The 85th Oscars are just days away and once again, I won’t be watching them. Will you be?
It’s not that I hate the idea of the Oscars. In fact, I immensely enjoy watching movies, I’ve seen most of the movies nominated for best picture and I always look for results in the paper or online the next day.
The culture of watching the Oscars, getting food and making it an event with friends and family has just never precipitated for me.
I grew up with a black-and-white TV with bunny ears — and though I vowed to have cable when I grew up and moved out, that never materialized.
Needless to say, my bunny ears did not reach far enough to pick up the Academy Awards. My bunny ears didn’t even pick up CBC if you can make sense of that.
The one and only time I saw the Oscars was when I was 12 and my friend taped the nearly four-hour 70th anniversary event for me.
Gone are the days of sharing media in the form of taped shows and mixed CDs. (Who remembers fast forwarding through commercials with the fuzzy gray lines going across the screen?)
Granted, we don’t need those days anymore since all will be posted online, which leads to my next question — are they even worth watching in live time?
The one thing I hated about my only experience from watching the Oscars, is watching for all of the awards I didn’t care about and those weird, lengthy speeches.
All of the highlights get talked about the next day, including who won what, and who wore what.
It’s a nice book-ended broadcast leaving only the diehards needing to make an evening out of watching it, I think.
The duration of the show may not be relevant, but the show itself is. There’s always hype and chatter leading up to the event, and of course, after.
I’m not a pro at making predictions but I know what I’d like to see. Up for best picture, it is a toss up between historical films and fantasy and some even cross that line (Django Unchained).
While I enjoyed Django, I didn’t leave with anything but a few chuckles, while Beasts of the Southern Wild and Zero Dark Thirty had my companions and I chatting about them the entire drive home.
I saw the last showing on a Friday night for Zero Dark Thirty and I didn’t realize two-and-a-half hours had passed or that we left the theatre well after 1 a.m. The movie was well-paced and culminated with an intense third act in the dark at Osama Bin Laden’s compound.
Beast of the Southern Wild was just an all-around perfect movie-going experience placing me right in the centre of a community hovering at the edge of the world.
Lincoln was good, but not gripping. Certainly the acting was top-notch and Daniel Day-Lewis worthy of a nomination for best actor. But, I think Joaquin Phoenix takes the cake in this category for his work in The Master. A movie that I found confusing at times but Phoenix, and Amy Adman did an amazing job of the hooch-making wanderer-turned follower and the wife of a leader and fanatic of his religion The Cause.
As for best actress, I am all for that little girl, Quvenzhané Wallis, in the Beasts of the Southern Wild who finds beauty in the poverty-stricken community, known as the Bathtub, where she lives.
Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty) and Adams offered powerful performances too, but Wallis packs a powerful performance for a six year old.
So there you have it, those are my hopes anyway. I still have a few days to pack in the rest of the movies but I think I’ll wait until Feb. 25 and see how they do first.
