Welcome to The GBU, a weekly column where I look at the Good, the Bad and the Ugly on TV.
This year’s Oscars tried to be young and hip with hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway, but the result was as traditional as you’d expect. The 2011 Academy Awards featured few surprises as the same actors who’ve won at the Golden Globes, SAG Awards and every other awards show took home the prizes with Melissa Leo, Christian Bale, Natalie Portman and Colin Firth winning while The King’s Speech was named Best Picture.
See the Full List of Winners >>
Here’s the Good, the Bad and the Ugly from the 2011 Academy Awards.
The Good: Kirk Douglas
Leave it to a 94-year-old man to steal the show at an Oscars targeted to a younger demographic. When Kirk Douglas showed up to present the winner for Best Supporting Actress, his sometimes-ineligible rambling provided countless moments of greatness, with jokes about Anne Hathaway’s hotness (even if he did mispronounce her name) and the way he kept drawing out the announcement with an instant catchphrase, “You know …” It was a surreal moment, made more surreal my winner Melissa Leo’s cursing, but Kirk Douglas proved that he can still entertain even in his 90s.
The Bad: The Winners
An incredibly predictable year of movie awards finally came to an end when Melissa Leo, Christian Bale, Natalie Portman and Colin Firth all won the trifecta of awards, adding Oscars to their Golden Globes and SAG Awards. With no surprises and the fact that Natalie Portman didn’t go into labor on stage, I consider this a big disappointment.
The Ugly: James Franco and Anne Hathaway
While I enjoyed the intro video featuring this year’s hosts, that was due largely to the fact that you can never go wrong by putting the hosts into the nominated films. However, once James Franco and Anne Hathaway took the actual stage, their banter was painfully stilted and unfunny. They proved that hosting the Oscars is not easy and that it takes a real entertainer, not just two attractive young actors. My only hope is that the show learned its lesson about shamelessly pandering to a younger demographic and goes back to using established entertainers like Hugh Jackman for next year.
(Images courtesy of ABC)
Senior Writer, BuddyTV
John watches nearly every show on TV, but he specializes in sci-fi/fantasy like The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural and True Blood. However, he can also be found writing about everything from Survivor and Glee to One Tree Hill and Smallville.
