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I watched the fashion show, aka the Academy Awards, mostly in hopes that Jon Stewart would do well.
Stewart is a very funny man, though not the type of humorist that the Hollywood tribe expects. The deadpan, the droll wit, the two-beat pause between setup and joke are all perfectly suited to late-night, small-audience TV, but not to the Oscars.
Still, he was very good, and as someone pointed out, his ad libs got better as the night went on. He's a major comedian now, but I bet he will not be invited to emcee the Oscars again soon. The academy will most likely return to Billy Crystal, the best there is at this sort of thing.
For me, the biggest surprise was not that Crash won best picture. It was that the Hollywood geniuses let the pimp song get nominated and then (unbelievably) gave it the Oscar. So now it's right up there in filmdom's musical pantheon with "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." This was surely a new low for Hollywood.
Even more amazing: Almost all the blacks in the audience–men and women of accomplishment, talent, and taste–seemed to be on their feet, delirious with joy at the honor paid to the gutter version of American black culture. Will journalists poke into this phenomenon, maybe telling us what combination of guilt and stupidity allowed the academy to go slumming like this?
Probably not.
Posted at 05:11 PM by John Leo
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