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Kinda a bland year. Hollywood needs another juggernaut with 11 or so Oscar wins, like Return of the King. Maybe The Hobbit next year?

I thought it was great, a nice 5/5 split between Hugo and The Artist which were my favourite films of the year. Though, in my opinion, The Tree of Life was robbed for Best Cinematography and Best Director should have went to Scorsese instead of Hazanavicius but comme ci comme ça

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Fountain of Thought - My views on cinema past and present

I was very happy to see The Artist win the top three prizes (I did not see any of the other films, so I cannot voice my opinion on them yet). Martin Scorsese already has a Best Director Oscar, so it's good to let somebody else get a chance to win one. I was also glad when Jean Dujardin won Best Actor over George Clooney.

Meryl Streep winning Best Actress (and Octavia Spencer winning Best Supporting) did not really surprise me much. 'Nuff said.

On the Best animated feature category, this was a very bad (or should I say slow) year for animated movies (your opinion may differ). There was nothing really that stood out in terms of "Oscar Gold". Pixar was out of the running for the first time in a long while (since Cars 2 was a huge critical flop). I still have not seen the winner [i]Rango[/] as it has never appealed to me at all. The only movie I saw out of the nominees was Kung Fu Panda 2 and that did not seem Oscar-worthy (from what I remember). Part of me would've liked to see one of the Independent films win personally, even if they sucked.

I wasn't surprised at all to see Hugo dominate the technical awards (i.e. Sound Editing, Visual Effects, Cinematography, etc)

About next year, I am guessing The Hobbit will get a few nods, as a previous poster as mentioned (unless critics hate it).

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Scorsese may have won one already but...it's Scorsese, widely hailed as the greatest living director - one doesn't seem enough. Especially when his win was for The Departed which is far from his best work.

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Fountain of Thought - My views on cinema past and present

I have the first half-hour of every Billy Crystal-hosted Oscar show, and last night's was added to the "keep" list. It was a great way to start the show, and the Cirque de Soliet (sp?) stole the whole show. That was just an amazing five minutes of entertainment.

"Man or Muppet" winning the Best Song Oscar was also great!

As for the awards, "Hugo" and "The Artist" were my favorite films of 2011 (i was lucky enough to see eight of the nine films nominated) and "The Artist" definitely was a good choice.

"Hugo" comes out on Blu-ray/DVD tomorrow, Tuesday, February 28. I will be adding this to my collection.

I was a little upset with Streep winning, but then when I look back on her career, 17 nominations with 1 Best Supporting Actress and 1 Best Actress Awards, I can see where the Guild wanted to award this treasure with another statue. I am so glad Octavia Spencer won Best Supporting Actress for her role in "The Help".

I am pleased with Christopher Plummer winning his award, and the Best Animated Feature went to my favorite film "Rango".

All in all this was a very good Awards show and did anyone notice that it ended 20 minutes early. Crystal has a way of making things move. None of shows have run longer than the scheduled time.

Let's hope the Academy signs him up for one more turn. He is truly a great host of the Oscars. He puts in a lot of hard work on this show. Can't wait to see his new movie "Parental Discretion" which comes out this winter.

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The show ended like 10 minutes late...

It was supposed to run from 8:30-11:30.

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I'm kinda mad that none of the Harry Potter movies have ever won an Oscar and I'm not even a fan. I thought this year would be its chance! In terms of Best Picture, Directing, acting, etc, I think not, but def for the technical Oscar awards! Those HP movies have some of the best production design, make up, visual effects, editing, and cinematography I've ever seen!

Best bit: Kim Jong-Il's appearance on the red carpet, and on Ryan Seacrest.

It was a crime not to give The Tree of Life the award for Best Cinematography but Hugo deserved the technicals for the opening shot alone. Stunning shot - Rene Clair for the 21st century.

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Fountain of Thought - My views on cinema past and present

TheSequelOfDisney wrote:


According to everything I read and also my Cox DVR schedule, it was scheduled from 7:30 to 11:00 pm CST.

According to all sources I have checked Billy Crystal got good remarks for finishing the show early by 20 minutes.

All of his shows have run under the scheduled time, that's why they need to get him signed up for another year NOW!!!

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Is there somewhere online I can watch this now? I wasn't home for any live streaming and don't have cable anyway, just the net.

So awesome that Man or Muppet one, but did they really not let them perform it? That sucks if they didn't. I still wanna see it because Crystal was always the best host, though.

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I would have preferred Hugo to have won both Best Picture and Best Director rather than all those technical awards, but I'm glad The Artist was still recognised for how great it was and that Hugo won quite a few awards nonetheless. Speaking of which, the Sound Editors' acceptance speech for Hugo was the only one that was genuinely funny and original - all the others were either boring or were too desperate to be funny. The speeches by the stars or makes of The Artist also seemed a little awkward when they struggled with their English.

Billy Crystal's entrance by appearing in clips of several films was somewhat entertaining but went on for too long; also, because of some of the clips shown, I now want to see Beginners.

