Unlikely Oscar Winners and Poll Results

For the first time in a couple of years, the Cinecultist did not spend the Oscars at home, by ourselves, live blogging. This plan had its pros and cons. Attending an Oscar party means extra tasty treats for the commercial breaks and more people to potentially throw out witty quips about the celebrities' fashion choices but also more distracting chit chat over good acceptance speeches. CC is embarrassed to admit, we even shushed one of our friends—not a proud moment. All in all it was a fun night and we're certainly glad the writer's strike was resolved in enough time to have a pretty normal telecast. Although, jeez, did there need to be that many montages? It was montagalicious up in there. We almost expected to see a montage of the montages over the final credits, it was so self-congratulatory.

Favorite moments from the three plus hour show for Cinecultist included Tilda Swinton's crack about George Clooney wearing the nippled bat suit on the set of Michael Clayton, Jon Stewart's reintroduction of Marketa Irglova so she could give her acceptance speech for best song, and James McAvoy subtle flirting with Josh Brolin during one of the scripted introductions. We saw that look between them! A new bro-mance is born!

As for the official Cinecultist Oscar Pool, our winner is Martin X, who got 15 our of the 24 categories correct. Well done, Martin! Please email CC your info and whether you'd like a drink or some random DVDs from the Cinecultist vault as your prize. Thanks to everyone who entered, we all got a few at least. More than half of us predicted best picture, and there were lots of accurate best actor, best director(s) and best supporting actor votes. Yet only two people thought Marion Cotillard would take home best actress and one lone voice was rooting for Tilda. Also no one accurately chose the Best Documentary Feature, Taxi to the Dark Side. It's currently in theaters now, so as penance we should all go see it. The best foreign language winner The Counterfeiters is also playing now in New York and Los Angeles. It looks intriguing, as does that entry from Kazakhstan Mongol. Cinecultist totally didn't know Kazakhstan had a national cinema, that's awesome. Mongol comes out in June and stars the wonderful Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano as Genghis, so it's definitely on our To See list.