Well, that's it, another year over and done. I managed to correctly predict 13 of the 21 categories I ventured guesses for and even though that means there were 8 categories I got wrong, only one of those wins truly surprised me and that was Meryl Streep's. To be honest, I actually gasped when Colin Firth read her name because it seemed like Viola Davis had it in the bag (and, also, it makes me kind of sad that Meryl won her 3rd Oscar for a performance in such a complete mess of a movie).
Anyway, a few stray thoughts on tonight's big show:
* I can't believe that in 2012 and in a year when The Help, a movie designed to make white people feel good about race relations, is one of the major nominees, a performer would appear in black face (and in the first minute, at that). But maybe we can chalk that up to the "old Hollywood throwback" theme they were going for.
* Next year maybe they should hire this year's sound winners to work on the ceremony. The sound quality was so bad the ceremony sounded like a youtube video filmed in someone's garage.
* Dean Pelton has an Oscar! Now let's all watch Community when it comes back.
* Favourite speech is a toss up between Christopher Plummer and Asghar Farhadi.
* Favourite presenter: Colin Firth. "Mama Mia. We were in Greece. We danced. I was gay and we were happy."
* The "In Memoriam" segment almost always gets justly criticized but this year they managed to get it right, letting the tribute montage play from beginning to end without cutting to the singer every couple of seconds, and muting the in-house audience so that we don't have the "applause-o-meter" effect to indicate the relative popularity of each of the departed.
* If there was a point to that first montage, it was completely lost on me as it looked like a random assembly of movies, some of which won Oscars and some of which just made money. There was no time to hear the two nominated songs, but there was time to spare for that mess?
