CiB Oscar Recap

Ah, the Oscars!  The one awards show where there is a 100% chance of no Justin Bieber, no Glee kids, and no Kardashians, or any combination thereof!  We are thrilled to have swept the Oscars with our predictions, having not picked a single upset.  Yay for us!  We considered celebrating with a little box-o-vino while watching, but we figured that would lead to a premature bedtime.  Then we figured we would probably be falling asleep before the end anyway, but at that point we were too lazy to get out of bed.  And since Natalie Portman won, we’ll have to continue watching this awful but seriously important telecast year after year.  With that, we bring you our list of the worst things about watching the Oscars, and the things they finally did to fix them last night:

1.  The Dead Celebrity Popularity Applause-o-Meter: Before last night, this death montage was known to us by this name, since it was consistently four excruciating minutes of dead celebrities, most of whom no one had ever heard of.  Every single person would receive polite golf claps, except the occasional big star who would cause the audience to erupt in hoots and hollers.  Then it was back to, say, a cinematographer who hadn’t worked since the ‘70s.  Golf claps.  That poor man’s family!  People obviously didn’t like him as much as they liked Jessica Tandy.  To fix this, we heard Celine Dion singing over the “In Memoriam” montage.  It would be impolite to interrupt Ms. Dion to cheerfully celebrate the life of Dennis Hopper before the end of the song, so everyone received equal amounts of claps at the end.  Yay for you, and yay for you too, art director from the ‘50s!

2.  The Montages, Good God, The Endless Montages!: Speaking of the Dead Celebrity Popularity Applause-o-Meter, we don’t think we spotted a single other montage last night.  We did briefly fall asleep sometime during the sound effects awards, but normally these pointless time suckers are all over the place.  Good on you, ABC!

3.  The Best Original Song Performances: Okay, so there was no improvement here, except perhaps from fifteen years ago when they would all sing the entire song – all four or five minutes of them, making the show last thirty minutes longer than necessary.  Even though they no longer do this, the fact that they devote more time to showcasing these four nominees than they do even for the acting nominations is cruel.  We understand that they are trying to make a SHOW out of this – but come on, many of us are operating on Eastern Standard Time, and some of us have work tomorrow.