{"id":115,"date":"2003-03-25T11:39:00","date_gmt":"2003-03-25T11:39:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T23:00:00","slug":"random-thoughts-on-the-oscars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/archive\/random-thoughts-on-the-oscars\/","title":{"rendered":"Random Thoughts On The Oscars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was interested in Mr Moore&apos;s phrase made during his acceptance speech, &quot;Shame on you, Mr Bush. Shame on you.&quot; <\/p>\n<p>I don&apos;t think that&apos;s something a British satirist or political activist would say. It sounded strangely inclusive, treating Mr Bush as an equal and a fellow American who has merely strayed from the path. If, say, Mr Tatchell were given an Oscar (for Best Citizen&apos;s Arrest Attempt?), I&apos;m sure he too would mention the much-alleged illegality of both the War and Mr Bush&apos;s own elected status, but the phrase &quot;shame on you&quot; would sound very odd indeed. If you have utter contempt for someone, wishing shame on them seems strangely tame and polite. Yet on Mr Moore&apos;s lips, and while holding an Oscar, the phrase sounded a powerful, shocking indictment.<\/p>\n<p>Mr Farrell is supernaturally good-looking in real life, despite the beard. Which surprised me as I&apos;d only previously seen him in DareDevil as an evil bald villain, and couldn&apos;t understand what the fuss over him was all about. I now have an inkling. <\/p>\n<p>Mr Martin is clearly still an extremely funny man. Why he can&apos;t make films as funny as &quot;The Man With Two Brains&quot; or &quot;LA Story&quot; anymore is therefore even more perplexing. <\/p>\n<p>Such a shame that the entries for the Best Song category have to be original works written for a recent movie. So, rather than all those excellent Kander &amp; Ebb 70s compositions from &quot;Chicago&quot; like &quot;All That Jazz&quot;, &quot;Razzle-dazzle &apos;Em&quot;, and &quot;They Both Reached For The Gun&quot;, we get their comparatively forgettable &quot;I Move On&quot;, just because it&apos;s new.<\/p>\n<p>Mr O&apos;Toole was rather wary of his Lifetime Achievement Award, seeing it as the Oscars&apos; way of tidying you into the grave, their equivalent of placing a coin on the lips of a corpse. Still, if it makes people investigate &quot;Lawrence Of Arabia&quot; , &quot;The Ruling Class&quot;, or &quot;The Stunt Man&quot;, for the first time, it can only be a good thing. <\/p>\n<p>One protracted part of the ceremony, being as it was the awards&apos; 75th year, featured an onstage seated display of as many previous winners of Best Actors as the organisers could presumably rustle up. As the commentator moved from uneasy, fixed-smiling actor to uneasy, fixed-smiling actor, naming each one plus the films they won the award or awards for, one could hear the whispers across the world:<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Oh, I didn&apos;t know they got an Oscar for THAT film.&quot;<br \/>\n&quot;Never seen that film.&quot;<br \/>\n&quot;Never heard of that film.&quot;<br \/>\n&quot;Where&apos;s Katharine Hepburn?&quot;<br \/>\n&quot;I thought she&apos;d won more Oscars than that&quot;<br \/>\n&quot;Is she STILL alive?&quot;<br \/>\n&quot;Look at the state of her!&quot;<br \/>\n&quot;Who?&quot;<\/p>\n<p>I was tickled to see that one of the winners was &quot;This Charming Man&quot;. Not the Smiths song, but a Danish live-action short film whose director was presumably a bit of a Morrissey fan. A suspicion which was confirmed during the &quot;Other Awards In Brief&quot; section of the highlights programme I watched, which showed a still of the 30-year old director at the podium, displaying an admirably Morrissey-esque haircut. I wonder if he thanked Mr M in his speech for the idea of the title? <\/p>\n<p>No sign anywhere of my two favourite films of last year &quot;24 Hour Party People&quot;, and &quot;Kissing Jessica Stein.&quot;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was interested in Mr Moore&apos;s phrase made during his acceptance speech, &quot;Shame on you, Mr Bush. Shame on you.&quot; I don&apos;t think that&apos;s something a British satirist or political activist would say. It sounded strangely inclusive, treating Mr Bush as an equal and a fellow American who has merely strayed from the path. If, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}