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Vulture Live-Blogs the Oscars

The votes have been counted, the stars have walked the red carpet (see the slideshow!) and are safely in their seats, and history’s most predictable-ever Academy Awards are just about to begin. (Congratulations in advance, Mo’Nique! Keep it short and in one language, Christoph!) Dan Kois and Lane Brown will be your hosts for Vulture’s Oscar live blog, so take a seat, fix a drink, and keep your cursor on your browser’s refresh button. It’s going to be a very long night.

Kois (8:29): Welcome to the Vulture live blog of the 7,000th annual Academy Awards!

Kois (8:31): Wow, they are Westminster Dog Show–ing the Best Actor and Best Actress nominees. “Observe their carriage and gait before you vote!”

Kois (8:33): Oh, THANK GOD. NPH. Although the prison-rape joke maybe doesn’t work.

Brown (8:34): Looks like they started working on the opening number before they realized Nine wouldn’t be nominated.

Kois (8:34): Okay, Steve and Alec, prove you are better than Neil. I like the notion that Steve and Alec hate each other. I hope that this year’s “through-line” is their simmering resentment, culminating in a brawl. This feels Letterman-y — like a satire of Oscar hosting.

Kois (8:38): Ethan Coen loved that Hitler joke!

Kois (8:41): That was the best Oscar CUT TO: ever. CUT TO: a Jew, Ethan Coen!

Brown (8:43): That was kinda bad, but mercifully brief. In his living room, Hugh Jackman is only halfway through a ten-song tribute to tonight’s Best Picture nominees.

Kois (8:44): Get ready for Christoph’s excellent speech!

Brown (8:48): Better luck next time, Christopher Plummer.

Kois (8:48): Stanley Tucci’s clip just insured that no one will ever see The Lovely Bones.

Brown (8:48): The crawl at the bottom of the screen tells us ABC7 and Cablevision have resolved their dispute just in time for incredibly lucky Cablevision subscribers to miss that opening and still see Christoph Waltz’s acceptance speech.

Kois (8:50): He managed to fold all his thank-yous into a narrative, ensuring that Harvey won’t yell at him afterward despite Adam Shankman’s manifesto!

Brown (8:55): Up next: the Oscar for Best Animated Feature will be presented to Up.

Kois (8:59): Pete Docter is wearing an Ellie badge! Super adorable.

Brown (9:03): They totally just spoiled the ending of Crazy Heart.

Brown (9:04): And poor Chris Pine has to announce District 9’s nomination to remind him that Star Trek didn’t get the sci-fi slot.

Kois (9:06): They spoiled the ending of Basterds in Waltz’s clips. Let’s keep an ending-spoiling count!

Brown (9:06): Surely they’ll spoil Up in the Air when giving out the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

Brown (9:13): I hope Robert Downey Jr. didn’t wear those glasses to see Avatar.

Brown (9:15): Locker defeats Basterds for Original Screenplay! Looks like a Hurt Locker sweep.

Kois (9:15): I had Quentin all the way here.

Brown (9:16): Me too. Thus concludes the exciting part of tonight’s awards-giving.

Kois (9:17): John Hughes tribute! Moviegoers ages 32-41, time to start weeping.

Kois (9:20): At this party, during the Breakfast Club scene: “Now we’re the parents! Those bratty little kids.”

Brown (9:23): Why is Samuel L. Jackson announcing Up’s nomination?

Kois (9:24): He played Kevin the bird!*

*Not true

Kois (9:24): He was in The Incredibles, though, fulfilling the past-relationship requirement Ryan Reynolds fulfilled for The Blind Side.

Brown (9:31): Wow! Tough luck, Wallace and Gromit! Logorama wins for Best Animated Short.

Kois (9:32): If they spend this much time on the short films, they are not finishing these awards before 2 a.m.

Brown (9:33): All of this year’s nominated shorts are shorter than that intro montage.

Kois (9:34): Upon seeing the clip from Music by Prudence, a guy at my party just yelled “Oh, shit, I didn’t know this one had a wheelchair in it!”

Kois (9:39): CUT TO: Meryl Streep, lover of Hitler.

Kois (9:39): “Your insistence on perfection” = “Your destruction of our lives.”

Kois (9:43): The Dude is back!

Brown (9:43): Jeff Bridges thinks he’s announcing A Serious Man’s nomination because he played the Dude in the Coens’ Lebowski, but he’s really doing it because his wife is secretly cheating on him with Fred Melamed.

Kois (9:47): And now the award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Walter Kirn! Your book made it in! Enjoy it from the furthest-back row of the theater!

Brown (9:50): Wow! Precious wins! It’s a compromise — Up in the Air co-writer Sheldon Turner doesn’t get to make a speech, but neither does Jason Reitman.

Brown (9:53): So can Up in the Air still win anything? Doesn’t seem like it.

