Award Chatter: Oscar Highs and Lows

Highs:

1. Marketa Irglova of Once getting to come back on and deliver her speech after she was rudely cut off.
2. Montages of old Oscar clips before most categories. If for no other reason than showing us the old Danny Kaye clip.
3. Diablo Cody’s family for loving her just the way she is.
4. Tilda Swinton spending her acceptance speech joking about George Clooney’s Bat-nipples.
5. Jon Stewart playing the Wii with the 11-year-old August Rush star Jamia Simone Nash.
6. Amy Adams having the stones to sing “Happy Little Working Song” with absolutely nothing else on the stage beside her, given the giant productions involved with the other two Enchanted songs.
7. Cate Blanchett wincing at the clip of her own performance in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and springing up to applaud Marion Cotillard’s win. She knew what we all knew.
8. Cotillard’s “Thank you, Life. Thank you, Love.”
9. Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill’s Halle Berry banter.
10. Stewart watching Lawrence of Arabia on an iPhone firmly establishes why people should be crotchety about technology.

Lows:

1. Marketa Irglova of Once being denied her speech in the first place.
2. Stewart’s off-hand dismissal of Film Editing by saying “someone just took the lead in their Oscar pool based on a guess.’ True, yes, but still a bit harsh.
3. Enchanted gets three songs nominated, and nothing from Eddie Vedder’s Into the Wild soundtrack.
4. Nothing for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
5. Rogen and Hill’s Halle Berry banter being beaten into the ground.
6. The Sid Ganis Price Waterhouse sketch. Yeah, not so much. Thankfully, Stewart echoed the sentiment.
7. The thought of Jack Nicholson impregnating somebody during the show.
8. Tommy Lee Jones messing with his cufflinks during Javier Bardem’s speech. C’mon, man, pay attention!
9. The ‘okay, you’re done talking now’ orchestral cues were often obnoxious and abrupt as opposed to the subtle creep-in they usually do.
10. The sad feeling when re-watching Cuba Gooding Jr.’s joyous and infectious acceptance speech from 1997 and the standing ovation it received… and then thinking about Daddy Day Camp.