Oscar Blog 2008: Where Are My Tears, Bitches??

Welcome to a lackluster celebration of celebrity! My heart sank as I watched The Oscars. I could milk more humor from the Menendez Brothers E! True Hollywood Story. But alas here we are, the most important night in The Entertainment Industry and therefore THE WORLD, so you better be watching, eyes glazing over with the rest of us. This journey won’t take four hours of your life, nor a little piece of your soul, so let’s begin!

This awards show needs an operatic serial killer.

Guest-commenting on this is my good friend BS, who goes by the name of “Ex” on my personal blog. BS is a film director and since I’ve dated him, this more than qualifies me to knowledgeably discuss industry awards. We’ve been viewing the Awards together for the past four years and this is the first time I’ve brought my laptop in.

IS: So I’m going to blog this for TVgasm tonight. May I quote you?

BS: Sure.

IS: Do you want me to link your name to your website or anything? Seriously, thousands of really awesome people read TVgasm a day. It could blow your shit up.

BS: No. Everyone that knows you knows who I am anyway.

IS: Yeah. That’s my point. Not everyone that reads TVgasm knows me.

BS does not seem to get my point so we move on.

I get to task, wondering how I could possibly get snarky about the celebration of art and film, until the ceremony begins and then I wonder how I ever took it seriously before I had to deconstruct it for the internet community. This shit’s totally corny.

Vas do you mean? It’s aht.

The show kicks off with a animated car heading down a highway towards Hollywood. And it looks like it’s gearing up to be the Rock of Love opening sequence which would be AWESOME. Please let there be a motorcycle with Bret Michaels next. I mean, really Academy. You call this class? We “arrive” in Hollywood and greeting us is the lamest visual effects sequence ever. A montage of automobiles, monsters, and recognizable faces from all the blockbusters of today and yesteryear. I caught Grease-era John Travolta and Indiana Jones in there. Some Transformers. (This will be the first indication that we are the wake of a writer’s strike. The next sign will be everything else, save but about three of John Stewart jokes.) I think I saw this same vignette in line at Universal Studios one time and I think I made the same stink face then, too.

So, John Stewart is back, looking as resigned as the rest of us feel. And unsurprisingly he mentions the writer’s strike first off. He calls it “make-up sex”. Boring-ass missionary style? Make-up sex should definitely be hotter than this.

Try mutual masturbation.

Cutaway to some of our dashing celebrities. Daniel Day Lewis is first to catch my eye. Now I have a thing for Daniel Day Lewis characters, but this man has bad personal style. Seriously. He looks so different in the real world. How does real-life suck the hotness from this man?? How? He plays such badasses on the screen and then in real life he looks like a wimpy theatre pansy. So disappointing.

Jon Stewart makes a few good jokes, but watch the youtube videos if you haven’t seen it, since writing down punchlines of an opening monologue is grim to me.

Jennifer Garner comes out to announce the award for costume design. Elizabeth: The Golden Age obviously nabs the award and BS and I laugh that Atonement possibly had a chance. We seriously enjoy hating on Atonement despite the fact that neither of us have seen it. I don’t like mopey period pieces in general, but the fact that my friend went to Atonement director, Joe Wright’s, Christmas dinner this year and he made everyone read dramatic monologues made me definitely not like it. Lamest dinner party ever. I remind BS of this and we agree all Hollywood director dinner parties should end with girls in hot tubs. But I bet DDL would be stoked to find himself at Joe Wright’s!

This evening I will read from Death of a Salesman. Could you pass the mac and cheese, please?

Babs appears in her ice capades tuxedo to remind us that when she won it was a tie. There was a tie? BS and I can’t figure out who or what tied, but he has an itchy trigger finger on the remote, so maybe they said, and we didn’t really care.

Note from the Editor: You need a gayer boyfriend. Kate Hepburn, yo!

We get some more George Clooney and he is a hot piece, but we suspect that glassy eyed fembot he has with him is his a beard. Either that or he is one seriously attainable celebrity.

So now we get a montage of Oscar moments. Oh, Oscar, we love that you are so meta. Oscar likes to celebrate itself as much as it does the winners. And these are quality moments indeed. Diddy, Cher, Miss Piggy. Academy icons. Perhaps Danity Kane will perform next year.

When it’s over, Jon Stewart shills an iPhone for a few minutes and it seems unnecessary. And kinda gross. If he starts Swiffer Sweeping the stage and offering samples of Keebler Cookie’s I’m outta here.

Why don’t you blow Jobs while you’re at it, man?

Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway fake mess-up their animated feature presentation and it’s also a bit embarrassing to watch.

