Academy Awards Recap: Huge Night for 'Hurt Locker'

As was expected in most circles, The Hurt Locker took the two top Academy Awards, but when it also won Best Original Screenplay (and there was some precedent for that), it also equaled what the mighty Avatar was able to garner for the entire evening. The difference is, Avatar only won technical awards...oh, and $2.5 billion. Still, Hurt Locker doubled Avatar in the final accounting and was the runaway winner of the night.

There were only a couple major surprises, and the screenplay categories were where you'd find them. Up in the Air was an all-around loser, which was not at all how I saw it going. The adapted screenplay was the safe bet, but it lost to Precious. One surprise to me was that the telecast reverted to "And the winner is" instead of "And the Oscar goes to." Thank goodness. What, if anything, stood out to you? To me, it's the impression that there's not a rejection of Avatar or sci-fi or technology, but that the majority of voters still warm up to great storytelling, no matter how simple. Since the vast majority of these voters are actors, they're also looking for performances that they connect with, and Avatar was one of three Best Picture nominees without an acting nomination, and one of two without a writing nomination. Those factoids shouldn't go overlooked in the post-mortem. Here are the winners:

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Oscar Week: Watch the Best Original Song Nominees

Since these apparently won't be featured in tonight's Oscars, here's your chance to brush up on the Best Song nominees. The producers of the show reportedly cut the performances a couple weeks ago and I haven't heard anything to the contrary. That kind of blows, because the songs break up the rest of the show rather nicely, and some of them - like "Falling Slowly" from Once two years ago - is definitely worth watching.

This year, the leading candidate to win is "The Weary Kind" from Crazy Heart. I'd like to see Ryan Bingham (or hell, even Jeff Bridges) sing that tonight. Great song and everything that award is supposed to be about. There are also two nominees from Disney's Princess and the Frog, a foreign language nominee from Paris 36 ("Loin de Paname"), and one of Marion Cotillard's two showstoppers from Nine, "Take it All." You can watch/listen to all five nominees below if you think Crazy Heart might be vulnerable.

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Oscar Producers Ditch Best Song Performances

So, OK, just a few hours ago, we wrote about the producers of the Oscars telecast requesting that the winners perpare two speeches, one for the show, one for backstage where all the perfunctories are dispensed. Not the best idea in the world, really, because the show is roughly 75% speeches. And they're more memorable than almost anything else in the show.

In that article, I threw together a quick fix for the Academy Awards if the producers are so concerned about it being broken. "Make it primarily about the major categories presented by big stars," I offered, "throw in the Best Song nominees, do the tribute, the lifetime achievement, and a couple other performance pieces that are easy to promote ahead of time." Scratch that part about the Best Song. Yep, Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic won't invite the nominees in that category to the show, according to Entertainment Weekly. Well, that's just stupid. I'm not really a big fan of there even being a Best Song Oscar for reasons I'll be happy to go into later if you're interested, but when it comes to the telecast, it's a pretty easy thing to get right that Oscar almost always gets wrong.

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Bridges, Bullock Talk Screen Actors Guild Wins

Coming off their wins at the Screen Actors Guild Awards last night, Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock sat down to discuss the surreality that is the awards season with The Hollywood Reporter. Bridges has been the leading candidate for Best Actor for about a month, and prior to that, there was no talk about his work in Crazy Heart at all. Behold the power of Fox Searchlight.

These two performances are coming from different places. In a year without one or two stand-out lead actor performances, Bridges has taken over in part because of his distinguised career. Is he really better than Clooney or Jeremy Renner or Colin Firth? Maybe, maybe not, but he's never won and he has no Forest Whitaker or Daniel Day-Lewis sure bets in the category. For Bullock, her work in The Blind Side has charmed voters, although I'm far from convinced it's either the best work in her career (the sorely undervalued Infamous) or the best work of the year (take your pick from easily a half-dozen performances). And it's curious that she might be in a position to win Best Actress after spending 15 years mostly avoiding serious work, as opposed to Bridges, who has 35 years of it.

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Video - Watch "The Weary Kind" from 'Crazy Heart'

The Jeff Bridges film Crazy Heart is powered as much by its music as it is its signature performance, one that might win Bridges an Oscar by the time it's all said and done. The Dude plays aging country singer-songwriter Bad Blake, who wears the years and the mileage of a life on the road on his weathered face.

T-Bone Burnett and the late Stephen Bruton worked on the musical score and the soundtrack features some of the greatest country acts from when they were distinguishable from pop stars - Waylon, Buck Owens, George Jones, Townes Van Zandt, and even the Louvin Brothers. But the song that stands out the most is new, Ryan Bingham's "The Weary Kind." Certainly, this will be the first year two Ryan Bingham's will be Oscar nominees (that's the name of Clooney's Up in the Air character), but this Bingham displays the kind of authenticity a song from Crazy Heart genuinely needs to reflect where Bad Blake is at this stage in his career. Check out the video:

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