So, how did our local Oscar candidates do? Unfortunately, not so great.
Our best Actresses in a Leading Role, Bedford resident Glenn Close and Bedford native Rooney Mara, both lost to the formidable Meryl Streep for her role in The Iron Lady.
Our best Documentary Feature, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, made by Northern Westchester resident Joe Berlinger, lost to Undefeated. (That’s Undefeated, the documentary about the Tennessee football team, not The Undefeated, which is about Sara Palin.)
Our Best Adapted Screenplay, Scarsdale native Aaron Sorkin’s script for Moneyball, lost to The Descendants and its incontrovertible Hawaiian charms.
And, even in our biggest category of the night—best Documentary Short—we came up empty-handed. Both God Is the Bigger Elvis, directed by Tarrytown’s Rebecca Cammisa and produced by Scarsdale’s Julie Anderson, and Incident in New Baghdad, made by Katonah resident James Spione, lost to Saving Face, a documentary short about a plastic surgeon who helps women in Pakistan whose faces have been disfigured by acid attacks.
Hey, there’s always next year, right?
As for the awards themselves…they were okay. I’m sure there are people out there who liked Billy Crystal’s throwback- style of Oscar hosting, but I personally didn’t find his jokes funny. (It doesn’t take a brilliant comedic mind to deduce that both Christopher Plummer and Max von Sydow are old.) But mercifully, the extra bits that go along with the ceremony were kept to a minimum, so I didn’t have to endure much of the Billy Crystal humor, and things wrapped up only a little after 11:30 pm.
I was going to share with you my favorite of the few extra comedy bits of the evening—wherein Christopher Guest’s comedy troupe reenacts a modern-style focus group for The Wizard of Oz—but it’s not available in embeddable format. (You can see it here if you’re curious.) So instead, I’ll settle for my second-favorite moment of the evening: Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis presenting an award as only the two comedians can do.
You can see the complete list of winners here. What did you think of the awards? Let me know in the comments.