Anne Hathaway mentions that 800 billion people are watching and this continues the ongoing debate we are having over Oscar viewership. We’ve heard one billion, hundreds of millions and now 800 billion. Can we get some Neilsens on this? Seriously all of these numbers sound outrageous. BS and I question whether or not hundreds of millions of people even have a television set?

Ratatouille wins best animated feature. They should just say “Pixar Movie” each year and be done with it. Gah.

Best make-up is up next. BS fast fowards past the first few moments, which he does all the time. I always bitch about it and this time he actually rewinds because he wants to see what turns out to be Katherine Heigl.

BS: Oh, I’m going back. I don’t want to deny you the pleasure of seeing a bitch I’m gonna talk up.

IS: Whatever. She’s painted up like a hooker. You can have ‘er.

La Vie en Rose wins and it should for being able to make Marion Cotillard look busted. That girl is stunning.

And then. AND THEN. Poor Amy Adams has the misfortune of performing “Happy Working Song” from Enchanted. Now I loved Enchanted and I’ve loved Amy Adams since she knocked it out the park in Junebug, but when you’re on a stage sola with no animated rodents, you look like an idiot singing that song. She could have at least had a Disney princess dress. She looked like a choir teacher in that get-up. I bet she ran off the stage in tears after that performance.

Call my agent and get me outta this dump.

BS: This could be a career stopper.

IS: Oh no! Oh no! I swear it worked in the movie. Oh, this is awkward.

BS: I’m gonna FF.

IS: No it’s gonna get better. They’re gonna add animals somewhere.

BS: If you consider those giant spinning circles behind her “better”. Oh, look, they’re blue. Oh, now they’re orange!

Finally we agree to FF and put ourselves out of our misery, but continue the masochism when we kiss Michael Douglas and CZJ ass and show them both winning Oscars for some reason. This year’s winners aren’t enough. Let’s celebrate past winners some more!!

The Rock presents Best Visual Effects.

BS: Where is the class and dignity this year?

IS: Indeed.

Golden Compass wins, if anyone cares.

Cate Blanchett does Art Direction. Sweeney Todd wins.

BS: Who fucking cares really?

IS: I think this is the conversation all 800 billion viewers are having right now.

And now an actor award! There’s a montage of every best supporting actor ever winning, which we’d been anticipating for a while since it always seems to be right away.

IS: See. I knew it was coming.

BS: Well, yeah, obviously it was going to come at some point.

And despite it not being a slimming color, presenter Jennifer Hudson looks hotter in white than one might think she would.

Javier Bardem wins, as expected, and looks less hot without the Dorothy Hammill pageboy. He allegedly speaks both English and Spanish, but they both sound the same.

Somewhere in Tijuana, Dora the Explorer is wiping a tear from her cheek.

Then, because the Oscars are fraught with humor, we get a delightful little “Binoculars and Periscopes” montage. Then a ten second “Waking up from Bad Dream” montage. The Oscars are classy and whimsical! Big ups for Pee Wee Herman. He’s up there with Diddy as Academy icon.

Keri Russell comes out to announce another song, looks gorgeous, but strings together the most boring hundred or so words ever, so I have no idea what she said. We watch five seconds of “Raise it up”.

BS: I’m FFing.

IS: Yeah, I can already tell we are not going to feel the emotions this song is telling us to feel. I feel nothing and would like to continue to do so.

Owen Wilson presents short films, nose looking weirder than normal and we wonder if it fluctuates under duress.

BS: It’s weird when adults make short films. They only do that in foreign countries.

I have never reflected upon this, but perhaps he is correct.

When animated short films comes up BS says that the stop-motion is the go-to for this category, because it’s harder. This time there are two stop-motion animated shorts and we FF so we don’t know which wins. I am possibly the worst journalist evs, and am content with this knowledge.

Now we get a montage of every Best Supporting Actress and this is a category with no clear Javier-like victor. I’ve been wanting Tilda Swinton to win, but don’t think she pull it out…but she wins! And oh, god, she’s dressed in an As Four-esque trash bag, but she gives a decent speech and we give her a pass. We get a cutaway of Michael Clayton director, Tony Gilroy, who as it turns out, is really hot. Eat your heart out, DDL, I’m moving on.

It’s casual and dressy. She should have put makeup on half of her face to really make this work.

Josh Brolin and James Macavoy deliver Oscar one-liners from screenplays based on material previously published, and it’s is as awesome as it sounds. We wake up when we see Sarah Polley.

BS: Sarah Polley is nominated! Good for her! Hot, young and talented. I love her.

IS: Whatever. It was based on something written.

(BS gives me the look. We have a thing called “The Order of Praise”, which means it is only acceptable if BS compliments a girl if I’ve complimented her first. If he compliments first, he insists I always say something negative. I think the results are inconclusive to say that that’s true, but we are an absolute stitch to watch in real life since all we pretty much do is discuss the appearances of females we see. And I wish I were kidding.)