Kois (9:54): Fletcher’s speech was heartfelt, passionate, and totally incoherent — just like his movie!

Kois (9:56): Robin Williams is Heath Ledger’s replacement to present for Best Supporting Actress? I am sure that he is very proud up there in heaven.

Kois (9:59): Mo’Nique is so out of everyone else’s league that it is ridiculous. Precious: spoiled!

Brown (11:06): I liked his other recent documentary better.

Kois (10:03): I must say I was not that excited about Mo’Nique’s speech.

Brown (10:04): Agreed. Her previous eight were better.

Brown (10:05): This is the worst cervical cancer commercial of all time.

Kois (10:05): It makes me want to GET cervical cancer!

Kois (10:06): Sigourney Weaver has some outstanding art direction, if you know what I mean.*

*I mean she is hot

Kois (10:10): “She weighs a single pound!” —Steve Martin on SJP. Which is untrue! Her weird head-merkin weighs like twenty pounds.

Brown (10:15): So Charlize Theron just announced Precious. What’s the connection? She was once ugly in a movie, like Mariah Carey?

Kois (10:15): She was in Monster’s Ball, which was also fucking depressing as shit.

Kois (10:17): Paranormal Activity jokes! That was a huge missed opportunity! You could have included the John Hughes tribute right here with a good old, “Those aren’t pillows!”

Kois (10:17): If horror hasn’t been at the Oscars since The Exorcist, what are clips from Oscar winners Misery and Silence of the Lambs doing here?

Brown (10:22): Here comes a five-minute lecture of the difference between sound editing and mixing that nobody will understand.

Kois (10:23): If they were gonna use someone with a great voice to explain sound editing, I wish it had been Sy Abelman.

Kois (10:24): Sound Editing! It has been like eleven minutes since an award!

Brown (10:25): Another upset — Hurt Locker wins.

Kois (10:25): Edgar Winter won an Oscar!

Brown (10:27): Hurt Locker wins for Sound Mixing too! I figured Avatar would, since they had to mix down the sound of James Cameron berating his actors in every scene.

Kois (10:27): Hurt Locker is sweeping away the competish, as Variety would say. Elizabeth Banks is saucy! She’s this year’s Babe Kissing Nerds in the Tech awards!

Brown (10:28): John Travolta, a real-life dyslexic, announces this year’s most misspelled Best Picture nominee, Inglourious Basterds.

Kois (10:30): “Coming up: the hottest dance troupe in America”? I think it is Apolo Anton Ohno and Tom DeLay.

Brown (10:33): The commercials are pretty lame. It’s all ads for ABC shows and drugs that reduce the frequency of periods.

Brown (10:34): Which is appropriate, because I have had two periods since the ceremony started.

Kois (10:36): Best cinematography! Sandra Bullock speaks truth to power about actresses and DPs.

Kois (10:36): Avatar wins cinematography. It’s the first ever cinematography award given to an animated film!

Kois (10:38): Sorry, dead people: Demi Moore is memorializing you. And now James Taylor reliving his cameo in Funny People.

Brown (10:41): Another upset! Karl Malden closes the “In Memoriam” montage (Patrick Swayze was first).

Kois (10:43): Very classy, Academy — but why did they leave out Farrah??

Kois (10:45): OUTRAGE at my party vis-à-vis Farrah Fawcett.

Brown (10:45): Maybe because she mostly did TV?

Kois (10:45): Here’s her IMDb page. The Burning Bed! Logan’s Run! More movies than Michael Jackson!

Kois (10:46): Oh yay, a dance number!

Brown (10:50): There’s a guy completely appropriately doing the robot to Michael Giacchino’s score from Up.

Kois (10:51): As I recall, Up was robot-free. From our party: “At 10:50, you don’t bust out the dance numbers.”

Kois (10:52): Man, it’s too bad that the only music nominated were these long boring scores that require dancers to make them interesting. If only something musical was nominated for an Oscar that was short and catchy, like a “song.”

Brown (10:55): Avatar wins for visual effects! I just lost my Oscar pool.

Kois (10:56): Star Trek still will get an honorary Oscar for its pioneering use of lens flare, but Avatar takes it.

Brown (10:57): Up in the Air has apparently fallen so far that they couldn’t get anyone not in it to present it. “I don’t want to be associated with a loser,” said Ellen Page.

Kois (11:00): The Modern Family ad is the best of the night.

Kois (11:05): And The Cove wins for Best Documentary. Who in a million years would have thought that Ben Jabituya would win an Oscar?

Brown (11:06): I liked his other recent documentary better.

Kois (11:07): Hahaha. Where was THAT Oscar nomination? Tyler Perry is KILLING it. Plus he leads us to a shot of Alec and Steve in Snuggies.

