If you don’t expect too much from the Oscars, you won’t be disappointed. I don’t think that was Jon Stewart’s best work, but it was a lot better than some of his predecessors have done.
I haven’t seen any of the films, so I won’t comment on the merits of any of them.
I liked George Clooney’s acceptance speech (Proud to be non-mainstream!). I liked Reese Witherspoon’s acceptance speech. Rambling as it was, I liked Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s acceptance speech.
All due respect to Dolly Parton, but I don’t think any of the three nominated songs were worthy of an Oscar. Couldn’t Ang Lee have found a good soulful C/W song for Brokeback Mountain?
Some of the shorts (both documentary and animated) looked interesting; I wonder if anyone does compilations of Oscar nominees for those films on DVD?
I’d heard good reviews of both Tsotsi and Paradise Now; I wonder if the voters felt they’d rather pick a South African movie than a Palestinian one.
I liked the joke about tearing the Oscar statue down, as well as Stewart’s line after the montage of “socially-relevant” films: “All of those problems went away after that.” I suspect that offended some of the Hollywood types, who often seem to believe they’re a little more powerful social force than the rest of us think they are.
And hey! It ended more-or-less on time!