I didn't watch much of the show, but I thought Jon Stewart was good where I saw him. It was nice to see that *someone* at the Oscars wasn't taking it too seriously.
I will mention one thing--during the montage to "the Big Screen," where the message was presumably that seeing a movie in a theater is an ennobling experience, as opposed to watching it at home on DVD, which is dirty and whorish, the actor reading the card stumbled over his line, as if he recognized the bullshit coming out of his mouth the instant he said it. It was telling. Hollywood can keep on saying to us that movies are better in a theater, but, you know as they say, folks vote with their dollars...
I didn't see Brokeback, but I wanted to. I did see Capote, and it was an excellent movie. It really grinds me to see certain writers and commentators (most of them conservative) lash out against this crop of movies in such a brazen, uninformed way (such as Coulter, but she is far from the only one). Given, Hollywood is full of itself, and the movies this year do strike me as particularly agenda-driven. But Capote, and I would venture to say all of these movies, deserve better than the already stale one-liners about gays, racism, homophobia, etc.
In specific reference to Capote: this film had no agenda, beyond the usuals of making money, and the more rare objective of telling a good story. I dare anyone to tell me Capote was a polemic on the death penalty. Truman Capote is reported to have been fervently anti-death penalty, but the movie remains ambiguous and at the same time honest. Capote wanted these men to die so he could finish his story. In "In Cold Blood," he takes pains to draw out the two killers, examine their childhoods and examine how they became they way they were. But he never lets the reader forget about the family they killed. Near the end of the book he revisits the killings in great detail. The triumph of the book is that Capote enables you to sympathize with the killers and yet keep their crime firmly in mind, recognizing that death is perhaps the only appropriate end for these men.
The movie has a somewhat different angle, as it focuses on Capote's own devotion to his nonfiction novel, and the lengths he would go to in order to finish it. Yes, Capote was gay, but that actually plays very little into the central conflict. At one point in the movie, Capote himself uses his broken childhood to get closer to one of the killers to get his story. My point remains: this movie deserves better than dismissive one-liners. I can't speak for the others, but this one deserved a spot in the top 5 movies of the year.
