The 79th Annual Academy Awards

Well that show was…something, wasn’t it…yikes…

(Every red state fear about Hollywood was confirmed as Al Gore…I kept expecting the crowd to break out into a chant of “Gore ‘08! Gore ‘08!” at any moment…got thanked [and lionized] more often than God did :-)

The show started off slowly…the cutesy self-congratulatory opening film…some tepid jokes from Ellen DeGeneres…the gospel choir bit that would have worked well on Ellen’s talk show but seemed more than a bit forced and out of place here…the first Oscar of the night for art direction (??) followed by a recap of the tech awards…and that was all before the first commercial break.

And things didn’t really go anywhere interesting from there. Certainly the only mildly amusing production number about comedy’s lack of representation in the Academy Awards didn’t help (no matter how hard Will Farrell, Jack Black, and John C. Reilly worked to try to sell it.) By the time the special effects “choir” hit the stage my eyes were glazing over.

The show was poorly paced…too many montages, too many shadow dancer things, too many Ellen bits that went nowhere near funny (she and her pantsuits tried hard, bless her heart, but it was only sporadically funny)…and something of a slog to get through.

Kudos to Martin Scorsese for finally getting one of the little golden guys (we can put that particular story to rest now) as well as to Melissa Etheridge and the Dreamgirls cast for breathing a little musical life into the proceedings.

The 79^th annual Academy Awards show was not a winner…hopefully they’ll get their act together for the 80^th and hit higher notes.