Why not?
I mean, why the hell not?
Everyone else does it - this live blog thing.
(Here's my tree-falls-in-the-forest question: If someone is writing a live blog during the Oscars, does that mean that someone is actually paying attention?)
Of course not. That's why you do a live blog - with the full and comfortable realization that no one is paying attention.
So here goes...
8:30: Interesting - first musical chords from "Lawrence of Arabia." Why? Nostalgia...
8:43: The opening number, what was not to like, honestly? Lively, energetic, funny, imaginative, different, charming, intimate, downscale...Jackman's opening number, any opening number, isn't just a scene-setter but a tone-setter, and get the tone wrong and you get the night wrong; by staging from a proscenium, and forging - or forcing - an intimacy with the audience - Jackman (who knows how to work those large unwieldy human masses) established a link. That's really hard to do. And this - the fact that the nominated movies are so small, and the fact that the stage is so small, was a wise bit of stage craft...
8:47: Good Lord, talk about blasting away the good will that Jackman worked so hard to establish...this long stuffy intro for BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS (God, you'd think this was a Nobel to be conferred)...the Academy puts us right back where we're so accustomed to being on this show - a place long of wind, and full of self. Certainly like Penelope, but she's acting like her shiny little thing is a Nobel for discovering the cure to cancer.
8:56: Best Original Screen play: Every year the Academy DESPERATELY tries to breath life in this award, make if friendly to audiences who don't read. Make it funny, they demand. That way the morons will pay attention! And it nevet ever works. Nor does this one. Steve and Tina - just...bot...happening...' This award is best given quickly, and without any fuss. A fine award..but people want stars, not writers. (Which is probably why no one reads live blogs...) "Milk" gets it. The movie that a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the national audience has seen, but which plays big with a tiny, tiny crowd inside the Kodak... Followed by Best Adapted..."Slumdog..."
9:03: Jen and Jack: Did I just say people "want the stars..." The pain, the pain...Just a half hour in and this is already turning into a deeply annoying broadcast. How can the Academy take something like best animated and turn into something akin to the scraping of fingernails across the chalkboard. But they did just that. "Wall E" gets it - a sad throwaway award for a movie that shoulda been nominated for best movie.
9:17: Art direction. I'm sure this is an important category, but am terribly sorry to say that - year after year (after year) the Oscars try to bring meaning and relevance to this one, and fail badly. We can understand "direction" but append that word "art" and I'm lost at sea...Costume design...that makes sense. "The Duchess" scores here and rightly so.
9:36: Well, praise be we got the Joaquin Phoenix jokes out of the way, quickly and harmlessly, relatively speaking.
9:46: Snark at the Oscars - been around forever and it's the industry's way of defusing its self-importance, and pretensions, while telling the world that it really doesn't take all this nonsense seriously..and that...and that...and hat's why God invented James Franco/Seth Rogen. But no one, no one, believes them when they make fun of themselves and the most important (and self-important) awards telecast on the planet . That's why long sketches like this one are so deadly.
9:49: I'm thinking, for no reason at all, that this is shaping up to be a pretty forgettable broadcast. Is redemption around the corner - or just after t his far more intriguing and adsorbing commercial about something?
9:55: Beyonce, Zac Efron, and Hugh - this is the set-piece of the night, and it's terrifically old-fashioned. Aspiring for elegance and pulling ancient rabbits out of tattered top hats. Baz Luhrmann created, but Busby Berkeley might just as well. This broadcast doesn't know what it is, or what it wants to be - something modern or something old, something forward-looking, or something desperately looking to a past that richer, deeper and more socially relevant. A Depression-era-type number for a Depression-type-era? Are we supposed to feel - what? - like Fred and Ginger?
10:02: Well, yeah, this is sure a big moment. The Heath Ledger Memorial Award, AKA, best supporting actor. Surprise! Heath won! The family, dad and mother and sister ascend...they speak..they are somber..here is the one soundbite that will be replayed endlessly tomorrow...and yet...and yet...it seems so anticlimactic. The single great drama of this awards season - a brilliant acting performance and tragic death and it all ends, more or less, in this cold and oddly emotionless moment. That Maysles film plays, then Maher: "Everyone's crying and now I have to go on." Oh shut up.
10:17: Short Documentary Award Subject: Has it occurred to anyone on the planet besides myself that this award category should be dropped for all eternity?
10:24: Another intensely grating tribute...to action films, as some sort of ridiculous pretext for the special effects award. Some good, some execrable movies. And a clip job that's all bad. And of course, "Ben Button" wins, which had nothing to do with hard action flicks at all. What gibberish this whole thing has become.
10:29: And I now see "The Dark Night" won for some small award - reminding everyone at home and at the Kodak about- what-might-have-been.
10:39: Watching and enjoying another commercial, and am about to make a prediction that has just occurred to me: This WILL be the lowest-rated Oscars telecast in history. I can hardly wait for the Jerry Lewis tribute...
10:44: Wow, Jerry looks pretty darn good. Considering every conceivable health ailment he's gone through. His speech is short and dignified. Finally, a not-bad moment in The Lowest-Rated-Oscars-Telecast-in-All-Human-History (Recorded or Otherwise.)
10:55: Bollywood has come to Hollywood. I'm liking all the Slumdoggers; they have have managed to turn this, at least moments of this, into something no one quite expected, I imagine, which is something slightly exotic.I can only guess the reaction of the rest of America to this - which is most probably an insatiable urge to go to bed early, like right now.
11:03: Well, you've already gone to bed, but I do think the A.R.Rahman number from "Slumdog" was probably a high-point in a broadcast brimming with low ones. But again...a small movie adds up to small TV numbers. But I suppose we'll all just have to get used to it - this industry, and this academy, has looked to distant shores for growth and profit. An under-watched Oscars is the the consequence. But this show has many more problems than simply that.
11:15: The death march. A standard of the Oscars show, and it is always an effort to avoid morbidity, and I suppose Queen Latifah handled it adequately. But that brief and inadequate capper featuring Paul Newman? Yet another misfire in this awards show - a genuine legend in this industry dies - a figure who helped define what we all (once) loved about it, and he gets a quick, five-second "so long Paul!" What a joke.
11:24: Danny Boyle wins best director. The sense of inevitable builds...
11:26: The best actress posse is up there now. Is anyone loving this new routine? I find it strangely cold and insincere (imagine something cold and insincere at the Oscars.) Honestly though, most viewers haven't seen most of these movies - they have no idea what these people are saying, and why they're saying it. Much, much better just to show the clip and be DONE with it.
11:38: Well, lucky De Niro gets Sean. He gets tonight's winner. How did he draw that card? That's Bobby, for you. Plus, a few good lines, too. I guess this proves that this new process isn't entirely a flounder. But still, people, clips next time. Clips. We in the viewing audience ask nothing more (other than a watchable broadcast.) And Sean has the single best line of the night. The only good line of the night: "I do know how hard I make it to appreciate me, often." And then he has the worst - telling those who voted against gay marriage ban, that he hopes their grandchildren see the shame in their eyes. Oh what bull. Is this an acting award or an ideological one? I'm lost here.
11:48: The best movie. Lemme guess...lemme guess....Slum...slum...slum...slum...slum...Oh what a surprise. This is probably deserved, but it was so completely expected that to have bet against it would have been foolish indeed.
So that's it, friends. Thanks for hanging around. Check back here tomorrow for the numbers, and they will be disappointing.