Jimmy K Hottie Body Hump Club
This cannot hold a candle to last year’s magnificent “Jimmy Kimmel’s Handsome Men’s Club,” but kudos to Kimmel and his writers for spending hours getting all the awful subtleties of infomercials just right, and all the actresses for being willing to do lewd things to exercise equipment. These post-Oscar skits are a testament to Kimmel’s ability to get top talent to do “ridiculawesome” things.
“Fad diets and workout plans only lead to anticipointment and frustruation.” — Scarlett Johansson
– Lang
Welcome to StaticBlog’s Live Coverage of the 83rd Annual Academy Awards
Huzzah! Thank you for joining StaticBlog for our annual live coverage of the Oscars. This is always the cross-country death slog of live-blogging exercises, but I always come back for the scintillating back-and-forth in the comments section and the opportunity to type until the blood spurts coming out of my fingertips are happening in time with those coming from my eyes. For the love of all things holy, let’s get this cheesefest running!
And we’re off…
7:04 p.m. So, why is it that everything about this show online indicates that the ceremony starts at 7 p.m. CST, but it’s actually starting at 7:30? Weasels.
(Editor’s note: Had some technical difficulties but we are firing up again.)
James Franco and Anne Hathaway hosting the Oscars.
7:48 p.m. Already wasting time with a montage? Gah!
7:49 p.m. Tom Hanks is looking haggard, which means we are all getting a little bit older and a little bit slower.
7: 50 p.m. Hanks awards cinematography. Wally Pfister beats Roger Deakins because his name is funnier to read on the dais.
7:57 p.m. They showcase Amy Adams in the outro for Best Supporting Actress. Does it mean something? Stop trying to ascribe meaning to this.
8: 01 p.m. Kirk Douglas — “She’s gorgeous? Where were you when I was making pictures.” Saying something, given his era.
8:02 p.m. Douglas awards Best Supporting Actress, eventually… Melissa Leo — lost my first prediction of the evening. Well done, though.
8:03 p.m. Melissa Leo: “Wow — mine? For me?”
Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis present at the Oscars.
8:04 p.m. Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake … uh, I’m sorry, losing consciousness. Slowly… blurrgh…. Damn you, Mila.
Mila Kunis arrives at the Academy Awards.
8:07 p.m. When Pixar’s in the running, it’s kind of astounding when someone else beats them. “The Lost Thing” wins!
8:11 p.m. Mila announces Best Animated Feature, about the biggest fait accompli of the evening. The Oscar goes to Toy Story 3, because the sun rises.
8:17 p.m. These odd little paths to yesteryear are deflating this show.
8:18 p.m. Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem announce adapted screenplay. Call it, friendo: Aaron Sorkin, “The Social Network.”
Aaron Sorkin
8: 19 p.m. Sorkin references Chayefsky in acceptance speech. Good grace note. Stop playing him off — he knows how to string sentences!
8:21 p.m. Brolin and Bardem announce Best Original Screenplay: “The Kings Speech.” Once for each. No way to handicap Best Picture based on this.
Anne Hathaway in a tux and James Franco in a dress at the 83rd annual Academy Awards.
8:32 p.m. Reese Witherspoon announces Best Supporting Actor. Great field,especially Hawkes, but this was always going to Christian Bale for “Fighter.”
Christian Bale
Hugh Jackman arrives at the Academy Awards.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
Marisa Tomei arrives at the Academy Awards.
Cate Blanchett arrives at the Academy Awards.
Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law present at the Oscars.
9:56 p.m. Oh yeah, they showed Dennis Hopper after hitting the nitrous in “Blue Velvet.” Finally, something that didn’t make me gassy.
10:02 p.m. Hathaway must be wearing a battery pack for that blue dress.
10:05 p.m. Bigelow announces Best Director. Goes to Tom Hooper. “King’s Speech” great and all, but not on board at all. Fincher was robbed. Robbed!
10:06 p.m. Hooper gave a great speech, but “The Damned United” was better.
10:09 p.m. Lifetime Achievements introduced by Annette Bening. Godard didn’t show, of course. Hateth Oscar. As am I, if things keep going this way.
10:12 p.m. Hathaway praises Franco for “doing fabulous job.” Where? He’s hardly been there?
10:13 p.m. Jeff Lebowski gives the testimonial for Annette Bening. Wasn’t Julianne Moore just as good?
10:15 p.m. Glad they gave up the whole “Star Chamber” conferring greatness on nominees. Way too Reality TV, that was.
10:16 p.m. Love the dude, but he’s not really tying the room together.
