Not really about the Oscars

We didn't really the watch the Oscars this year. Two reasons: 1) The ongoing Time Warner Cable problem--this year, the screen wasn't black but it did freeze and pixilate and stutter a lot; 2) Once again, we didn't really care about the Oscars. It's a bit ironic that, as more interesting indie movies have taken over the Oscar field (since mainstream Hollywood studios have largely abandoned movies which are about anything except replicating amusement park rides), the Oscar race has become much less interesting to me. At any rate, we did watch Jon Stewart's monologue which was good, if not great--the Dennis Hopper thing fell flat, and though I appreciated the "Iraq war movie" bit, the audience didn't seem to.

The only major nominees we've seen so far are No Country for Old Men, which I appreciated more than liked, and Michael Clayton, which I liked but which didn't feel "heavy" enough to be an Oscar movie. I was glad that the Coen brothers won for direction, but this movie is not one of their best. I put the Coen's movies into three categories:

1) Great movies, ripe for multiple viewings:
Blood Simple (still my favorite Coen brothers film), Miller's Crossing, Fargo, Raising Arizona.

2) Good movies that I might watch another time or two:
O Brother Where Art Thou, Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski, Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers.

3) What the f*** movies that I might watch a second time but hate myself for doing so:
Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn't There, No Country for Old Men.

I've seen Barton Fink more times than I care to admit (and read several critics' takes on it) and just hate it. I love the idea of Hudsucker and its various references to old movies, but wish it had a stronger script. O Brother and Lebowski are ones I'd like to re-visit every so often, but never quite get around to.

By coincidence, on Oscar weekend, we watched the movie that won Best Picture in 1971 (technically, as Oscar night for '71 movies was on April 10, 1972), The French Connection, one of the few Oscar winners I'd never seen before. The famous car chase scene (Gene Hackman in a car, chasing a elevated subway car) is indeed quite spectacular and Hackman is good, but otherwise it doesn't feel like a Best Picture; it feels like a big-budget version of Shaft. I liked the gritty feel of the film (shot almost entirely on the streets of New York) and seeing a young Roy Scheider (R.I.P.) who I loved in Jaws and All That Jazz. I think I've avoided seeing French Connection because it stole the Oscar that year from two of my favorite movies, Clockwork Orange and The Last Picture Show. I'm glad to have seen it, but I still think the other two movies got robbed.