I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

TINY POST-OSCAR THOUGHTS...

Well, congratulations to Helen Mirren for winning Best Actress in one of the few years I even cared enough about any of the Best Actress nominees to have an opinion for her spot perfect performance as Queen Elizabeth, portraying Her Majesty in the most reverential yet sympathetic performance imaginable. I'm not someone who got teary-eyed over the death of Lady Diana (it was an unfortunate, regrettable, and untimely death to be sure, but I wasn't part of her cult of personality so her passing didn't personally affect me in any substantial way) yet I loved that movie because, while it did present the Royal Family as being somewhat out of step with the mood of the general public over the death of Diana, it wasn't pointing fingers at them to castigate them as objects of ridicule; it was very fair in the way it presented their reluctance to participate in the public grieving.

Obviously, I would have preferred it if The Queen had won Best Picture, but I'm not upset that The Departed won. Nor am I happy that The Departed won. I'm just indifferent. I eventually got around to watching the film and, while I thought it was well-made for what it was with good performances from Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, and Matt Damon (not so much Mark Wahlberg... he really didn't make much of an impression on me with this film so I don't know why he got a nod for Best Supporting Actor), I really don't get what the fuss was about, or, at least, why so many movie fanboys on message boards were jizzing their sweatpants over it. The Departed just seemed like a standard mobster/corrupt police/crime movie, nothing more, nothing less. I'm not a backlash bandwagon-jumping "hater" as some of the Rotten Tomatoes fanboys posting in this thread seem to think those of us who weren't too thrilled with this win we are, I simply find The Departed to be overrated. Crime movies just aren't my bag, I guess (except for Bottle Rocket, though they aren't exactly hard-boiled criminals in that film), and I'm especially not fond of "everyone dies" endings like The Departed has. That was a bummer.

However, one Oscar loss I'm very happy about is Brian Singer's mostly awful Superman Returns losing for Best Visual Effects. (And I really liked X2: Mutants United, not to mention the Richard Donner Superman film-and-a-half, so I don't know how Superman Returns ended up being so wretched other than a fairly good performance from Kevin Spacey, who was the best Lex Luthor he could possibly be with what he had to work with.) It was a farce that Singerman... erm, I mean Superman Retreads... erm, Returns even got nominated, since I thought most of the special effects shots were much too dark, looked like cheesy PlayStation 2 live-action-actors-with-cheap-computer-generated-backdrops videogame cutscenes, and, speaking of videogames, made Superman himself look no more realistic than Cloud, Sora, Lara Croft, or Solid Snake. And Metropolis looked nothing like a real city, especially in the aerial shots. I'm not anti-CGI special effects by any means, but I'll still take the low-tech obvious bluescreen (or, rather, greenscreen since the costume was blue) of the Christopher Reeve Superman films, since at least old-fashioned "practical" special effects had charm to them and weren't sterile CGI exercises that looked like rejected demo reels submitted to Squaresoft.

And what little I saw of Ellen DeGeneris, since I was mostly watching Heroes, eating supper, or playing the first Getaway game, which I bought super-cheap from a Toys R'Us clearance bin the other day, was very "meh": she didn't suck as bad as Whoopi as a host, but I far preferred Steve Martin, Chris Rock, or even David Letterman.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 7:08 AM