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As always I wasn’t really too pleased with the Oscar nominations this time around. 2007 was an awesome year for films but lot of great films which should have been there weren’t, including the best foreign picture category (”Lust, Caution“, “Persepolis” and “4 nights, 3 weeks and 2 days” missing). Hoffman being nominated for Charlie Wilson’s War and not for Savages or Before the devil knows you are dead. Into the Wild being treated a pariah. And so on and so forth. The same was true when the awards were announced today. A lot of unexpected winners. However just like last year the greatest redemption came in the best director category. Coen brothers who have been snubbed on more than one occasion in the past (imagine Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Barton Fink and Miller’s Crossing not even getting a nomination) winning the best directors statuette for “No country for Old Men”. It was ironic that the presenter was Scorcese, a director Academy has been most cruel to. The movie was also a best picture winner, though I felt that award should have gone to There will be Blood. For me, the best moment was a tearful Diablo Cody, a former stripper winning an Oscar for best original screenplay. There was a news package in the morning on one of the channells as to whether Indians really need to care about Oscars and why Bollywood films fail to make it in the foreign film category. Well I guess even the Americans have stopped paying too much attention to the annual event. What elso could explain the deteriorating viewership of the Academy Awards. It’s another matter that Oscars have lately started recognising more and more off-beat films unlike earlier years when the more commercial the film was, the more were its chances of getting nominated. I hope this decline doesn’t make the academy go back to the bad old days when studios ruled the roost.

Anyway for me the following were the highlights of the Oscars 2007

1. Acceptance speech by documentary short winner Cynthia Wade and full length doc winner Alex Gibney who both dedicated the Oscar to the subjects of their films who are not alive.”Let’s hope we can turn this country around, move away from the dark side, back to the light”
2. Daniel Day Lewis while accepting the Oscar got down on his knees in front of Helen Mirren; “this is as close as I’ll ever come to being knighted”
3. Jon Stewart wasn’t half as good as he usually is. Lack of preparation because of writer’s strike???
4. 98 year old Robert Boyle being presented with an honorary Oscar. His speech was longer than 8 awards put together. His last words summed up our passion for this wonderful medium. “Since I’ve been around here for almost a century, I’ve noted a lot of conflicts, but there was one bright image in this whole life of ours, and that was the arts, and particularly the art of the moviemakers, of the moving image that we all love.”
5. Counterfeiters winning the best foreign movie. “Austrian directors like Billy Wilder had to come and work here because of the Nazis. A film on that era had to be made”, said director Stefan Ruzowitzky.
6. Best documentary short being presented through a filmed clip by US soldiers stationed in Iraq.
7. Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill being introduced by Jon Stewart as Halle Berry and Dame Judi Dench.
8. A big surprise winner was Marion Cotillard for La vie en Rose. I only got to see the movie last weekend and while everyone was rooting for Julie Christie I really really wanted Marion to win the award.
9. The ritual of showing clips of the industry people who passed away during the last year. Heath Ledger in the last frame drew the biggest applause.
10. Jon Stewart at the start of the show, “You’re here — I can’t believe it, you’re actually here!”, reflecting on the strike that threatened to call off the ceremony.