Monday, February 23, 2009, 4:36 PM
Movies
By Kevin Moreau

Hollywood's dark night? Not quite

The 81st Academy Awards are over, and the six major categories went pretty much the way everyone expected them to.

Or, at least, there weren't any mind-boggling upsets, unless you count Sean Penn winning over Mickey Rourke. I can't say I'm surprised by that: Everyone says the Academy loves a good comeback story, but it loves politics, hot-button liberal issues and Sean Penn more.

To absolutely no one's surprise (except maybe Harvey Weinstein), given the bumper crop of awards it amassed before yesterday, "Slumdog Millionaire" won Best Picture (and, almost by default, Best Director as well, since the two awards go hand-in-hand more often than not).

Penelope Cruz for Best Supporting Actress makes sense, given that Hollywood seems to adore her, Amy Adams and Viola Davis canceled each other out for "Doubt," Taraji P. Henson had the misfortune of being in "Benjamin Button" (which I enjoyed, but apparently most voters didn't, except in technical categories), and most voters probably still regret giving Marisa Tomei a statue for "My Cousin Vinnie."

Kate Winslet for Best Actress was a foregone conclusion (despite the fact that, as Hugh Jackman drolly referenced, no one saw "The Reader"), as was Heath Ledger for Best Supporting Actor.

Now that that federally mandated recap is out of the way, I have to admit to a certain ambivalence about the whole thing, and not just because the results were largely predictable. Aside from the fact that Americans seem obsessed with celebrities (and especially what celebrities think of other celebrities), the Oscars' place in the culture far outweighs their actual significance.

It's great that the movie industry wants to award excellence in its field; more power to them. But it remains a mystery to me why we're so obsessed with what a bunch of actors, editors, makeup people, costumers, special-effects gurus and sound engineers think about what their peers did. I admit to being mildly curious, at times, about what one actor thinks of another actor's work, or what Director A thinks about Movie X. But on an institutional level? Not so much. It's like if professional football players got together every year to hand out their own awards: a curiosity, perhaps, but little more.

I might be biased, but I'm much more interested in what certain groups of critics might think, or the public at large. (Except that in practice, that's the People's Choice Awards. So maybe scratch that last part.)

For that reason, I don't think too much about the inclusion or exclusion of certain kinds of movies among the nominees. The fact that "The Dark Knight" wasn't nominated for Best Picture doesn't offend me, as it does other writers (like Salon's Andrew O'Hehir), who feel the Academy should honor movies that make or break significant box office records. I don't get that. That's what the box office is for.

I think the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences vote for Best Picture based on what they think worked best overall, beginning to end, as a film. (Although I'm not naive enough to think that politics, sentiment and other factors don't play a large role.) I'm a fan of comic-book movies, and I thought Robert Downey Jr. could easily (and perhaps should) have been nominated for Best Actor for "Iron Man." But he wasn't. C'est la vie. And although I enjoyed "The Dark Knight" a good bit, even I can admit that it tried a bit too hard and was at least a half-hour too long for its own good.

But that's just me, and I concede that I'm in the minority where a lot of this stuff is concerned. That's fine. So anyway, for anyone who cares:

I thought the ceremony itself went well. I enjoyed the linear-narrative approach the producers used, walking the audience through the process of a film getting made. I absolutely loved the short film by Judd Apatow with James Franco and Seth Rogen reprising their roles from "Pineapple Express." I liked having groups of past award winners come out to announce the nominees and winners.

And I thought that on the whole, Hugh Jackman did a good job. Could've done without the musical number extolling the virtues of musicals, though. I kept thinking that time could have been better spent, you know, handing out awards.