Natalie Portman arrives at the Academy Awards.
10:17 p.m. Dude announces Best Actress: Natalie Portman wins. Was a little fearful that this was going to go elsewhere. Relief sets in. Richly deserved.
10:20 p.m. Now Sandra Bullock says nice things about five men. This takes too long. Make it stop.
10:21 p.m. Too bad Bardem was about 10 times better than the rest of “Biutiful.”
10:25 p.m. Best Actor would be considered competitive if Firth hadn’t stitched this up like a Tom Ford tux.
Colin Firth arrives at the Academy Awards.
10:27 p.m. Was there any doubt here? Firth was a bigger fait accompli than Toy Story 3 for Best Animated. Deserved, but all nominees did.
10:30 p.m. Firth: “I have impulses I have to attend to backstage”? How deliciously ambiguous! “Awww…” or “Ewwww.”
10:33 p.m. Spielberg is here to end it all by announcing Best Picture. This is where my “Should Win” gets trounced by my “Will Win.”
10:35 p.m. When the entire Best Picture montage is voiced over by King George VI, you know where it’s going.
10:37 p.m. Timpani roll! “The King’s Speech.” And StaticBlog slinks away, slightly dejected, Tweeting in vain in support of the Facebook movie.
10:39 p.m. Thanks to all for enduring a slightly different, Twitter-fueled live blog. And thank you to @nerdage for enabling this simulcast. Cheers!
– George Lang
www.twitter.com/georgedlang
StaticBlog Oscar Predictions, Live Blogging on Sunday
Join me at 7 p.m. Sunday for my live-blogging of the 83rd Annual Academy Awards — broadcast on ABC, analyzed, digested and extruded on StaticBlog. This and the Grammy Awards are the big live-blogging events every year on StaticBlog, and I encourage you to join in, comment, discuss, grouse, wax rhapsodic and chide. This is always fun, and just so you know where my head is at going into the ceremony, here are my picks — who should win, who will win.
Best Picture
In our second year of the 10-player pileup, best picture is still generally a battle between three or four films. Years from now, when the true quality of many of these films will be judged by their enduring value rather than their immediate impact, “The Social Network” is the stone-cold TCM classic of this year’s roster, a brilliantly written and acted, beautifully concise film about fast-track ambition and its personal toll. It does not matter if Facebook is nothing but a ghost in the Google cache system 50 years from now — “The Social Network” will resonate in much the same way that “Citizen Kane” still speaks to universal truths.
But if “The Social Network” does not win, it will be to “The King’s Speech” what “Raging Bull” is to “Ordinary People” or “Pulp Fiction” is to “Forrest Gump”: an asterisk. There is no taking away the craft and the spot-on acting in “The King’s Speech,” but it is not the film that is unquestionably emblematic of the best of 2010 cinema. What could throw this thing is this: “The King’s Speech” is far more … Oscary. From its period setting and accents to its central triumph over adversity, it is what most academy voters associate with a best picture winner.
Should win: “The Social Network.”
Will win: “The King’s Speech.”
Best actor
Last year, Firth went into the Oscars as the front-runner for his role in Tom Ford’s “A Single Man,” but then he got steamrollered by Bridges’ earthy and heartfelt “Crazy Heart” performance. This year, the two men face one another again, but Firth will win this time, mainly because cosmic justice will not let this happen twice and because it is such a tricky, thread-the-needle performance Firth gives in “The King’s Speech.” There are so many ways his portrayal could go wrong as the stuttering King George VI, but Firth nailed it so well that he not only garnered raves from critics, but from speech pathologists as well. Truth be told, this category is stacked with amazing performances this year, but voters will choose to award Jesse Eisenberg (“The Social Network”) and Oscar co-host James Franco (“127 Hours”) with statuettes later in their careers, and while Javier Bardem is superb in “Biutiful,” the film is not as good as he is.
Should and will win: Colin Firth.
Best actress
This category is marked by genuine competition. Nicole Kidman gave the most realistic and emotionally honest performance of her career in “Rabbit Hole,” and Bening was believable in every way as a mother watching her carefully cultivated family life fall out of control in “The Kids Are All Right,” but this is Portman’s award to lose, and not even starring with Ashton Kutcher in a middling rom-com can take anything away from her mesmerizing role as troubled prima ballerina Nina Sayers in “Black Swan.” The entire film hinges on whether Portman can be believed, and there isn’t a second where credibility is an issue. This isn’t the first time Portman has deserved it, but this time, it is hers.
Should and will win: Natalie Portman.
