... FOR "HOLLYWOOD'S BIGGEST NIGHT" (aka "OSCARS 2014") - UPDATED!

UPDATED: Well, that's it. Another Oscar show, another 365 days at the movies come and gone. While last night's telecast had its surprises (12 Years A Slave for Best Picture? Did anyone but the politically correct-minded see that one coming?) as well as its foregone conclusions (Frozen for Best Animated Feature and Best Song, plus Alfonso Cuarón nabbing Best Director honors for Gravity), Oscar 2014 will likely go down as the most social media-centric ceremony in the history of ever, with host Ellen DeGeneres' star-studded "selfie" breaking records as Twitter's most retweeted photo of all time. (My favorites: Kevin Spacey and resident sour-puss Angelina Jolie joining in on the fun, or Brad Pitt and Benedict Cumberbatch photobombing Best Actor hopeful Chiwetel Ejiofor mere seconds later.)

From what I watched, the show was every bit as random and rambling as it has been in previous years, with pompous tributes (how, exactly, did The Wizard Of Oz earn a special remembrance for its 75th anniversary, while other classics like Gone With The Wind and Stagecoach did not?) and pointless attempts at grandiosity dominating the night (dedicating the ceremony to "heroes" in film, animated and otherwise, only to show endless clip montages populated mostly by men? Dudes, your women must be so proud!). All this, plus John Travolta hilariously mispronouncing Idina Menzel's name during her otherwise top-notch rendition of "Let It Go"? Oh, the humanity!

Winners have been bolded (with an asterisk) at the end of this post. For anyone who stuck through to the end, what are your thoughts, reminisces, complaints? Did any acceptance speech or musical performance rub you the wrong way? What winner took you most by surprise/had you rolling your eyes? Is anyone else fully on board the McConaissance like I am? Please post your responses below!

 
Oscar, Oscar, what could you possibly be thinking? 

Each year, we're subjected to our share of cop-outs and controversies surrounding the Academy Awards. Often, these range from the obsessively petty (How did that person even get nominated?) to the borderline offensive (celebs who mistake their time at the podium as an opportunity for political grandstanding). Other times, Oscar seems to have an agenda all its own (the 69th Annual Academy Awards, for example, for which The English Patient took home the coveted prize for Best Picture, might have been dubbed The Year of The Independent Film; in 2004, Oscar was all about The Lord of The Rings: The Return Of The King, winning every award for which it was nominated; two years ago, I argued that the nominees for Best Picture at the 84th Academy Awards were steeped in nostalgia for times gone by).

... FOR "FRANCHISE FACE-OFFS (PART 6 - 'HARRY POTTER' EDITION)"

It is, without a doubt, one of the great rags-to-riches stories of the past two decades: A single mother, living off of welfare, carts her baby down to the local coffee shop in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she writes the first book of what will become the most successful children's series of all time. She goes from poverty to multi-millionaire status all within the span of five years; her novels sell over 400 million copies; are translated into 67 languages; and her iconic creation – Harry James Potter, aka "The Boy Who Lived" – becomes a permanent fixture in households worldwide.

Joanne "Jo" Rowling says she conjured up the idea for Harry Potter in 1990, while on a return train to London. But she didn't actually finish writing The Philosopher's Stone – the story of an eleven-year-old boy who attends Hogwarts School Of Witchcraft And Wizardry – until six years later. During that time, Rowling suffered a series of emotional setbacks that pushed her close to the breaking point: Her mother, Anne, died of multiple sclerosis in December 1990, the impact of which forced Joanne to move from London to Portugal, Spain, to pursue a career as an English teacher. While there, she met and married Jorge Arantes, a journalism student with whom she had a tumultuous relationship. The birth of their daughter, Jessica, in July 1993 only seemed to heighten the tension between them, and following a violent argument in November of that same year, Joanne took the baby and fled back to England. (The couple eventually divorced in August 1994.) Jo's father, Peter, had since re-married and their relationship had become strained, so she moved to Edinburgh to live near her sister. Jobless, penniless, and living on a weekly £69 allowance from social services, she began a daily routine of wandering her neighborhood streets, pushing Jessica in her stroller until the baby fell asleep. Then she would duck into the nearest coffee shop or restaurant and write. She completed Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone in early 1996, and after many rejections from different publishing houses, the book was finally purchased by Barry Cunningham at Bloomsbury, for an advance of £1,500. Scholastic Books followed suit, a mere three days after its publication in Britain, and bid an unprecedented $100,000 to distribute Potter in the United States. The rest, as they say, is history. Rowling would never know poverty again.

