Michael Moran
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The few bloggers that weren't wildly speculating about a Jackson 5 revival were talking about a little-known film awards ceremony known as The Oscars. With its melding of high fashion and low culture, The Academy Awards ceremony was bound to excite the attentions of easily-distracted web pundits;
In Contention restrained itself to a simple, elegant pictorial of the night's winners, but many other correspondents opted for a blow-by-blow drinking game approach that echoed our own Chris Ayres. Defamer, that most venerable of gossip blogs, followed the drinking game approach perhaps a little too closely, delivering a funny but frankly rather foul-mouthed commentary which focused on the rivalry between Supporting Actress winner Jennifer Hudson and her Dreamgirls co-star Beyonce Knowles.
Most other bloggers seemed to find the show a little dull: Nikki Finke went further, with a scathing account punctuated by scaborous (and occasionally scatalogical) e-mails from her readers. There was surprisingly little Oscar-related content on YouTube when we looked, save this unapologetically blue collared, red-necked response to Hollywood's perceived Democrat bias. Citizen of the Month was sufficiently bored to try blogging the 1987 Oscars instead
Perhaps expectations were tempered by the notion that the awards were considered predictable, although Web Metrics Guru came up with a list of potential winners based on pre-show internet traffic that was, while interesting in itself, far from accurate.
Most people blogging the Oscars seemed more interested in giddy, breathless reaction to the red carpet fashion than saying much about the movies. Fashioniq did its best to pick out some trends from the cavalcade of frocks. Daily Intelligencer did its best but, like many, was too distracted by Jack Nicholson's ostentatious baldness to say as much about the dresses as one might expect. Doyen of the gossips Perez Hilton went with a selection of red carpet pictures besmirched with his trademark MS-Paint commentary. Best fashion scoop was Just Jared, who revealed that Helen Mirren may have taken some style tips from Britney Spears with her underwear choices. Elsewhere in the world of grooming Grimary Gource seemed dismayed by the sheer avoirdupois of some of this year's Academy nominees.
Of course the internet belongs to the special interest groups, and apart from the covetous appreciation of all the celebrities' free gifts at Swagtime there were points of interest for Tom Cruise fans, the already substantial Apple iPhone demographic, and of course for afficionados of that peculiarly web-based phenomenon Snakes on a Plane , which perhaps suprisingly won no awards this year.
In a night devoid of high drama the biggest story was Marin Scorsese's long-overdue triumph. Martin seems to be the last remining person on Earth without a blog, so instead we leave you with his rather technical, but still fascinating podcast about The Departed.
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