While Bollywood films tend to be melodramas (and any British colonialist portrayed in them will be a mustache twirling bastard) the Indian film industry has been producing some really amazing films over the last decade or so, and even going into areas where Hollywood fears to tread. Like last year's Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, where a man and woman fall in love, and then he discovers that she was born a boy. The only Hollywood films about transsexual characters have been used as comic relief, like John Lithgow in The World According to Garp or tragedy like in Boys Don't Cry. They never get to live happily ever after.
I also thought his performance was great, and I was rooting for him to win Best Supporting Actor. I thought all the performances in Banshees of Inisherin were great, even though I did not like the film overall. The short that won was the only one in that category I did not see. Of the other nominees, I thought An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It was head and shoulders above the rest of them. I watched it three times!
No I'm not! I never heard the song until the Oscars and had no biases for/against it. Just thought it was... annoying. But still better than that Gawd-awful "EEAAO" song!
"This Is a Life" was marred by obvious technical problems, plus the original female vocalist, Mitski, wasn't there for some reason. I'm thinking her replacement, Stephanie Hsu (from the film) may have been a last-minute addition. The song plays much better in the film.
Yeah, Mitski is probably retiring, at the very least from playing live. I think she’s a little freaked out by her fans who want to treat her like a Lady Gaga like figure, even going so far to scream “mom” and “mommy” during her concerts. Stephanie Hsu is not amateur, but she was clearly nervous and off her game, likely because of a lack of practice.
I own Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle records and have seen the most famous of the "playback singers" Kishore Kumar in concert. I will repeat -- there is a very thriving film industry in India. I agree with Paul Schrader -- the Oscars are a celebration of Hollywood (not Bollywood ).
Foreign films have been honored at the Oscars and even nominated for best picture since Grand Illusion in 1938. With all due respect to Schrader, he wasn’t even born when the Oscars first nominated a foreign film. And again, owning a bunch of records doesn’t really impact the weight of your opinion.
India is producing so many films, and so many innovative films like Iravin Nizhal - a 100 minute long musical, shot in a single long take that is the first single shot non-linear film - that sometime within the next 5 years they will produce a film that will be one of the 10 Best Picture nominees. This is the sort of thing that Kubrick would be doing if he was still alive.
Mitski does this a lot between her album eras. She deleted all her socials after the Be The Cowboy album/tour was over and only came back when she was ready to start Laurel Hell's era
I hadn't heard any of the songs before the show either and thought they all were pretty good, though personally I would have given it to Lady Gaga's song simply because her performance of it was the best of the night. I'm generally not a Gaga fan in the least, but Sunday night she actually looked like a real person instead of some freak show, and her song had great emotion in it too.