Best supporting actor
If it weren’t for Bale’s singularly believable, heartbreaking, disturbing and occasionally funny performance as crack-addicted ex-boxer Dicky Eklund in “The Fighter,” the competition would be wide open: Hawkes, Ruffalo, Rush and Jeremy Renner (“The Town”) all merit serious consideration. If anyone is likely to pull an upset here, it’s likely to be Rush, whose portrayal of royal speech therapist Lionel Logue was a study in empathy and strength. But seriously, no one left more on the screen than Bale this year — it is a performance that sears itself into memory.
Should and will win: Christian Bale.
Best supporting actress
Don’t get me wrong — newcomer Steinfeld delivers in a difficult to calibrate and ultimately unforgettable performance as Mattie Ross in “True Grit,” but her inclusion in this category has more to do with strategy and jockeying for position than it does with screen time and responsibility. She is in nearly every frame of “True Grit,” and her work is just as important as Bridges’ performance to the success of the film, but the studio obviously did not think Steinfeld could compete with Portman, et al, in the main category. She will win, but her fellow nominees are true supporting players, and by that measure, Jacki Weaver’s sociopathic grandmother in “Animal Kingdom” would be the dark horse winner in any other year.
Should win: Jacki Weaver.
Will win: Hailee Steinfeld.
Best director
Conventionally speaking, best director is paired with best picture. When it doesn’t work out, there is always great hue and cry over how the person at the helm of the greatest film of that year could not be given credit for bringing it to fruition, or vice versa. If “The Social Network” does not win best picture, the academy will split hairs and give best director to Fincher. Beyond Fincher, just take a look at the nominees — every one is a top-shelf indie master working at the peak of his powers. It could go to any of them, but Fincher has consistently broken ground since his rise in the 1990s, and “The Social Network” is his masterpiece.Should and will win: David Fincher.
Best original screenplay
Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson, “The Fighter.”
Best adapted screenplay
Aaron Sorkin, “The Social Network.”
Best animated feature
“Toy Story 3.”
Best documentary
“Exit Through the Gift Shop.”
Video of the Day: Cut Copy, “Need You Now”
The Australian band, who show a seemingly equal and welcome love of both Heaven 17 and Lindsey Buckingham on their new album, “Zonoscope” (ergo, my favorite release of the year, so far), get inundated with athletes spanning the world of sport.
– Lang
Cut Copy - "Need You Now" from stereogum on Vimeo.
Video of the Day: Radiohead, “Lotus Flower”
As he proves in this video, Thom Yorke is the “King of Limbs”!
– Lang
Video of the Day 2: Colourmusic, “Tog”
POPPE!!!
This is the first video from Colourmusic’s “My ____ is Pink,” which arrives May 10 on the esteemed Memphis Industries label (The Go! Team, the original Pipettes before the fall). Something ritually messy is happening on that stage, what with all the red and white goo blasting at the audience. A great video for “Tog,” and the song seems to foretell wondrous things for this Stillwater band’s “My ____ is Pink.”
And yes, that’s Nathan Poppe ripping his shirt off and getting sprayed with effluvia. Better him than me.
– Lang
Colourmusic - Tog from Delo Creative on Vimeo.
Video of the Day: Kanye West feat. Everybody, “All of the Lights”
Mr. West’s latest offers an object lesson in flashy typography, while Rihanna’s wardrobe offers a hypnotic lesson in structural engineering.
Meanwhile, Kid Cudi rocks MJ-style red leather and Alicia Keys and John Legend both take us on a tour of that “ghetto university.” One of the best tracks from West’s best album, “All of the Lights” wraps a heartbreaking lyric about parental failure in the kind of epic arrangement that justifies that “Star Wars” font at the beginning.
– Lang
Music Review: PJ Harvey, “Let England Shake”
Rating: 88
Whether she is directly addressing a specific war or making oblique references, Polly Jean Harvey describes a world haunted by large-scale bloodshed in her eerie and elegant eighth album, “Let England Shake.” These are songs Harvey wrote from the heart and from the head, carefully researching the particulars of her nation’s wars but filtering the facts through her sharp intellect and deep emotional center.
The most important historical touchstone for “Let England Shake” is World War I, or “The Great War,” the scars of which can still be felt nearly a century later on England’s green and pleasant land. Her imagery is most stark on “The Words That Maketh Murder,” in which Harvey recounts eyewitness accounts of WWI battlefields where “soldiers fall like lumps of meat” and “arms and legs were in the trees.” More often than not, such uncompromised storytelling is accompanied by disarmingly beautiful music: Harvey’s gorgeous soprano weaves through “On Battleship Hill,” which looks at the lasting legacy of the Battle of Gallipoli.
