Oscar Roundup '09: Nixon's Got Gams!

Jerry Lewis finally got an Oscar—for his telethons? Every surviving auterist just threw up a little in his mouth.

Also, while I'm as pleased as anyone that Heath Ledger won Best Supporting Actor, surely he deserved a chance to pair it with the Academy's grandest prize: the Most Applause During The Death Montage award. You win, Paul Newman. But you won by forfeit.

Update: Yes yes yes, I know that Ledger was in the montage last year. In other news, I'm not really mad at Paul Newman.

The real reason I'm posting this update: to direct you all to the ineffable Oscar-night liveblog at the right-wing film site Big Hollywood, where you'll find this post from someone named Brett Joshpe:

Hmmm….why did Mickey Rourke win Best Actor in every other award ceremony besides this one? As I said, the Academy punished Mickey for his gratitude towards President Bush for keeping our country safe from Islamo-facist [sic] terrorism. Instead, it chose to award its biggest donkey, Sean Penn. I would looooove to debate Sean Penn and explain to him why his [sic] such an insufferable idiot and jackass.

I was cheering for Rourke too. The Wrestler is a great movie, and Rourke's performance was the best thing in it. But Hollywood conservatives have reached a new level of self-congratulatory victimization—we're talking The Ancient Egyptians Were Black Men Who Invented Airplanes levels of crazy—if they need a theory like that to explain why an orthodox biopic with a tamely liberal message beat an unconventional film made outside the studio system. (Meanwhile, another Big Hollywood contributor seems to believe The Dark Knight didn't get a Best Picture nomination because of its alleged pro-Bush politics, and not, say, because the middlebrows at the Academy felt insecure about honoring a superhero movie.)

Note: Joshpe headlined his comment "Sean Penn Makes Me Puke In My Mouth," which lends support to Graphite's charge that my post's opening paragraph concludes with an overplayed cliché. Chastened, I promise to throw that phrase under the bus, to kick it to the curb, or, if all else fails, to lose it in a perfect storm.