... FOR "HOLLYWOOD'S BIGGEST NIGHT" (aka "OSCARS 2015") - UPDATED!

UPDATE: Well, it seems Cracked was absolutely right. In a move that should surprise absolutely no one in retrospect, Oscar bestowed Eddie Redmayne and Julianne Moore with Best Actor/Actress honors at last night's 87th Annual Academy Awards, for playing disease-ridden screen characters and/or historical figures. Moore's win is especially grating, not because she didn't deserve it, but because she's already given at least a half dozen worthwhile performances, and since this year she happened to play a Columbia University professor suffering from Alzheimer's, the Academy finally decided to give her her due. (Like Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, Moore was awarded for a film people respected but didn't particularly enjoy.)

As for the rest, I guess I really shouldn't be too upset that Birdman took home top honors for Best Picture, Director and Original Screenplay. It is, after all, a terrific entertaiment, with stellar performances and knockout cinematography. But its meta-tale of artists under pressure is as old as Fellini's 8½, and the illusion that it's all shot in one long, uninterrupted camera take has been pulled off before, in Sokurov's Russian Ark and Hitchcock's Rope. I'm convinced more than ever that every film today is a copy of something else, and that the only thing "original" about them is the way their stories are told.

So why didn't Boyhood win the Oscar for Best Picture? As far as I'm concerned, it was the only film released last year that broke ground in any way, this 12-year odyssey, shot with the same actors, of a boy growing up and the "moments" that make up his life. The movie may seem uneventful to the average viewer, but then again that isn't the point. (The point is: What do you do with the moments that make up your life? Do the curve balls steer you in the right direction or hold you back?) Boyhood was a labor of love for its director and actors and everyone else involved, and no other film aimed higher or accomplished more by saying so little. And that will be cherished and remembered decades from now while everything else fades into oblivion.

As for the show itself, we were attending a family function so I really didn't get to see much of it. But I managed to stick around long enough to hear host Neil Patrick Harris say of the Oscars, "Or, as I like to call them, the Dependent Spirit Awards." That pretty much summed it all up for me.

A (relatively) short one today, since you've no doubt already formed an opinion of what the Academy Awards do or do not mean to you at this point. To sum up the blog's annual stance on the subject, the Oscars a) are really nothing more than a glorified high school popularity contest, b) pride themselves on celebrating that old "independent spirit," c) sometimes rally around a unified theme, d) try to seem "edgy" and "of the moment" only to revel in time-worn clichés in the end, and e) celebrate everything that's mediocre about American film. And yet, without fail, something will compel me to tune in, at least for a bit, to see if all the tried-and-true traditions still hold. If you can resist the temptation to check out even a part of the telecast for yourself (and, let's be honest, who couldn't use a little Neil Patrick Harris fix every now and then?), then congratulations, you're a better person than I am.

... FOR "CG ATROCITIES" (CONTINUED)

An addendum to last week's post, on the horrors of excessive CGI in modern blockbuster cinema.

One of the things you'll notice when watching George Lucas's recent Star Wars prequels is that the guy is clearly infatuated with all the newfangled technology at his disposal. This is certainly one of the reasons why so many people tend to reject The Phantom Menace, Attack Of The Clones and Revenge Of The Sith on an intellectual level. It's the opposite of what made the original trilogy so special in the first place, when Lucas was basically forced to invent the FX that would kowtow to the stories he wanted to tell.
 
Especially depressing during Clones and Sith is George's insistence on using digital stuntmen to punctuate his action sequences. Long before the days of Luke Skywalker, apparently, the Jedi had the power to transform into hokey cartoon versions of themselves while doing somersaults through the air. Pretty cool, right? For someone as old- fashioned as myself, however, this is the equivalent of those Adventures Of Superman serials of the 40s, when actor Kirk Alyn would literally morph into a hand-drawn Man of Steel when flying. Which is to say, if you can't make it look right, why bother trying at all?