The Cirque Du Soliet bit was bloody fantastic, and I was especially delighted to see it showcase the best scene in movie history (North by Northwest); it was much better than the overrated movie clipshow that included Avatar, Titanic and Forrest Gump. I would have liked to have seen "Man or a Muppet" performed, but never mind. It went quicker than I had thought it would, and I can't wait to see next year's Oscars.

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Ehhh... my DVR cut off 10 minutes at the end, so I missed the end of Meryl Streep's speech and the Best Picture Award.

I'm thinking your sources are wrong.

I thought Cirque du Soleil was awfully boring and the rest of my family agreed. Maybe us British just don't 'get' it?

The perfect Oscar host would be Woody Allen but considering he doesn't even accept his awards, he's never going to accept a hosting gig!

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Fountain of Thought - My views on cinema past and present

SWillie> wrote:


Whoever you have your cable service through blew it not you! I have friends with several different companies and it seems that Cox and Comcast were the only ones in the Midwest who got it right and scheduled it for 7:30 to 11:00 pm.

Don't beat yourself up over this, but know next time you are recording something live, add some time to it, preferably 30 minutes, and you won't miss a thing.

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But it featured the best scene ever directed by HITCHCOCK!

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My two cents:
I really enjoyed this year's show. Though, I can't help but feel that they aimed for brevity in terms of presentation. Save for the short films peppered throughout and the big Circe Du Soleil presentation, the show went by surprisingly fast. Even the award speeches didn't last more than two minutes. In a way, I really like that since I felt the problem with last year's show was that it had way too many gimmicks and it dragged the show down. On the other, a lot of "show" was taken out for the sake of a faster pace. I would have loved to have seen more songs performed live, but whatever.

As people have said already, Man or Muppet winning best song was a great highlight for me. Octavia Spencer winning was also a highlight since she really did feel humbled by it.

My absolutely lowlight of the evening was Chris Rock presenting best animated feature film. First, the joke about voice acting was irrelevant to the award. Had this been the award for best vocal performance then yeah, it would have made sense. But no, he just went on and on about how "easy" voice acting is.

Maybe it's just the animation nerd in me, and I get that he was trying to be funny and sarcastic, but his joke came out as a big "Fuck you" to professional voice actors with all his claims about voice acting being "easy". He really did over-simplify voice acting since voice acting is still voice ACTING, which means that you still have to convey emotion and add weight to the character. Voice acting also means repeating the same lines over and over again, something that studios don't show a lot of.

The whole thing felt like an insult, but it turned into a punch in the face when he said "And then I get paid millions of dollars for doing nothing". See, that got to me since it does show how "bad" the animation industry is nowadays since that is indeed how it is done, especially DreamWorks that has made it a practice of hiring celebrity voice actors and then paying millions of dollars so they can keep milking the film franchise.

The other lowlight of the evening is that there really wasn't any surprises in terms of winners. It was a battle between Hugo and The Artist and whatever category one didn't win at, the other did. It did show that 2011 was a dull year for movies. Yeah the bad movies were bad and the great movies were great but nothing really stood out. There wasn't a fierce competition of movies nor there was that one really big movie people wanted to see win.

But overall, the show I think was a massive improvement over last year's show where they hired the wrong people to host (Anne Hathaway was great but James Franco was just... stoned) and spent so much time on gimmicks and little on the actual show. Billy Crystal proved that he still has charm and charisma to carry a big show, and the winners were indeed deserving of their honor.

So it gets a 8 from me.

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Scrosese should've won his first 32 years ago, for Raging Bull and later one too for Goodfellas. Maybe even one for Shutter Island. That guy has been robbed so many times it's ridiculous.


Wait... Nick Nolte can act??!! Since when?!

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You'll be pleased to know that Tara Strong agrees with you.

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"If your life had a face, I would punch it." - Kim Pine, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Not surprised at all. People like her, Jim Cummings, Tom Kane, Tom Kenny, Charlie Adler, Steven Jay Blum, Billy West, DAN CASTALLENETA, Nancy Cartwright, John DiMaggio, Cree Summer and TONS more in the animation/anime community have made a name for themselves just doing voice overs, and they will ALL attest to the fact that voice acting is not easy.

I think it was Billy West who said that voice acting is more than just doing silly voices, that you have to train your vocal chords for the stress they will be forced upon, and that you have to ACT. Billy West also mentioned how ridiculous celebrity voice acting is getting, using Cameron Diaz as an example. At the time she was getting tons of millions of dollars just to voice Fiona. Billy even said that all she did was be herself, and I agree.

Again I get that he was being sarcastic, and the fact that everyone laughed means that they got what he is talking about. Still I just wish there was more respect towards animation since in the last few years it has been making more money than most live action films, and as Chris Rock said, they are getting paid by the millions.

I blame DreamWorks for this. Yeah, they have made great movies and at times they do get a lot of talent out of the celebrity voice actors they hire, but because they have made it so easy for anyone to come in and do a voice and pay them millions for it it has created the idea that animation is an easy thing to do.

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