Kois (11:07): Hurt Locker for editing, obviously. Hey, they are Sam Raimi/Roger Corman alumni? Awesome!

Kois (11:09): Keanu presents The Hurt Locker. Point Break call-out! If they were gonna have a former Swayze co-star introduce the “In Memoriam,” I would’ve preferred Keanu, honestly.

Brown (11:17): El Secreto de Sus Ojos upsets The White Ribbon for Best Foreign Language Film. Maybe Michael Haneke should make his next movie more explicitly about the Holocaust.

Kois (11:18): “Thanks to the Academy for not considering Na’vi a foreign language.” —The Foreign Language winner.

Brown (11:18): This guy is the best.

Kois (11:18): I love him! To his wife: “You took a guy stuck in development hell and made something watchable out of him.”

Kois (11:19): Kathy Bates introduces Avatar because she gave the live performance that the Tree of Life was based on.

Brown (11:25): So Hurt Locker has won in every category in which there’s been any question… Can Jeremy Renner beat Jeff Bridges? I still say no.

Kois (11:26): This is pretty great, actually. I really get off on starfucking shit like this, honestly. I like the idea that they make these people pretend they are actually friends. From my party: “They should have had Glenn Frey do this one.”

Kois (11:26): Much annoyance from the moms at this party about Jeff Bridges being lauded for being a working parent. “Yes, and also he is a millionaire, which makes things easier.”

Kois (11:28): Wouldn’t it be great if Julianne and Colin Farrell were both like, “Y’know what? *I* wanna talk about Jeff Bridges.”

Kois (11:29): Line of the night from Tim Robbins! “Morgan Freeman said to me on the last day of shooting The Shawshank Redemption: ‘Friendship is getting a friend a cup of coffee. Could you do that for me, Ted?”

Brown (11:33): Surprise! Jeff Bridges wins for Best Actor.

Kois (11:34): The Dude has been partaking, and Bad Blake has been sippin’.

Brown (11:34): “The Weary Kind” sounds terrific on soprano saxophone. It was a real missed opportunity not having Kenny G. play on the Crazy Heart score.

Kois (11:37): Great speech, Jeff Bridges!

Kois (11:40): OPRAH!

Brown (11:43): I guess they had to fly her in to talk about Gabourey Sidibe, since she has no other famous connections yet. It’s not like they were going to let Lenny Kravitz do it.

Kois (11:45): How are we feeling about Carey Mulligan’s earrings? I am worried they are going to pull her head off her shoulders.

Kois (11:46): Gabby is so great she even makes me forgive Oprah for being so over-the-top.

Brown (11:47): Stanley Tucci is talking about Meryl Streep. He is so much better for Meryl than whoever Meryl’s real husband is.

Kois (11:48): Agreed.

Kois (11:46): What is Sean Penn talking about?

Brown (11:47): Haiti, probably? I didn’t hear, I was in the bathroom.

Kois (11:48): Right now Adam Shankman is like, “Stick to the script, Sean.” He is going to barge on stage and rip Sean Penn apart with his gym-toned arms.

Kois (11:49): “Did I really earn this or did I wear you all down?” Sandy! Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to!

Kois (11:52): Sandra Bullock, as expected, wins the night.

Brown (11:54): Obviously Kathryn Bigelow should and will win Best Director, but could you imagine the crazy shit that would happen for the next 2 minutes if Quentin Tarantino did? Harvey Weinstein would run outside and flip a limo over, basically.

Kois (11:54): It’s too delightful to even taunt me with that, Lane.

Kois (11:56): “Well, the time has come,” Barbra said, and Lee Daniels momentarily shit his pants. But Kathryn Bigelow, the awesomest director in Awesometown, wins Best Director.

Kois (11:56): To her credit, Kathryn Bigelow seems not to have assumed she would win. To her detriment, she didn’t seem to prepare a speech. And somewhere, Jane Campion calls her agent and says, “Fine, sign me up for an action movie. Is Bad Boys 4 available?”

Brown (11:59): And Tom Hanks announces The Hurt Locker wins for Best Picture before Kathryn Bigelow can even leave the stage.

Kois (11:59): That was like an Improvised Explosive Device of an awards announcement!

Kois (11:59): Hurt Locker wins! The lowest-grossing movie in Best Picture history. And in all honestly, whether it was too inaccurate or too accurate — depending on which disgruntled veterans you believe — that is totally awesome.

Kois (12:02): All right, let’s hand it off to the late-night crew. Thanks for live-bloggin’ with me. Also, I won my Oscar pool. Suck it, my friends and spouse!

Brown (12:02): Thanks, Dan and readers! We’ll see you all back here tomorrow morning for more exhaustive analysis of this awards show that went pretty much exactly the way we’ve known it would for months now. Good night!

(Update: Videos removed by request of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.)

Vulture Live-Blogs the Oscars