Oscar Upsets and Sweeps

This years Oscar Sweeper was Slumdog Millionaire.  The truly mesmerizing story of a kid who goes on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and uses his experiences in his young life to answer some of the most obscure questions they could come up with.  Even the answer to the simple questions involved an inspiring, shocking, or simply funny story.  While I preferred Milk for the Best Picture Oscar, there is no surprise here, and it went onto grab a grand total of eight.  Including Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Cinematography.

After Slumdog took everyone to the house, there are a few wins or loses I was slightly surprised by.  Best Actor win by Sean Penn, while wholly deserved, seemed like an upset over the shoe in for Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler.  Both were very deserving, but with Rourke's wins in numerous critics choice awards and a BAFTA and a Golden Globe... was surprising.

The documentary section was very weak this year.  I've only seen two of them, out of the four, and everyone was raving about Man on a Wire.  I watched Man on a Wire.  Some French guy broke into a sky scraper, walked on a high wire thousands of feet up, and then got arrested, released, cheated on his girlfriend and went home.  All of the while using a team of uninteresting pot heads with nothing better to do apparently.  So when it won over Trouble in the Water, which is about a family who survived Katrina, I was just kinda pissed off.  I couldn't find anything to be interested in Man on a Wire other than the fact that those buildings are gone now, and that had nothing to do with the documentary.  The man was uninteresting, is act was pretty stupid, while still impressive, and frankly, who the hell cares?

Another movie worth mentioning is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which didn't win any of the major categories, but pulled in a few of those movie magic wins.  Those would include Art Direction, Makeup, and Visual Effects.  All of these mostly due to some new technology to put Brad Pitt's face on a bunch of smaller people, without looking terribly computerized, or obviously rubber.  They really did achieve this and its actually very scary at times cause basically you forget its Brad Pitt because physically, he doesn't look like that, even though its a perfect aging prediction for him.  Thirty years from now, we've got to go back and compare him then to what they predicted for him.  Little long term experiment for you.

Last little note is that Heath Ledger beat out the competition and picked up the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor over the likes of Josh Brolin in Milk and Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt.  No, no Robert Downey Jr. was not mentioned.  His nomination was a joke, should not have been taken seriously, and was rather insulting to a number of other actors and their performances.  Sure it was funny, but its not hard to act like a deranged dick with an Australian accent and some make up on your face.  See frat kid any weekend at about 11:30pm.