Jon Stewart did his best, but it wasn't good enough. There are limitations in being a clever, self-deprecating master of irony, when what the job of Oscar host truly demands is being a showman. Which Stewart would probably be the first to admit he's not.
His humor, politically barbed but never obnoxious, was possibly a bit too sophisticated for that cavernous room. But what really defeated him, as it has almost every modern-day Oscar host except for Billy Crystal, is the deadly monotony of the Oscar show itself. What a fossiled relic. The Oscar broadcast is a classy but inert dinosaur, and this year's was more forgettable than most.
Stewart gamely tried to deflate the evening's pomposity whenever he could — after a montage on message movies, he quipped, "and none of these issues were ever a problem again" — but still, we had to sit through it all anyway.
Even with a last-minute shocker, as Crash
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Jon Stewart
The 78th Annual Academy Awards 8:01: The opening scene just demonstrates why we love Jon Stewart: No one does self-deprecation so funny. Not even George Clooney. I think my dog would look great in a Steve Martin wig.
8:05: At first, the Hollywood royalty aren't laughing quite as hard as I am at Jon's jokes — especially not at the one about the suffering caused by movie piracy. But nothing brings people together like a Bjork joke. (She was trying on her gown and Cheney shot her!) And then the gay Western montage. Not even Stewart knows how to follow up that hilarity, so I'm not even gonna try. Brilliant.
8:16: Nicole Kidman's weird intro for the best-supporting-actor nominees has me thinking right away that Clooney will win. And then he does; self-deprecation keeps working wonders. "So I'm not winning director." The music starts after about 10 sec
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Question: What do you think are the most overrated Oscar nominees this year?
Answer: You know, almost any other year I could have come up with a list a foot long. But the 2005 Academy Award nominees are a really strong bunch — among the major categories I can honestly say that there isn't a single one I strongly feel doesn't belong in the running. That said, I don't think John Williams merits two nominations in the category for best original score — for Munich and Memoirs of a Geisha. But I'm consistently at odds with the prevailing opinion on him. I find the overwhelming majority of his compositions overblown and totally ordinary — just because he can orchestrate up the yin-yang doesn't mean he has to do it every single time. He has 36 prior music nominations (all but three for original score), many of which represent two films in a single year; he also has five wins t
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Ziyi Zhang
Question: I have a question about the beautiful actress Zhang Ziyi, who was in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But in Memoirs of a Geisha, she was called Ziyi Zhang. What gives, and what’s her first name?
Answer: Zhang Ziyi’s first name is Ziyi, but in many Asian cultures it’s traditional to give the surname first. Given that for the bulk of human history, the most important thing you could know about a person — in both the East and the West — was who his or her family was, I’m surprised that this order isn’t the norm everywhere. But in the West, the standard name format is surname last (generally a patronymic — the father’s name) and given name first. Miss Zhang appears to have adopted the Western order as part of her bid for international stardom; Americans especially have a problem with “weird” names. That
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Albert Brooks, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
For Albert Brooks, it was a longer trip than expected from Los Angeles to India. His new film, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World — in which the comic, as a version of his real self, visits India and Pakistan on behalf of the U.S. government to learn what makes Muslims laugh — originally was slated for an October release (and lofty Toronto Film festival showing). Instead, it got shuttled to this weekend due to some nervous Nellies. And all because of the title.
After screening some footage almost a year ago for Sony execs, "Everyone felt excited, but I didn't feel as excited as the others," Brooks recalls, "because when I told them the title, one of the big shots made a joke that was weird to me, like, 'Good title. I guess we're going to have to put extra phone lines in to take these calls.' When studios say t
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Brokeback Mountain's Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal
The box office went ape for King Kong over the weekend... oh, right — that's next Monday's news. (Hey, I didn't want to be the last hack to make a lame joke about people being driven bananas by Peter Jackson's instaclassic.) This weekend, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe dominated the cineplex, conjuring up $67.1 million in receipts. Expanding nationwide after two weeks, George Clooney's muy political Syriana took in $12 million for a second-place finish. But the big story — no, I'm not going to make another pathetic Kong crack — is the performance of two flicks in limited release: Memoirs of a Geisha, playing on only eight screens, made a stunning $674,000; and Brokeback Mountain — the movie of the year according to the L.A. Film Critics Association and the Boston Society of Film Critics — wrangled $544,549 in just five theaters. Its $108,910 take per screen
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