Oh, Oscar...

I used to love the Oscars. I used to live for the Oscars. The year the ABC tower in Decatur fell over right before the Oscars, my college friends and I drove to Kankakee (the closest place to Champaign-Urbana we could think of that got the Chicago TV stations) and rented hotel rooms to watch the awards we would otherwise have been closed out of. When my friend Melanie and I were stuck in the back of the room during a really boring history class, we used to entertain ourselves by listing, in order, all the Best Pictures from Wings on up.

And now... When Meryl Streep showed up to give out the Best Actor trophy, I had to head to Google to remember what she won for last year. Oh, dear.

This year's annoyance factor started on the Red Carpet. Just when you thought there could be no more annoying human being on the planet than Ryan Seacrest, along came Kristen Chenoweth, whose idea of interviews was to compare her diminutive stature to everyone who came along. Hugh Jackman, Queen Latifah, Adele, Bradley Cooper's mother... Yep. Kristen Chenoweth is smaller than each of them.

And just when it seemed Cheno had the annoying thing all wrapped up, Seth MacFarlane entered the building and blew all other contenders out of the water in perpetuity throughout the universe. Instead of Bob Hope or Billy Crystal, we're now stuck with the likes of MacFarlane, the unfunny plastic man with the perpetual smirk of self-satisfaction, the one who used his hosting gig to push his TV show, his movie, his album... He started out with a song about boobs. Keepin' it classy, Academy.

The highlight for me was the salute to movie musicals, and I thought all three of the featured numbers -- Catherine Zeta Jones doing "All That Jazz" from Chicago, J-Hud belting out "And I Am Telling You" from Dream Girls, and all the major players from Les Miz plus members of the current touring company (including IWU's Casey Erin Clark) going big with a rousing "One Day More" -- came off very nicely. I wondered if we might get to see some of Oscar's earlier musicals, however. Like Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey popping up for Cabaret. You know they can do it. Or even something from Mamma Mia, Moulin Rouge, Oliver!, Gigi... Notice no one said a word about Nine, either, even though Daniel Day-Lewis was right there.

I love Adele, the winner for Best Song, and she sounded fine on "Skyfall," the winning song from the James Bond movie of the same name. But the song itself? Kind of blah. In comparison, Shirley Bassey brought down the house with her rendition of "Goldfinger," a 50-year-old Bond song. Wowza. More Shirley Bassey, please!

In terms of the awards, I don't have any real quibbles. Argo was a welcome winner for me, as was Best Director Ang Lee. Life of Pi was a hugely difficult movie to make, Lee is lovely, and he's a U of I alum. Oddly, Argo also has a University of Illinois connection, since Christopher Denham, who played one of the Americans stuck in Iran, earned his undergraduate degree in Urbana, too.

It was a foregone conclusion that D D-L would win for Lincoln, that the omnipresent Anne Hathaway would take home the award for Best Supporting Actress for Les Miz, and that Jennifer Lawrence (at left) would win Best Actress for Silver Linings Playbook. She looked lovely even if she did take a tumble. She can console herself that Barbra Streisand did the same thing back in 1969. And Barbra had see-through panels on her pantsuit, so... Somewhere Seth MacFarlane is cracking himself up writing a song about seeing Barbra's butt.

The only acting award that seemed up for grabs was Best Supporting Actor. Tommy Lee Jones was the early favorite for his role in Lincoln, although Oscar prognosticators have been opining that his cranky attitude at the Golden Globes was pushing voters away, helping Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained) pick up his second Academy Award in that category in four years.

I'm down with Argo screenwriter Chris Terrio winning in the Best Adapted Screenplay category, but Quentin Tarrentino for Best Original Screeplay for Django Unchained over Tony Kushner and Lincoln? Well, it was expected, but it's still stupid.

On the fashion front, almost everyone looked great. I'd pick the three Jennifers as standouts. Whether she fell or not, Lawrence looked beautiful in her pale pink princess gown from Dior Couture, Garner (right) looked better than she has in ages in a purple Gucci gown with an insane number of ruffles down the back, and Aniston (below) eschewed her normal glittery beige towel look for a beautiful scarlet Valentino number.

Oh, and Quvenzhané Wallis was cute as a button in a bright blue dress with one of her trademark puppy purses as an accessory.

A lot of fashion pundits were picking Jessica Chastain and Charlize Theron as their top choices, but the former's dress blended in too closely with her hair and skin tone to appeal to me, while the latter was stunning, but the stiffness of her white gown, as well as the preponderance of white on the red carpet, meant she didn't make my personal, uninformed, non-fashionista list.

