, directing, score and the two twin sound awards, sound mixing and sound editing.

Other than that, perhaps what this year’s Oscars will be remembered for is Degeneres ordering three pizzas and handing out slices to the front row of Hollywood superstars. I thought this bit was excruciating, and it resulted in horrible things like this:
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People do not watch the Oscar to see Brad Pitt eating pizza just like the rest of us! They watch them to see movie stars looking supernal and glamourous. All I could think was grease spills on Vera Wang, and that is not a pleasant thought. Plus, what if someone didn’t want to eat their pizza? Did they just put the plate under their chair and have to sit there with cold pizza underfoot? Ugh.

To take your mind off that, here is a picture of Chris Hemsworth and Charlize Theron looking supernal and glamourous. Not eating pizza.

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Other odd moments:

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Pharrell’s hat is really a thing now.

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John Travolta was concentrating so hard at keeping his hair on that he called Idina Menzel by the name “Adele Dazi.”

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Liza Minelli hug-bombed Lupita Nyong’o.

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Benedict Cumberbatch proved he is the king of Tumblr by photo bombing U2.

And then there was the Steve McQueen/John Ridley feud. Neither the winning director of 12 Years a Slave, McQueen, not the winning screenwriter, Ridley, thanked each other, and they avoided one another on stage. McQueen’s half hearted clapping when Ridley won—and Ridley’s look of disdain as he passed McQueen—was brutal.

Ridley—who spent some time writing comics, including The American Way for Wildstorm—is known as an opinionated guy. According to Nikki Finke, the feud stems from a disagreement over the credits for the screenplay.
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Oh well, let’s forget about unpleasantness and think about how we can get Joseph Gordon Levitt and Emma Watson to star in a comic book movie together.

13 COMMENTS

  1. Somebody make sure that Chris Hemsworth & Charlize Theron don’t make any babies. The resulting progeny would surely be gods and rule the Earth for generations to come.

  2. I thought there was supposed to be a time-limit for speeches. Woe for the days of Johnny Carson hosting the show.

  3. This was by far the most tedious Oscars show that I’ve sat through. Even during the years with bad hosts I didn’t feel this way. DeGeneres was incredibly dull. The LA Times called this year’s show an over-correction from last year, and I can’t say that I disagree.

  4. There still is a time limit for speeches, but obviously the actors, director, and Best Picture winners are obviously exempt from such things.

  5. Last year Oscar did a ghastly James Bond montage, but at least I understood the hype-point: SKYFALL had been a big success and the director had a measure of “serious” fame in the eyes of the Oscar community.

    This time, the montages, while not terrible, were sort of “why are they doing this?” Why salute animation with snippets of nothing but recent animated films? The “superhero montage” ranged a little further, including down-to-earth “action heroes” like Rick of Casablanca and the Kevin Bacon character from FOOTLOOSE (??WT–?), but what was the point of it? To covertly acknowledge that superhero/adventure films are frequently bringing home the bacon for Hollywood even though Oscar won’t honor them for anything but makeup and FX?

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