... FOR "THE BEST FILMS OF THE DECADE" - PART 10

Genre:

SCIENCE-FICTION/FANTASY

Defined:

Space battles. Time travel. Journeys into the mystical unknown. The Science-Fiction/Fantasy films of 2000-2009 enjoyed a creative and financial resurgence unlike anything since the late 1970s, when Star Wars and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind ruled at the box office. Avatar, The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King, and Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest passed $1 billion in worldwide grosses apiece, while Return Of The King took home 2004's Academy Award for Best Picture – the first Fantasy film in history to accomplish such a feat. The best genre titles aren't content to wow us with their Utopian futures and wondrous special effects; they also hold up a mirror to the social, political and philosophical issues of our times. They challenge us. The final frontier, indeed.

The Top Five:

5. Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009)

It might be too early to call it a great film, but J.J. Abrams' blockbuster relaunch of the U.S.S. Enterprise is certainly a great entertainment, which dives headfirst into action and never looks back. Like Batman Begins and Casino Royale before them, Paramount returned to the drawing board to offer a fresh perspective on what gave Kirk, Spock, Dr. McCoy and the rest such cross-generational appeal in the first place. Trekkies' hardcore devotion to canon, however, made a complete retrofitting next to impossible, so Abrams and screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman busied themselves with a time travel plot that's both obvious and ingenious: obvious, because it's been done before, and ingenious, because the physics at play allow them free reign to tinker with the mythology without seriously uprooting the fan base. With its breathless pacing and candy-gloss textured set design, it makes an admittedly cultish sci-fi phenomenon officially "cool" again. And the cast is perfection.

... FOR "BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS AND 'HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, PART 1'"

First off, we've already established that adapting children's books into movies can be a tricky business. There's a lot of padding involved in turning a 30-page tome into a 90-minute feature, and I'd hesitate to call any attempt at this (so far) an unqualified success.

The world of Harry Potter, meanwhile, is a completely different matter. J.K. Rowling's Witches and Wizardry series is so chock full of incident, so ripe with characters and fantastical creatures and iconic moments, that it's a struggle deciding what to leave out. This has been a great source of frustration for fans loyal to the books, especially after the first two entries in the series, Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone and Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, which were short enough (at 300-340 pages) that director Chris Columbus and his team could follow Rowling's narrative without deviating from it too much. As the books expanded, though, subplots had to be dropped, character beats fell to the wayside, and it’s been fun listening to Potter-philes express their growing exasperation over what didn't make the cut.

... FOR "THE BEST FILMS OF THE DECADE" - PART 6

Genre:

FAMILY/ANIMATED

Defined:

Fairy tales. Fantasies. Good old-fashioned family values. The kid-centric films of the Noughties were dominated by CG animation, performance capture, and Harry Potter. G- and PG-rated entertainment grew scarce, as did traditional hand-drawn animation (revived again, to mostly glorious effect, for 2009's The Princess And The Frog). And while Disney/Pixar continued to capture the imaginations of cinema-goers worldwide (with Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Up), their chief rival, DreamWorks, fancied in-jokes over genuine storytelling (Shrek, Madagascar). The ultimate Family flicks must not only do without the heavy profanity, violence and sexuality required of other genres, they must also engage adults and children alike.

The Top Five:

5. Enchanted (Kevin Lima, 2007)

Disney satirizes itself to such a spectacular degree you'd be hard- pressed to look at any of their animated classics the same way again. It's a canny twist on an age-old formula, complete with wink-wink nods to past studio successes and hummable song score from Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz ("That's How You Know," their centerpiece ballad, is a genuine crowd-pleaser). The whole thing actually plays like an answer to DreamWorks' Shrek, with jokes that poke fun at storybook conventions only to succumb to them, proudly, at the end. And while the 12-or-so minutes of featured animation are as sublime as anything Disney's done before, the movie really comes alive during its live-action sequences, with a game cast led by Amy Adams in the very definition of a star-making performance. She's delightful enough all on her own to make you believe in the corniest of fairy tales.