Scorsese Triumphs, I Suffer Defeat (Sort Of)

Each year for the past few Academy Award presentations my family and I gather together and compete to see who can pick the most winners for the Oscars. With my superior movie knowledge, keen awareness of who has won what going into the event and handle on what the minds of Academy members are thinking I have always crushed my competition leaving the rest of the family to play for second place. This year was totally different.
Overall the event was pretty ho-hum. It wasn’t that Ellen DeGeneres wasn’t funny or the anticipation for who was going to win what wasn’t there. In fact, the collection of nominees in each category was so assorted – both in talent and nationality – it was a grand night to watch the moviemakers not linked with Hollywood reap the benefits of film’s greatest honor.
Director Martin Scorsese finally got what he deserved in a Best Directing award for “The Departed.” I think he definitely deserved one of these awards, but “The Departed” certainly shouldn’t have been the one to do it. “The Departed” also won the prestigious Best Picture award, which was also a mistake in my opinion seeing as “Little Miss Sunshine” was a far superior film overall.
The greatest shock in my opinion for the night was Alan Arkin winning Best Supporting Actor for his turn as a brash, drug-addicted grandpa in “Little Miss Sunshine.” It’s not that Arkin’s acting wasn’t good enough, but the hype surrounding Eddie Murphy’s performance in “Dreamgirls” made you believe he would end up second to none. I even considered Mark Wahlberg’s turn as a Boston cop not afraid to use harsh language was in the running for the award.
The night ran smoothly for the most part, aside from some “green” chatter concerning Al Gore and his award-winning documentary on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Speeches were kept to a minimum time frame due to two different features. The first was a familiar one, with the orchestra chiming in if the winner started to run long, and they didn’t mind where you were in the speech when it came to beginning the first note. At one point the conductor started as the guy was in mid-sentence thanking his wife.
However, that is where the second feature of the acceptance speech presentation came into play. Backstage winners were given as much time as they wanted to talk in front of a camera that would record the speech and be put on the Academy Awards website. Academy personnel said they would leave the speeches online until next year’s presentation. This gave winners the opportunity to give a more heartfelt speech onstage rather than go through a long list of people who aren’t known and probably don’t deserve national television credit anyway.
Well, by the middle of the evening I was in last place among my family in our “pick the winners” contest and in the lead was Kristyn, whose only knowledge of movies comes from People magazine photographs of the stars walking down Rodeo Drive with their babies in tow. Fortunately for me, her luck ran out and I began to pick up some steam coming down the homestretch. I ended the night tying Cint for first place, with ten correct predictions. This was an immense drop from last year’s record-setting selection of 18 correct predictions. This coming year I have vowed to return to my previous glory and slaughter my family with 20 accurate selections in next year’s game.