Oscars 2023 - Random Thoughts

It's been a long night because immediately following the Oscars telecast we cleaned up a few dishes and eight of us stayed up to watch the brilliant finale of The Last of Us.

* Jimmy Kimmel's monologue was fantastic, maybe the equal of some of the greats by Billy Crystal back in the day. And by my count, he limited himself to five jokes about last year's infamous 

* This Oscars may have raised the expectations for acceptance speeches; so many emotional and meaningful speeches (Ke Huy Quan nearly made me weep!) as well as what may be the most  widely-seen rendition of Happy Birthday ever. Too many good ones to list them all (I was also trying to keep track of all the winners on 16 ballots here).

* I was pulling for Everything EveryWhere All At Once, but was happy to see Naatu Naatu from Bollywood flick "RRR" take the statue, despite only having seen the song on YouTube for the first time this afternoon. The live dance version was clearly a crowd pleaser in the auditorium!

https://youtu.be/sAzlWScHTc4

* Seeing Michelle Yeoh become the first Asian woman EVER take home the Best Actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once was only surpassed by having such a delightfully weird film take Best Picture (and 5 other Oscars too). 

* EEAAO winning means we can look forward to more boundary-pushing movies that challenge our ideas about sentiment expressed within a movie that embraces so many ideas that are unheard of by themselves with  mass public but old hat to those of us familiar with comic-books.

The 95th Oscars had heart and soul and technical merit, and I only took four shots for March of the Dead (Ray Liotta, who I knew but forgot, Irene Cara, Wolfgang Peterson and Vangelis).