If there was one moment at the Oscars that gave me great joy, it was seeing the entire Academy crowd stand up and clap for Roger Corman. Of course Lauren Bacall had to be standing up beside him to get the audience to their feet, but it still worked.
Then about fifteen minutes later, we get a WTF moment of the kids from Twilight introduced a tribute to horror. The actor who plays Jacob the werewolf makes some snarky comment about how the Academy hasn't awarded a nomination for horror since 1972 with The Exorcist. Who the hell writes this? The first thing flashes through my mind is, "I guess the fact that Silence of the Lambs swept the major awards in 1990 doesn't count." And if to prove my point, the following montage of horror movies includes not only Lambs but a string other movies in the same time frame that could be called horror and which were awarded in some manner.
But here's the joke: they start with Jaws as the first horror movie. Later they show Poltergeist. Stephen Spiellberg, master of horror! Were there any Corman movies in the montage? I saw one---Little Shop of Horrors, but c'mon. The overt heaviness on Spielberg was almost as if to remind us of who really runs Hollywood. It ain't Corman, in case you want to know.
My favorite speech was the one by Sandy Powell who won for Best Costume design for The Young Victoria. Because of her, I'm going to make a point of paying more attention to costumery in movies in the coming year. It's my theme, I've decided.
Favorite award of the night: that Logoland winning Best Animated Short, of course. But The New Tenants winning for Best Live Short? Ugh. I just don't get it. It really shows the discrepancy in tastes between Hollywood and yours truly. I would not have thought that movie was even worthy of being in the category with the other live shorts, let alone that it would win.
Biggest travesty of the night: not that The Hurt Locker won so many awards (it deserved them I suppose), but that they screwed up the tribute to recently deceased, lingering too long on James Taylor while we missed the first couple tribute names.
But that's not what really bothered me. It was when they got far down on the list, and Jennifer Jones' name came up, there were about three people clapping in the entire auditorium. I realize that the stars ghave gone out to freshen their drinks, and the place is full of seat fillers but it's Jennifer Jones for god's sake, winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress of 1943 (a year that Tom Hanks would later invoke in reverence when handing out the Best Picture award---Jones beat Ingrid Bergman for the Oscar).
Jones was pretty much the last of old Hollywood (besides Bacall and a few others). That generation and that era is almost completely gone.
I don't give a damn if you're just a seat filler, son. You give it up for the woman who crawled across the rocks in Portrait of Jennie, and who crawled across the desert in Duel in the Sun. And you missie, who took the cab over from UCLA this afternoon so you could sit in Kathryn Bigelow's seat during commercials. Put Madame Bovary in your DVD queue and see what a screen presence is . And put your hands together for a woman who inspired Martha Stewart and whose career you probably can only dream of emulating in the slightest.
As for Roger, who made the movies of my childhood. They could have made the whole horror tribute montage about your work, and I would have been happy.
