Still Waking Up from the Oscars . . .

Still half asleep from not getting home until after midnight due to the annual Oscar party. Although today is a snow day for my kids and I get to stay home, too, so that's helping.

I had my lowest score ever in this year's pool, missing 14 categories, which may be an all-time record for futility at this gathering. In fact, everyone had a bad night because there were a lot of surprises, especially in the technical categories.
Most of the acting categories went as expected (especially for the guys). The one surprise was for supporting actress, which went undeservedly to Tilda Swinton, a weak role in a weak movie. I still wanted Ellen Page to win best actress for Juno, but they gave it to the woman who played the French singer in a movie a couple people saw.

I thought Jon Stewart did a very good job, much better than his first time out. The show was pretty lean, kept moving without a whole lot of filler, and no Randy Newman! My favorite part of the show was the performance of "Falling Slowly" from the excellent movie "Once." It was nice they gave the girl a second chance to give an acceptance speech, because they were really cutting off folks this year. None of the other acceptance speeches were all that memorable, except maybe one of the Coen brothers who just couldn't talk either time he was up there.

Each year, our host, Carolyn, serves up a variation of her homemade cheesecake. This year's recipe was some triple or quadruple chocolate concoction that was very good as always and gave us that extra buzz to make it through the show. We typically serve this during the lengthy special Oscar presentation to some old person that has never won before and they need to give them an honorary award before they die (this year went to some 98 year-old produce who looked and sounded pretty good for his age).

Or, we eat it during the what we call the "dead people montage" when we all are like, "Oh, THAT PERSON died last year?" Yeah, I know this is supposed to be a time for us to reflect on those we've lost, but it usually stoops to sarcasm and mock disbelief when some obscure set designer from the 60's comes up and we're like, "Oh no, you mean the set designer from "Gigi" passed away?" We always take a quick poll to see what dead person will get the biggest applause. Didn't seem to be any standout dead person this time, maybe Heath Ledger.

An unintentionally funny moment came when they ran through all the Best Picture winners since 1929. For some reason, Carolyn's TV cut off the first couple letters on the left hand side of the screen. So, we were borderline hysterical as they ran through the list and we were just cracking up with titles like "ocky" "liver" "rash" "ramer v. Kramer" "hariots of fire" and "andhi".

Carolyn won the Oscar pool this year. Her picks of "The Bourne Ultimatum" to win in three categories put her over the top.