80th Anniversary of the Academy Awards
By:
Katie Baumgart
Copy Editor
Although studded with stars and paved in paparazzi, the red carpet of
Hollywood’s Kodak Theater unrolled for a bleak and desolate 80th
Anniversary of the Academy Awards. According to Nielsen Media Research, the
television ratings this year have reached a record low, making this year the
least watched Oscar ceremony in the history of the show.
Even host Jon Stewart seemed to feel
the waning air of the ceremony, trying to pull the dismal scene together with
un-amusing stunts: playing Wii on the Oscar’s big screen, making an
announcement of all the pregnant women in the audience (it’s Nicole Kidman,
Jessica Alba, and Cate Blanchett, in case you missed the broadcast) and
dropping far too many political references throughout the evening. The
Academy-Awards are the paramount tributary to the glorious art of cinema, and
for an award-ceremony that is supposed to be the epitome of red carpet
refinement and sophistication, the overall levels of suavity dropped with every
passing “joke” and interlude with the host.
The four-hour broadcast did not entertain,
and even the Red Carpet fashions were disappointing. Marion Cotillard, who won
Best Actress for “La Vie En Rose,” was the only starlet in memorable attire,
wearing a stunning Jean Paul Gaultier mermaid gown covered in lacy white fish
scales. Jessica, from gofugyourself.com declared her “a sexy fish-lady on her
wedding day, which I know SOUNDS weird and rude, but I mean it in totally the
most complimentary way.”
It’s a shame that the ceremony did not hold
up to Oscar standards or pay due tribute because critics are of the mind that
2007 was one of the best years for movies in recent recollection.
Senior Chandler Honeycutt agrees with the critics:
“This was the first Oscar ceremony I watched all the way through because of the
amount of quality films that came out.” He said, “I thought they went
well…[although] there were way too many montages of crap.”
Statistics at Grafton might put the low TV
viewer ratings in better perspective. Only 1 out of 10 students polled watched
the Oscars, most had not seen any of the winning films, and some students did
not even know what the Oscars were. Senior Dani Berrane said, “one thing that
bothered me is that they picked really obscure movies that might have been
really good but no one’s heard of them.”
The lack of viewers can be contributed
to the low box-office ratings of the nominated films. The Best Picture winner,
“No Country For Old Men” grossed only a meager $65 million total, in comparison
to a previous Best Picture winner, “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”
which racked in $125 million in its first five days. Among the pictures
nominated for Best Picture, only “Juno”, a warm-hearted comedy with dialogue as
whippy and droll as the pregnant teen protagonist, was able to break past the
$100 million box-office mark.