Oscar boycott hiatus

For the first time in several years, I actually watched the Oscars. I have boycotted them for a while because it seems to me that they don't always award merit - but rather decide on popularity. I'm not sure it was worth breaking my boycott - this year was pretty uneventful. EXCEPT, early on, Jon Stewart made some joke about Scientology and they panned the audience for reaction and my friend from law school with whom I lived in Ireland was right there next to Joaquin Phoenix!!! I think she was a seat-filler. How cool is that?
I hear there were a lot of great movies out there and maybe if I'd seen more of them I would've felt differently. The movies I watched: the short documentaries, and Crash - which I watched right before the Oscars started. Crash ended up winning, and it was a great choice. What an amazing movie. It was so painful to watch this intense movie - I haven't even fully digested it yet. I normally don't like the kind of movies where it's a bunch of shorts put together, but it came together pretty nicely in this one. I appreciated the portrayal of bigotry without making the characters into caricatures of racists. I also appreciated how there were only a couple of seemingly uncorrupted people in the whole film (out of many) without the obvious "good guys" that are typically written into such storylines.

I really enjoyed Reese Witherspoon's speech - she said she tried to live by June Carter's mantra which was that she lived her life trying to matter. Easier said than done.