Joel and Ethan Coen win for “No Country for Old Men” and I like the look of these two. I hope we’ll see more of them tonight.

We do some FFing, because this shit is getting really boring and I check the TVgasm website to discover that the Make Me a Supermodel recap is up and make a mental note to read it later. I’m checking the gasm. This is how thrilling the Oscars are this year.

And suddenly Hannah Montana is presenting at the Oscars. This gives me hope Danity Kane will be performing after all. She introduces another Enchanted song, “How does she know?” with Kristen Chenowith singing, because Amy Adams is crying in the bathroom still. And I can’t focus on anything but the twenty gay “construction workers” jeté-ing around the stage.

If she had pulled some of this out for West Wing, that show might still be on the air.

IS: I’m beginning to think the Oscars isn’t the high brow event I used to.

BS: Well, maybe you didn’t see the Bongo player back there.

Jon Stewart attempts to make a joke about all celebrities being knocked up, but only the guy on Dlisted.com makes celebrity pregnancies funny. Everyone else, thanks for playing. (go, bloggers!)

Now we get sound editing with Dame Judy Dench and Halle Berry, but it’s actually Seth Rogan and Jonah Hill and they do a really tedious, who’s-the-Halle-Berry number, which is like Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion when they argue over who’s the Mary and who’s the Rhoda. Er, you both lose this round.

Bourne Ultimatum wins.

BS: Well, Bourne was loud and that guy has a ponytail. That’s a match made in editing heaven.

IS: They need to stop the Halle Barry joke. Ugh, now sound mixing? Every year I ask this and every year I still don’t understand the difference between sound editing and sound mixing.

BS: You never will.

And now for Best Actress. I want Laura Linney to win, which says a lot, because I didn’t even like The Savages, but we think it’s Julie Christy or Ellen Page.

And, in the one category upset…it’s Marion Cotillard! And it’s quite rewarding. God, she’s hot, regardless of Order of Praise. She’s so shocked and we don’t make fun of her because we both like watching pretty girls cry. In fact, she’s the only one that brings tears to this. This is a seriously disappointing year.

Thank you! I was starting to feel like everyone is dead inside.

After a commercial break John Stewart and this girl play video games projected onto the back of the stage and it’s so dumb I contemplate dropping the blogging and working on the My Fair Brady recap.

Colin Farrell introduces the next Oscar song, which is from the movie “Once”. I only heard bad things about this movie, so I never saw it and BS tells me they’re a real-life couple. And that this song is so moving I’m not allowed to type during their performance. And then he insists I include this so all aspiring actors out there may take note.

BS: Being a musician in a biopic is the new retard/Holocaust victim. So if you were a retard musician in the Holocaust you’d be guaranteed your Oscar. Write that down.

IS: Oh, I am.

Jack Nicholson introduces a montage of every best picture. We both sort of come back to life since we feel like we have to be headed into the home stretch and we enjoy rating all 79 pictures with a WTF, good, great. Crash definitely got the biggest WTF. It still bums me out to this day that it won. The only divisive winner was The Sound of Music. That movie made me who I am today, which is pretty awesome.

Reneé Zellweger introduces best film editing, looking like she’s seen far better, carb-eating days.

IS: I used to do a really good Reneé Zellweger impersonation. I bet I could still do it, but she’s not really relevant anymore so there’s no point in ever doing it.

BS: Why does she look so fake and awful? I can’t look at her.

We FF but can tell that The Bourne Ultimatum wins, which we both agree that this installment of the trinity indeed had a lot of edits.

Nicole Kidman presents the Honorary Oscar looking somewhat less waxen, perhaps with the glow of pregnancy, but she has an unfortunate situation where her necklace keeps catching on her boob and it’s distracting.

Robert Boyle is a production designer and he wins an Honorary Oscar. Nicole tells us that he set “the standard” that all films follow, but it looks like he’s only done Alfred Hitchcock movies. I wake up when I see Kim Novak.

IS: Hey! There’s Kim Novak! Now she was a hot bitch.

BS: Alfred Hitchcock was good at picking out the hot bitches.

IS: Alfred Hitchcock was a hot bitch.

Then I realize discussing the hotness of bitches is the only reason we are watching this anymore. They drag out the 100-year-old Boyle and BS steals my computer so he can IMDB some credits from this man that impress him. After reviewing his profile, he makes a lewd comment about how Boyle obtained his Oscar. Boyle is old and seems nice, so I won’t repeat it.

It’s only a matter of time, hon.

Penelope Cruz comes out and maybe she looks good, but BS and I can’t get beyond the fact that she looks like Beautiful Frankie from Make Me a Supermodel.

