Sunday, February 22, 2009

Live Blogging: 81st Annual Academy Awards [Half-Hour 7]

Liam Neeson and Freida Pinto are up to present Best Foreign Language Film. Woops. I don't think the nominees were in the same order on the screen as they were in which they read them aloud. Whatever won, it's a Japanese film.

Queen Latifah is on stage. Oh, here we go... In Memoriam (with Queen Latifah singing "I'll Be Seeing You"): Bernie Mac. Michael Crichton. Pat Hingle. Roy Scheider. Isaac Hayes. Ricardo Mantalban. Stan Winston. James Whitmore. Charlton Heston. Sydney Pollack. Paul Newman.

I wish they had filled the screen with the memoriam images. Instead we got a view of the stage which had monitors showing various pictures of those that passed away and their work. The end result is that the images of them were very small on the TV screen. A few times, a person's name got cut off at the bottom of the screen or was just too small to read well. I know they're trying some new things this year, but I'd rather they just let the memoriam fill the screen as they have in the past.

Reese Witherspoon is up to present the Best Director award. Her dress is a little weird. Anyway, my pick is Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire (although Chris Nolan for The Dark Knight would have been just as deserving had he been nominated). Winner: Danny Boyle -- who, in my defense, really does look like Rudy Giuliani, so it was an honest mistake.

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