Haha, I missed this last night and read about it at three different sites after the show was over. I've been patiently waiting to catch it on YouTube. If anyone is still not watching Modern Family, you need to.



"The finger."

Also, this made me laugh so hard I actually hit my head.

OH SHIT ACADEMY AWARD PREDICTIONS POST! I almost forgot; I have really not been following the race that much this year.

Picture - Inglourious Basterds (not wishful thinking; Avatar wasn't critically acclaimed at all, and Hurt Locker bombed at the box office; I think they split it)
Director - Kathryn Bigelow
Actor - Jeff Bridges
Actress - Sandra Bullock
Supporting Actor - Christoph Waltz (his speech will talk about the group of people that came together to make IB, an academy if you will, with Quentin as the president, and he will single out individuals to thank based on which "branch" of the "academy" they belong to)
Supporting Actress - Mo'Nique
Original Screenplay - Quentin Tarantino for IB
Adapted Screenplay - Jason Reitman for UitA
Art Direction - Sherlock Holmes
Animated Film - Up
Cinematography - Avatar
Costume Design - The Young Victoria
Documentary - The Cove
Editing - Inglourious Basterds
Foreign Language - The White Ribbon
Make-up - Star Trek
Original Score - Up
Original Song - Crazy Heart
Sound Editing and Sound Mixing - Avatar
Visual Effects - Avatar

I don't predict the three shorts (doc, animated, live action) because who the hell even sees them? Anyway, editing usually goes hand-in-hand with picture, but Avatar might take it and still not win because I think most people who vote don't actually know what editing is. Same thing with the sound categories. If Avatar wins for Art Direction I will scream.

ETA: So, we're halfway through. I clearly miscalculated, and The Hurt Locker is definitely winning Best Picture. I can't believe it won both sound awards over Avatar; that's pretty damning.

I also can't believe that Avatar won Art Direction. TREES ARE NOT PRODUCTION DESIGN. Argh.

I also can't believe that Christoph is going to be the only Oscar for Inglourious Basterds. God. It was such a good movie! It was so wrong, in the screenplay category, the stark difference between The Hurt Locker scene and the IB scene, to then see THL win. Sigh.

Did I, or did I not, call Christoph's acceptance speech for the SAG awards? For his Oscar acceptance speech, I'm assuming that he'll talk about what it means to be a part of an Academy dedicated to film, and how in some ways the cast and crew that made Inglourious Basterds is like the Academy, with Quentin as the president; everyone working to glorify film; etc, etc.

I may or may not have clapped my hands like a toddler when IB won Best Ensemble. That, coupled with Avatar losing the PGA to The Hurt Locker, makes me think IB has a real shot as a dark horse Best Picture winner, and that would be awesome. I haven't had one of "my" films win BP since ROTK.

Other than that, the SAG awards were nearly identical to the Golden Globes just six days earlier, which highlights one of my biggest problems with award shows (my biggest problem is genre bias): what I like to call the "Homecoming Queen" effect. When I was in high school, the so-called popular kids were outnumbered by the geek collective made up of band, drama, and FCA. We could have easily voted for our own when it came to dances, even making concessions to only choose the more popular of the non-populars, the cross-overs, the ones who stood on the boundary. But the super-popular girls always ended up nominated, which meant that the geek collective had to be voting for them, too. Which didn't make sense, because we didn't like them. But when you got your ballot, there didn't seem to be any point to vote for the trumpet player who was really nice or the stage manager who was really funny; they weren't going to win, so why waste the vote?

And I think this is what happens with the Oscars and related shows. Once the probable winners make themselves known on the critical circuit (which in its own way follows the same SOP and barring a few exceptions locks down itself within the first two weeks), everyone else pretty much follows suit. There might be a single acting category that could go either way, but even that is usually confined to an either-or between two candidates. And there's NEVER any feeling that all five are equally likely to win. So I've reached the point, as I do every year, where a lot of the fun is gone because we already know who's going to win 75% of the awards come Oscar night. :(