How the Oscars failed to catch fire - apart from Melissa Leo

I know some people get rather excited about the Oscars. I noticed the breathless updates on Facebook.


“Oh I thought xx, should have won. Did you see her outfit?”

I found it more difficult to get into the mood this year. Maybe it’s not easy to do glamour after returning from a kids birthday party in North Carolina.

Difficult too when you only possess a batty old TV without even the luxury of a remote control. You thumb through the channels on a tiny button but are likely to miss the Oscars because there seems to be a 50 percent chance of hitting commercials at any given time on American TV.

Then when I did hit on the Oscars it was half way through Achievement in Sound Editing. Excuse me but when did sound editing become an achievement? Achievement in Pressing the Off Switch on the Tape Recorder.

Although maybe sound has moved on a bit since I last tried to edit it., fleetingly and fumblingly.

My tardiness in arriving at the ceremony meant I missed the apparent highlight and what appeared to have been an Oscars first; Melissa Leo using the f word at the ceremony.

You would have thought in more than a century of Academy awards somebody would have inadvertently used the f word. I often find myself inadvertently swearing. Fortunately my daughter is usually around to reprimand me.

Apparently Leo also lowered the tone by flirting with 94-year-old Kirk Douglas who managed to upstage hosts Anna Hathaway and James Franco. I have a mahogany cabinet that could have upstaged the hosts, but at least Hathaway made up for it with her dress at the end of the ceremony.

Leo said Douglas calmed her mood, although not to the extent that she was able to suppress the pesky f word.

Douglas, told her. "You're much more beautiful than you were in The Fighter,". Leo's quick-witted reply was: "You're pretty good looking yourself. What are you doing later on?"

Going back to the home probably.

I wonder if Douglas made it until the end of the night. The Oscars can drag because of all the nerd awards that are given out before the awards people really care about. Last night’s ceremony really seemed to drag.

And while I was glad to see The King’s Speech win best movie and to see Colin Firth win his first Oscar, the element of suspense certainly seemed to be missing last night.

Fortunately there were plenty of fine frocks to keep the commentators going. Very few of them appeared to stand out to me apart from the outfit wore by Cate Blanchett.

Although I’m a big fan of Cate as an actress I had real reservations about this one. Maybe she expected a rather wild post Oscar party. Certainly if somebody had chucked up on the back of her frock, she probably wouldn’t have noticed.