Oscar Post-Mortem

And I don't mean the green Muppet on a slab at the morgue.

As with most Academy Awards shows, I watch out of a morbid sense of curiosity at the politics and shenanigans surrounding the crop of films each year, wondering if the films I thought warranted accolades would be the ones the Academy chose.  Last night, I was actually not disappointed.  

As much as I loved The Hurt Locker, as much as I love Kathryn Bigelow's work, I didn't give her or her best film to date a snowball's chance in hell, going up against her ex-husband's sci-fi epic Avatar (which is currently the 20th highest-grossing film of all time and climbing, adjusted for inflation) and the more socially-relevant Precious (which I would have pegged as more of an Academy-endearing project).  I'd been saying for weeks that I thought Bigelow was more worthy of the Best Director award for The Hurt Locker than James Cameron was for Avatar, and that The Hurt Locker was more suited to winning the Best Picture Oscar.  But I held little hope that that would be the case.

Imagine my surprise when she won.  And her film won.  It's kind of vindicating when you've liked an artist for many years and they are suddenly honored.  Good for you, Ms. Bigelow.  And good for the rest of us wwho have watched and enjoyed your work for the past couple decades.  And congratulations for being the first woman to win in the Directing category.  About friggin' time.

The format of the show itself was more about the jokes and less about the spectacle, which is fine by me.  The one exception was the break-dancing-to-film-scores-number (take note, producers - that was unnecessary and completely silly).  And notably absent from the memorial reel was Farrah Fawcett.  Whaddupwiddat?

But those quibbles aside, I'm pretty happy with the way the awards turned out, and happy my dark horse took the big two.  Now everyone go add The Hurt Locker to your Netflix queue.  You can thank me later.