Oscar Winners

I'd like to comment on the winners of the Oscars. First off Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture. As I said in my review this was a real good movie. Of course my personal favorite of the 5 nominees was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. But Slumdog had a very good human story and was very well put together and very well written.

Best Actor went to Sean Penn for Milk. He did a really good job but my personal choice was Frank Langella for Frost/Nixon. But aside from Sean Penn I would almost rather have seen the award go to Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler.

Best Actress went very deservedly to Kate Winslet for The Reader. Of the 5 performances this one was my favorite. Although there was a lot of buzz around Meryl Streep for Doubt I think they made the right choice.

Best Supporting Actor went, as everyone expected, to Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight. I personally don't think it was the best out of the 5 performances. I just think that because of his death everyone had a soft spot for him and gave it to him for that reason. I think that if he was still alive he probably wouldn't have won and might not have even been nominated. I think if I had to choose someone else to win it would probably be Philip Seymour Hoffman for Doubt.

Best Supporting Actress went to Penelope Cruz for Vicky Christina Barcelona. I was a little surprised by this at first but looking back at her performance she really deserved to win. My personal choice was Taraji P. Henson for Benjamin Button but the range of emotion showed by Cruz was done so well that she is very deserving of the award.

Best Director went to Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire. This one wasn't too much of a surprise given how well shot and how well put together the movie was. I think David Fincher did a fantastic job with Benjamin Button but Danny Boyle was very deserving.

The last award I'm going to mention is Best Foreign Language Film. A lot of people, myself included, thought that it would go to Waltz With Bashir. Waltz With Bashir was a very powerful animated movie from Israel. It was done in an animation style very similar to A Scanner Darkly and I was going to review it but decided not to because there was no way I could give it a score because I felt I'd do it a disservice. But instead the award went to Okuribito from Japan. I haven't seen this movie but it would have to be very good to beat out a movie as powerful as Waltz With Bashir.

The last thing I'm going to talk about is Hugh Jackman who hosted the awards this year. At first I was a bit skeptical about someone who's not a comedian hosting. But overall I thought he did a pretty good job. The two musical numbers he did were well performed and well put together. Even though a few times you could see him fighting back laughter. But I did notice that he wasn't on stage nearly as much as other hosts usually are but given that he's not a comedian it makes sense. So he did a decent job but I'd like to see the spot go to a comedian next year.