The Oscar for Foreign Language Film goes to The Counterfeiters. They say this is the first win for “Austria”, like winning an Academy Award in this category is like an Olympic medal. What if they just want to win it for themselves, Oscars? People have the right to be selfish. Stop trying to push your oppressive patriotism platform onto others.

And then we get John Travolta and what the hoohay is going on with his hair, people?

IS: OMG. It looks sprayed on.

BS: Holy shit. He looks like Curious George.

This man should inspire all men to stop using hair growth products. THEY DON’T WORK.

And he indeed looks like a giant, ugly Curious George and in fact, I will never see this man the same way again. He is presenting best song and despite the fact that Enchanted had three songs in this category it loses to the Once kids. And these kids are straight up adorable.

They are so sweet and grateful and when the girl comes up she gets cut off and she’s so bashful and submissive about it. It’s cute. Jon Stewart ad libs a joke about how that guy is so arrogant and it really is funny. And after the commercial, they bring back the girl from “Once” and we agree that they must have fucked up technically because they never do that.

Then Jon Stewart calls Cameron Diaz “talented and beautiful”. I would say annoying and used-up, but whatevs. They’re practically synonyms.

Best Bad Actress in a Horror Face

“There Will Be Blood” wins for cinematography, which was arguably the best thing about that movie.

Hillary Swank presents the montage for the people who died, but she awkwardly says “those whose work is done”. It sounds pretty idiotic and we love this expression. Throughout the whole montage BS can’t get enough as each person comes up.

BS: Your work. Done. Your work. Done. Your work, too. Is done. Your work is done.

Then at the end we realize they dissed Brad Renfro and we are a little sad. But, thank god we remembered to discuss Babs’s tie that year!

Amy Adams’s presentation is really awkward, which is sad since she clearly can’t recover from that grim performance earlier. And because I am such an awesome journalist, I have no idea what this award is for.

Oh God make it stop.

IS: Watching her makes me uncomfortable.

BS: She’s losing a lot of cred.

Atonement wins and we boo. At least I have no idea what they one.

Soldiers in Iraq present documentary short subject. And, support the troops and all, but it’s weird to suddenly be in Baghdad. It takes away from the nominees. Not that I’ve been paying attention since the last actor award.

The most awkward woman ever walks onstage with the biggest open mouth and gangly monkey arms to accept this award. We are both shallow and find it hard to look at her, so we FF, though I’m sure they did a good, important short film.

Now that’s a face for short film production.

Taxi to the Dark Side wins best Documentary Feature.

Harrison Ford announces Original Screenplay.

Diablo Cody wins, no surprise there. My friend emailed me tonight and described her as a cross between Dita von Teese and Carnie Wilson. Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a winner.

Diablo Grody

Helen Mirren announces Best Actor, looking far less hot than last year.

I want George Clooney to win. I loved that final scene in Michael Clayton they show, but everyone knows it’s all but been handed to DDL. We both try to appreciate Tommy Lee Jones’s performance but get really distracted by the fact that the scene apparently takes place in what seems to be an S&M sex club. (WTF, can someone explain this??) Daniel Day Lewis wins as expected. I was so so into him in Gangs of New York, but he has lost the hotness. And he’s so actor-y in his speech. Gah. I think he recites a limerick.

Director montages begin as we gear up for the second to last award.

IS: Wow. There’s a lot of bad haircuts in there.

BS: Wow. There’s a lot of actors in there.

I found mine more revelatory.

Martin Scorcese announces Best Director. Joel and Ethan Coen. No surprises there either. And I continue to watch these two with a little bit of a nerd-crush. Especially when they tell the audience that when they were eleven years old they made a movie on Super 8 called, “Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go”. Eleven year olds making a movie about Henry Kissinger? And it’s jauntily called “Man on the Go”??? Where is this movie? They should make a remake of that immediately. Insta-classic.

Denzel announces “No Country for Old Men” as best picture winner and now the Coens have overstayed their welcome because they have nothing else to say at their third award of the evening, so we are free to make catty comments about the Oscar statue handers.

BS: Who is that haggard bitch? They got a really tarty presenter.

But hold up, who is producer Scott Rudin and why is he telling “his partner” that without him the Oscar statue would be “hardware”? Is that a gay sex joke? We don’t get it, but we’re done. It’s over and we’re tired and can’t be bothered to speculate.

BS: This was lackluster, Jon Stewart. I want Ellen DeGeneres back.

IS: I want tears. That’s really all I wanted were tears!!!

And….End scene.

All right, guys. The pomp and circumstance is over till next year. I’d love to hear more snarky comments from some of the 800 billion viewers [source: Anne Hathaway]. We gave them four+ hours of our lives and I know y’all got more entertaining shit for me than that. Love y’all hard. Let’s all watch together next year! xoxo, Lady Sensation.