Oscars 2013

Thoughts on last night's Oscars:

• Worst moment: red carpet talking head Lara Spencer, who condescendingly said to 9 year old Best Actress nominee Quvenzhané Wallis, "Well hello there, little lady!"
• Best moment: Shirley Bassey, at 76, belting out Goldfinger. Wow.
• I was meh on Seth MacFarlane.  I actually expected him to be more biting than he was. I agree with one critic who said that the "boobs" and "sock puppet" segments should have been snippets instead of a back-door way to get the whole segment on the air.  Would have been funnier as snippets.
• Apparently most people like song & dance numbers.  I'm not averse to them in general, but I dislike when they don't seem to serve any purpose other than to fill time. Did we really need a number from Chicago 10 years after it came out?  The Les Mis number, at least, made more sense because it was a nominated film in the current year.
• Every year there is a tribute to someone or something, and/or a theme. I don't think we need retrospectives and flashbacks every single year.  Why not just have them on milestone years (75th, 100th) or special anniversaries?  It's not necessarily relevant to the current nominated movies.  The Bond tribute made more sense than a musical tribute.
• The Bond tribute, with the exception of Shirley Bassey, was disappointing. I kept waiting for the Bond actors to appear together on stage, but then it never came.  All we got was a bunch of clips from the movies, which are shown relentlessly on TV already.
• The show was still way too long, exacerbated by the fact that I'm 1h ahead of Eastern time zone, so the show ended around 1am.  I have to work the next day.  Today I feel like I wasted sleep in favor of a show that used to be more entertaining and worth staying up for but isn't anymore.
• Throughout the broadcast, the sound was horrible.  Singers were getting drowned out.  The telecast will not be winning any Emmys this year.
• Why was the orchestra playing off-site at the Capitol Records building?  Seems more than just a bit disconnected, and maybe that was partly to blame for the sound issues.
• I preferred that the host didn't disappear later in the show. I always found it distracting when they weren't around.

Cut the awkward banter between presenters, the tributes/flashbacks that don't make any sense, and you can easily cut 1h out of the show.  Then maybe us regular folks can get to sleep and not be zombies the next day.