The Oscars Overview

By: Joshua Volkers

Ah, another year, another Oscars, and with that comes cries of outrage, cheering, flat jokes and a whole bunch of golden statues! (Among other things.) While our resident fashion guru Katherine Liakakos covers the Red Carpet for this prestigious event, this will be the actual overview of the show itself. Of course, we’ll be going over the actual show, but first I want to get to the awards. Enough blabbering though; it’s time to dive into a pot of tears, laughs, speeches, upsets, and of course our old friend controversy, so let us talk about the Academy Awards!

Now, we’ll get the big one out of the way first: Birdman won the night with Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Original Screenplay and the biggest award of the night-Best Picture overall. But remember kids, even though it’s rated 14A up here, there’s still a lot of, er, explicit and brutal content throughout the film. What’s curious is that Birdman is described as a ‘black comedy-drama’ film, and is the first comedy film to win Best Picture since Shakespeare in Love, 16 Oscar shows ago. For anybody who consciously remembers when that happened: feel old yet?

I’ll quickly run down the rest so that we can get onto some of my criticisms for the show in just a sec here. The Grand Budapest Hotel, with just as many nominations as Birdman, won awards for Best Costume Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Production Design, and Best Original Score; Best Sound Mixing and Film Editing went to Whiplash and J.K. Simmons won Best Supporting Actor for his role in the film; Interstellar was awarded with Best Visual Effects; Big Hero 6 was named Best Animated film of the year by the academy; Best Animated Short was Feast (not the 2005 horror movie); Best Adapted Screenplay went to Graham Moore for The Imitation Game (great speech by the way); Best Foreign Language film was a Polish movie named Ida; American Sniper was awarded best film Editing: Selma had the best Original Song, Glory, (breathtaking performance by Common and John Legend); Best Live Action Short Film went to The Phone Call; Best Short Subject and Feature Documentaries were Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1 and Citizenfour; Best Supporting Actress went to Patricia Arquette for Boyhood; Julianne Moore won her first Academy Award after five nominations over her career, including this year; and finally Eddie Redmayne won for his role as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, (loved his enthusiasm!)

Oh holy rusted metal Batman, that was a lot to recite in one paragraph! But, anyways, this is really what I wanted to talk about, the show itself. It… fell flat. I would say it sucked, which it kind of did, but then again we live in a world where the 83rd Oscars Ceremony happened (the one James Franco and Anne Hathaway hosted). But really, the Oscars do not have a good grip on making an entertaining show for people to watch. Look, I’m not saying you put on something that’s the quality of Macbeth, but for the love of every single frame captured in Hollywood, that Oscar ballots joke was chuckle-worthy at best the first time they brought it up. After that, pfft! Flat. The jokes when NPH was walking through the audience? Flat. There were a few good ones of course; Adele Dazeem made a stunning return, as John Travolta acknowledged his mistake and apologized to Idina Menzel on stage for the whole world to see. He got a little creepy there for a few seconds, but he brought it under control. Over the past few years, Oscar hosts have been sketchy, with mixed feelings on Seth MacFarlane and Ellen DeGeneres, Franco and Hathaway an absolute embarrassment, and Billy Crystal as the Oscars’ literal golden boy being deemed the best of the bunch.

So what is it? Is it the writing? Is it the hosts? What is it that makes the Oscars unbearable to watch at points? I’d say it’s a few things: for starters, it’s too long. They devoted 14 minutes to Best Original Song-and only a few minutes to Best Picture. They need to shorten the time they take for each category, and I think it`s time to move a few of the categories to a separate night to cut time. There is a second Oscars show that`s not televised for the rest of the awards they can't show on the big night, so why not do that? I think that you could also televise it as an accompanying show before the main show.

Aside from the length of the show, I'd also say get a better team of writers who know how to keep a large crowd entertained, and also, let the hosts fly off the handle a little like with Seth MacFarlane. I would love to see Dwayne Johnson host an Oscars someday. I mean, imagine all of the smack talk that would go on! I don't know if the Academy would ever allow someone like him to do that, but it would certainly give that spark that the show has been missing for a little while.

As you can probably tell, I could talk about the Oscars for an hour, but I feel I have to wrap it up here. So, that was the 2015 Oscars, and while the show itself was disappointing, hey, we stay for the awards, don't we? Anyways, I’m Joshua Volkers, reporting for the Titan Times. Follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, stay tuned to any articles or news we put out, and hey, there’s a comment section down there, so why don't you give us your thoughts on the 2015 Oscars? Talk about anything that happened during the ceremony; the recipients of the awards, the host, the skits, the guests, anything! And with that, I will see you next time, Titans! Stay strong.