Oscar night

I thought that Oscar host Jon Stewart was going to be more biting than he was. He didn’t even take one swipe at Bush. He was OK, if not terribly exciting -- seemed a little held-back and intimidated by the occasion, especially in the beginning. I think he'll do better if they ask him again.
The montage of cowboy movies as gay movies was good. Only Stewart and his writers could’ve come up with something like this.
But there were too many other montages – epics, film noir, etc. Were they trying to lecture us on the lost artistry of Hollywood?

It was good that 4 out of the 5 best picture nominees were small un-Hollywood pictures. The one big picture “Munich” had a budget of $75m, which was more than the budgets of the other four combined.
No blockbusters were up for contention – un-Hollywood-like, and rather mature.
All five contenders were serious movies on Big Themes. The winner, “Crash”, won because it ‘confronted’ race with predictable hugs all-round bromides, and because it was about LA, where all the Academy voters are, and because these voters include a majority of film techies, who were never going to vote for a gay movie, let alone a gay cowboy movie like “Brokeback Mountain.”

Best speech was by Best Actor winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, who said great things about and to his mom.

Best moment by far, better than anything by Jon Stewart, was Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep doing a turn on director Robert Altman, about his over-lapping dialogue and other film-making idiosyncracies.
Good Lord, did Altman ten years ago really get a whole heart transplant from a 30-year-old woman?

From the NY Times: Los Angeles Retains Custody of Oscar -- by DAVID CARR

In the hierarchy of place here, there is no more exalted locus than the Chateau Marmont. The hotel high above Sunset Boulevard has launched a thousand cliched magazine profiles, is legendary for bad behavior by its inmates, and is the place where business is not so much done as memorialized.

It was only fitting, then, that the stunning best-picture victory of "Crash," a film by, for and about Los Angeles, was celebrated in lusty fashion there following the Academy Awards. The night air was just about perfect, music and booze provided a heady backbeat, and Oscar, the real megillah, the one that they give for the best film of the year, was in the house.

Paul Haggis, the writer and director who cobbled a remarkable ensemble cast and hustled money to pay them the old indie way, was posing for pictures on the patio with his daughters, who were handing his two Oscars -- he received a second for co-writing the screenplay -- back and forth like a pair of particularly handsome Ken dolls. He took a stab at why the script for Oscar night took a hard turn in his direction.

"I am the wrong guy to ask because I never even thought the picture would get made," he said, pausing to accept hugs from a parade of fellow Angelenos who came by to share the love. "To the extent that it connected with people, I think it was time to address the fear and intolerance that we all live with."

Los Angeles, a place where race is discussed rarely, at least in between cataclysms, saw itself in a film where both encounter and understanding are just a random fender-bender away. The movie may lay bare muttered oaths against the Other, but it ends in a self-validating hug. And so did the arc of "Crash."

For a time, it seemed as if "Brokeback Mountain," a movie shot in Canada, financed by an East Coast studio arm and shown endless love by the critical establishment, would be unstoppable. But it turned out to be an accident waiting to happen, one more abject lesson that the motion picture academy does not like to be told what to do. All the smart money, conventional wisdom and precursor awards came to naught when Jack Nicholson opened the last envelope of what had been a long, scattershot night.

"Whoa," he said.

And with that command, the horse stopped in its tracks and "Crash," the hometown favorite, helped Los Angeles retain custody of its awards. On one level, the movie crept up thanks to basic blocking and tackling: Lionsgate had released a torrent of videos to the film community and poured money into a picture that was no longer in theaters.

The awards calendar, stretched to suit the Olympics, left "Brokeback" dangling out there as a favorite, which meant that by the time many voters popped the DVD into their machines, they had been told that not only would they love the film, they should love it. Many had suggested that the academy had an obligation to award Ang Lee's brave decision to balance a movie on a gay love story, and it did, splitting the hair precisely to give him a best-director award that never seemed to be in doubt. But many members did not see why a story that was essentially a tale of two men cheating on their wives -- albeit with each other -- should be chosen to represent Hollywood's best effort of the year.

" 'Crash' was far more representative of the our industry, of where we work and live," said David Cohen, one among hundreds of Hollywood players joining in the festivities. " 'Brokeback' took on a fairly sacred Hollywood icon, the cowboy, and I don't think the older members of the academy wanted to see the image of the American cowboy diminished."

Just as many critics were put off by the tidy interweaving of parables in "Crash" that managed to wind themselves into a neat little bow at the end of the movie, others found the pacing of "Brokeback," moved along by the pluck of a guitar, to be taxing, and its stunning visuals were lost to many members who watched it on television sets, however large.

To get to "Crash," the academy had to walk past a phalanx of awards "Brokeback" had already won. But old hands know that the academy is its own creature.

"This is a very broad-based professional organization," said Peter Guber , chairman of Mandalay Pictures. "When it came down to the craft of filmmaking, I think the academy decided that Ang Lee deserved the director award, but in terms of the themes of the film, they were much more interested in 'Crash.' The membership is older and more conservative than some of those other groups, and I think it was reflected in the choice that they made."

John Calley, the former Sony Pictures chairman who is now a producer, discounted notions that either provincialism or homophobia played a role in the outcome.

"Nobody likes to think of themselves as being from Los Angeles," Mr. Calley said. "I don't know anybody that wants to be buried here. I think it was less about that or any problem with 'Brokeback' than in the end, it comes down to a subconscious shuffling of the pecking order and you just go with the film that was most affecting to you personally."

What eventually put "Crash" into the thick of things is that most everyone thought "Brokeback" would win and someone else would vote for it.

By night's end it was all about illusion again, as the Oscar season's little parables tied themselves up in a burst of unalloyed glamour at the Vanity Fair party.

If you went past the sheriff's deputy at the barricade humming "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp," past the fans and the paparazzi screaming their heads off at Reese Witherspoon , you entered Morton's and then a gated kingdom beyond. The A list was reassured of its status anew; journalists put down their notebooks in favor of cookies stenciled with the likenesses of Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson . It all took place in a room that was lush with topiary, mahogany finishes and translucent walls. It was actually a tent, but we don't call it that on Oscar night. It is called "structure." And there, in this construct, everyone was beautiful and yes, they all just got along.