To see Theron, Chastain, and a whole bunch of other gowns and the glitter, and a few guys, too, head over to the Tom and Lorenzo blog, where you can see it all and voice your opinion.

So that's the Oscars. On to another year. Who will we be talking about in February 2014? Daniel Day-Lewis going for his fourth? Meryl back at the podium? More Spielberg and less Tarantino? Seth MacFarlane not even invited to attend? A girl can dream.

Oscar Nomination Surprises!

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had some surprises up its golden sleeves this morning, with no Oscar love for the guy in the iron lung in The Sessions and a whole lot of topsy turvy in the Best Director race.

There are nine nominees for Best Picture, with only Moonrise Kingdom left out from prognosticators' lists of likely nominees if it went that deep. Big favorite Lincoln is there, along with Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Misérables, Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook and Zero Dark Thirty. Along with Moonrise Kingdom, dark horses Skyfall and The Master didn't make the cut.

Best Director was supposed to be a horse race between Steven Spielberg and actor-turned-director Ben Affleck, but Affleck, whose Argo got a Best Picture nod, is out in the cold, as are expected nominees Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty and Tom Hooper for Les Miz. Only Ang Lee (Life of Pi) and Spielberg repeat from the Directors Guild nominations announced on Tuesday.

It's not that uncommon for the DGA to pick a different winner than the one who takes the prize on Oscar night, but the two groups sharing only two nominees out of five is a bit surprising. Michael Haneke, who directed Amour, Benh Zeitlin, from Beasts of the Southern Wild, and David O. Russell, who has appeared on a lot of Best of the Year lists for Silver Linings Playbook, benefited from the absence of Affleck, Bigelo and Hooper on the final slate.

The Best Actor competition comes down to Daniel Day-Lewis, who played Lincoln in Lincoln, Bradley Cooper as a bipolar man who moves back in with Mom and Dad in Silver Linings Playbook, Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, Denzel Washington as a heroic but flawed pilot in Flight, and Joaquin Phoenix as an unstable man who falls in with a cult in The Master. Because Phoenix took a swipe at awards season and the campaigning involved, many thought the Academy voters would snub him, but there he is. And John Hawkes, widely expected to be a contender for his role as a man in an iron lung who hires a sex therapist in The Sessions, is nowhere to be found.

Frontrunners Jessica Chastain (a CIA operative going after Bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty) and Jennifer Lawrence (the quirky love interest who dances with Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook) are front and center in the Best Actress category, where they are joined by 9-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, who played a girl named Hushpuppy taking a journey to the end of the world in Beasts of the Southern Wild and 85-year-old Emmanuelle Riva, who played a retired music teacher whose health is failing in the French film Amour. Wallis and Riva represent the youngest and oldest nominees ever in the Best Actress category. Naomi Watts, a mother trying to find her son during a tsunami in The Impossible, rounds out the list of nominees. A likely contender left out was Marion Cotillard, whose performance as a whale trainer in Rust and Bone was overlooked. Let's give credit to IndieWire's Peter Knegt, who called this category perfectly.

The real Thaddeus Stevens (L) and Tommy Lee Jones in the role.

Supporting Actors nominated include veteran Alan Arkin for his work as a wily movie producer in Argo, Robert DeNiro as Bradley Cooper's OCD dad in Silver Linings Playbook, Philip Seymour Hoffman as the charismatic cult leader in The Master, Tommy Lee Jones as a fiery abolitionist in Lincoln, and Christoph Waltz as a bounty hunter* in Django Unchained.

Nominee Jacki Weaver

And the Supporting Actresses who got the call this morning are Amy Adams and Sally Field, playing wives to the title characters in The Master and Lincoln, Anne Hathaway as Fantine, arguably the most miserable character in Les Misérables, Helen Hunt as the helpful sex therapist in The Sessions, and  Australian actress Jacki Weaver, the mom in Silver Linings Playbook. There were a whole lot of names bandied about for that fifth spot, with actresses like Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Nicole Kidman considered more likely than Weaver. But her presence as the most stable member of the Silver Linings family won the day, giving Weaver an out-of-nowhere nomination.

If you'd like to see the complete list of Oscar nominations, head here to read 'em and weep. Or cheer. Lincoln leads in nominations overall with 12, with Life of Pi right behind with 11 and Silver Linings Playbook with 8. That's a bit better than experts predicted for Pi, so congrats to director Ang Lee, whose University of Illinois connection (he got a BFA there in 1980) makes him rootable in my book.

*I've corrected what I called the character in response to a comment, in case anyone wonders why he is suddenly a bounty hunter.