Sunday, March 05, 2006

Live Blogging the Music Oscars

Who gives a damn about the acting or whatever? It's the music that matters!

11:04 Phantom of the Opera as playout music? They should take these opportunities (playouts, montages) to give some airplay to film composers, especially those that haven't been nominated or previous generations.

10:55 Nice love for the orchestra by Jon Stewart.

10:32 Goodbye, Joel Hirschhorn.

10:23 Queen Latifah is funny, and the audience is missing it. And the oscar goes hip hop.

10:18 Ludacris is in the house! "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" I think one F-word slipped through at the beginning. And apparently they aren't even trying to bleep the "shit"s. I don't know enough about rap to adequately review this one.

9:58 At least the music with the special effects montage was associated with a movie. Ahh, Lord of the Ring's goodness. And now some E.T. love.

9:50 And the oscar goes to Gustavo Santaolla for Brokeback Mountain. I think this is more of an indication of the political support for the movie rather than that this score is better than the other nominees. It is nice that Gustavo acknowledged his orchestrators.

9:45 Penelope Cruz gives us a nice little history of film music. But more importantly, Itzhak with the Original Scores! I'm not sure how to feel about presenting the music "out of sync" with it's movie. It allows us to focus on the music more, but when the music is expertly crafted to lock in with the images, this form of presentation does a disservice. And by having Itzhak play all of them, we miss some of what makes these different soundtracks unique. The instrumentation, expecially of The Constant Gardner are rather missed in the Bill Conti arrangement.

9:37 So for the great American movie montage they use music from Aaron Copland that wasn't written for movies. What's up about that?

9:25 The next Original Song nominee, "In the Deep" by Kathleen "Bird" York and Michael Becker. This one has some space for the visuals, which I could see having potential for a movie. The performance was good.

9:15 Nice chance to listen to Laura's theme for awhile, before the villains came up.

8:52 Interesting, they chose Gladiator to accompany Russell Crowe rather than A Beautiful Mind. The Academy must agree with Jaquandar.

8:36 Dolly Parton is singing the first nomination for best Original Song, from Transamerica. It's okay, but rather generic as a country song. Dolly sells it well, but I don't see anything special about the song itself.

8:25 Nice joke involving the musicians forcing the speech-givers off.

8:15 ooh, background music for the acceptance speeches! That's different.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Heh ... I was blogging too. Nice thing is that this show is done at 8:30 here in California. Not bad

Anyway, looks like we are in agreement for a lot of the music stuff.

They coulda done better. I suppose they also coulda done worse. Mostly I think they just don't get music. At all. That's movie folks for you.

Eric Edberg said...

From what film was the music for the "in memorium" montage? Allison and I thought perhaps "Now Voyager."

I was so nervous when they announced Perlman was going to play, because I've heard from supposedly reliable sources that he's been having a lot of trouble with his bow arm. It was a great relief and a joy to hear him sound so good. Nostalgic, in a way. But I don't know that it really worked.

Nice to know I wasn't the only DPU music prof watching the show!

Scott said...

I wasn't paying attention to the music during "In memoriam." I was focusing on the names, to see if there was any other musicians mentioned. So I can't help.