In her two decades of recording, Harvey’s only constant is her wonderful inconstancy. Harvey has many musical gifts, but she uses her vocal range as a dramatic tool — if the material requires it, she can be a songbird, a banshee or something in between. On “Let England Shake,” Harvey brings her most beautiful, clear tones to some unforgettable melodies she creates with longtime collaborators John Parrish and producer Flood, offering an artistic counterpoint to the grave imagery in her words. Like “The Final Cut,” Roger Waters’ underappreciated final album with Pink Floyd, “Let England Shake” looks back in anger at the wars that cut into England’s heart, then unveils the lasting damage.
— Lang
Greyson Chance continues his ascent, performs Saturday in Edmond
Not all teen pop stars are created equal, and in the nine months since Edmond’s Greyson Chance achieved ubiquity with his heavily YouTube’d performance of Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi,” it is becoming increasingly clear that the 13-year-old singer-songwriter will not be following anyone else’s prefabricated paths.
Chance proved this on Monday, when he took a break from his tour with Miranda Cosgrove to perform on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.”
Without question, Fallon is running the best nighttime music lab on network television. With Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson and the Roots as the house band, the show isn’t in the business of suffering lightweights.
Chance took the stage with a full band to perform his single, “Waiting Outside the Lines,” a mature piano-rock ballad that clearly aims for all ears, not just young ones, and he earned respect. Not only did he attack “Waiting” with skill and passion, Chance proved he could command a stage, stepping away from the piano midsong and belting it out to the audience.
Shortly after Chance’s performance, ?uestlove — whose Twitter account identifies him as “your favorite twitterer’s favorite music snob,” took to social media to fully endorse the young star to his 1.4 million Twitter followers.
“Man. @greysonchance gave us an engaging and compelling performance on @latenightjimmy. I co-sign this kid,” ?uestlove tweeted.
The drummer/bandleader does not hand out compliments lightly. A tweet like that holds power. Sure, Chance gained millions of pop fans with his strong voice and piano work last year, and that is no mean feat. But ?uestlove’s endorsement means credibility in the minds of people who might not otherwise pay attention, and Chance earned it.
Since the YouTube frenzy and his subsequent appearances on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show, Chance has returned home several times, performing at his brother Tanner’s fraternity at the University of Oklahoma and appearing last month at a family-oriented inaugural event for Gov. Mary Fallin. But this weekend, the former Cheyenne Middle School student will return to Edmond for two special benefit concerts.
Chance performs at 1 and 7 p.m. Saturday at Edmond Santa Fe High School, with proceeds benefitting the Children’s Miracle Network. This week, in an e-mail interview, he talked about how his busy performance schedule and the process of recording his forthcoming debut album improved his stage presence and musical ability.
“I can tell my songwriting ability is getting stronger as I’m writing more,” he said, e-mailing from Atlanta. “Of course, being on tour I’m improving as a performer. I love feeding off the energy of the crowd. It’s like artist ‘boot camp’ — my writing, my performing, my vocal abilities will all improve the more I practice.”
Chance said the album is progressing and will arrive later this year with a pop-rock sound that he has previously compared to Coldplay.
“The story behind the album is about going through a heartbreak,” he said. “I can’t wait for everyone to hear it.”
As for the performances and meet-and-greet appearances at Edmond Santa Fe, Chance doesn’t want to give anything away. It’s all for a good cause.
“I have a couple surprises for the show,” Chance said. “You will just have to come to see what they are.”
One element that will not be a surprise: Greyson Chance is not the standard teen idol. He is taking chances.
IN CONCERT
Greyson Chance
With: At Long Last, Theater Breaks Loose and Sherree Chamberlain.
When: 1 and 7 p.m. Saturday.
Where: Edmond Santa Fe High School, 1901 W 15, Edmond.
Tickets: $20 to $30 for the concerts, $25 for the meet-and-greet appearances.
Information: www.stubwire.com.
Announcing the winners of tickets to see Greyson Chance!
NewsOK.com and StaticBlog are proud to announce the winners of tickets to see Greyson Chance on Saturday, Feb. 19 at Edmond Santa Fe High School.
Grand Prize Winners (Two tickets to the concert, plus two tickets to the meet and greet)
Rebecca Poston
Cambria Cotner
Second Place
Holly Patkowski
Paige Loyd
Kenzie Chabino
Taylor Fisher
Tickets may be picked up at the front desk at The Oklahoman, 9000 N. Broadway. Please present photo ID.
Congratulations to our winners!
