There were few surprises during Sunday night's telecast of the 83rd Academy Awards. As expected, Colin Firth took home Best Actor for his role in The King's Speech and Natalie Portman took home Best Actress for her role in Black Swan. Melissa Leo DID come away with the win for Best Supporting Actress, she also gets the "prestige" of being the first person the drop an F-bomb on the Oscar stage. (I'd rather be known for the first part, not the second.) And Christian Bale won Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Fighter, showing some emotion during his acceptance speech that we haven't seen this year.
The biggest bomb of the evening (except for Melissa Leo's) were the hosts. Franco seemed stoned and poor Hathaway tried to overcompensate and was a little too happy. It's not good when the biggest laughs come from 2 former hosts, one of whom has been dead for many a year and is digitally inserted on the stage.
In one area there was a surprise, Tom Hooper took home the Best Director award for The King's Speech. The majority of critic's and regular folk, pegged David Fincher of The Social Network to take this away from him. I however did not.
When it comes to my other choices, I did fairly well! 18 out of 24 correct.
As always there were a couple of areas that I was kicking myself over. When I'm making my picks, I take a piece of paper and write down who I instinctually think should win. Then I read other critic's choices and I watch previews and I inevitably change some of my choices. That's what happened this year in the areas of sound mixing and cinematography. I originally wrote down Inception to win both of those categories. I changed my mind because I really thought that True Grit was beautifully filmed. And Roger Deakins has been nominated 9 other times and not won. This was Wally Pfister's first ever nomination and I didn't really think he'd win. Not because it wasn't a spectacularly filmed movie (it was!) but just... because.
Now, in sound mixing I really should have stuck with Inception. Inception took home almost every technical award given out this year leading up to Sunday night, but I changed it up at the last minute and picked The Social Network, which had a lot of challenging sound effects to deal with, but was apparently not as difficult as it's rival.
The other 4 areas I missed- Best Foreign Language Film, Best Animated Short, Best Live Action Short, and Best Documentary Short -I'm not too upset about. I was barely able to watch previews for all of the nominees and when reading others picks for the winner, I had mixed results over all the categories.
All in all I'm happy about my choices this year! I enjoyed the telecast for the most part. The highlights being the opening film montage and Billy Crystal's bit with Bob Hope. I also liked hearing Mandy Moore and Zachary Levi sing I See the Light from "Tangled." I could have done without Randy Newman and I frankly couldn't understand what Florence Welch was saying. And someone please tell Gwyneth Paltrow to stick with acting. She looked so terrified to be up there singing, she barely even opened her eyes.
I look forward to the year ahead with all of it's great films to come and for this time next year, when I once again go through the agony and ecstasy of who-will-win and who-won-what!
