Post-show shorts (and updates).

The Guardian's Xan Brooks: "A genteel-verging-on-the-tedious Academy Awards saves its biggest shocks to the end.... First Eastwood pips Scorsese to the director award, then Million Dollar Baby adds insult to injury by being named best film.... For Scorsese it's an Oscar defeat snatched from the jaws of victory."

Rodney Welch [site]: "Look for a lot of TKO metaphors in tomorrow's headlines."

Defamer: "White trash cred expires after the first award, Hils."

The Movie Blog: "Give Rock a fairly respectable B- for his job."

Sharon Waxman and David Halbfinger:

For Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the founders and co-chairmen of Miramax who helped finance The Aviator the night was a bittersweet farewell, after a quarter-century run that racked up 249 nominations and 60 Academy Awards.

[...]

Underscoring the remoteness of this year's best picture nominees from mainstream tastes, Mr. Rock introduced a taped segment in which he interviewed mostly black moviegoers at a theater in an inner-city neighborhood here, asking them if they had seen movies nominated for best picture. None of them had. Asked if they had seen White Chicks a comedy starring two of the Wayans brothers, they said yes.

Also in the New York Times, Alessandra Stanley: "If only for the advertising revenue, television cannot afford to let the movie business sag, so all the networks pitch in to keep viewers tuned in - an act of self-serving generosity that falls somewhere between an Amish barn-raising and the government bailout of the S&Ls in the 1980s."

Cullen at the Hot Blog: "How seriously should we take this thing when the guy who hands out the Best Picture award takes the stage drunk?"

Update: "[I]t's weird to have Beyonce singing this French song when they have Johnny Depp's wife, an actual French pop star, right there." Monty Ashley, among the other Vidiots at TeeVee, Steve Lutz, Philip Michaels, Chris Rywalt, Lisa Schmeiser, Jason Snell and, just in time, Greg Knauss.

Another update: Cintra Wilson at Salon: "The neurotic, sphincter-clenched pacing, which was perhaps some accountant's idea of how to keep things moving, made the whole thing indigestible: kind of a cross between The Chronicles of Riddick and microwavable White Castle burgers."

David Edelstein at Slate: "Gil Cates is going to get a lot of kudos tomorrow. Fascists do make the trains run on time."

Posted by dwhudson at February 28, 2005 1:11 AM