Javier Bardem (below) continued to have a pretty good few weeks, winning best actor honors at the 25th annual Goya Awards in Madrid on Sunday night. Following the birth of his son in late January, and then an unexpected (to some) Oscar nomination for "Biutiful," Bardem returned to Spain to pick up his fifth Goya, which he dedicated "to my wife and son for awakening my heart and smile everyday." The Spanish film "Pa Negre" ("Black Bread") was the night's big winner with nine awards, including best film; "The King's Speech" won the award for the best European film … because, after all, it would hardly be a legitimate awards show if that film didn't win something. (CBC News) (Photo by Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images)
Jeff Wells starts a series he calls "They Wuz Robbed." He says it'll be a daily salute to actors who should have won Oscars but didn’t, and will include video clips from their performances. First up: Ann-Margret from "Carnal Knowledge,"who was beaten by Cloris Leachman ("The Last Picture Show") in 1971 even though, he says, she "dug deeper and delivered in a way that was more real, wide-open, vulnerable" than Leachman. But on day two Wells switches gears to salute Nicolas Cage's unhinged 1989 performance in "Vampire's Kiss"– and while he admits that it shouldn't have beaten Daniel Day-Lewis' Oscar-winning performance in "My Left Foot," he thinks Cage should have been nominated over Morgan Freeman in "Driving Miss Daisy." More robberies to come, one per day until the Oscars. (Hollywood Elsewhere)
Gaile Robinson peruses the Academy's acceptance speech database (yes, they have one) to come up with some of the best and worst recent examples. She's pretty dismissive of the speeches overall ("extemporaneous, poorly delivered, thoughtlessly assembled laundry lists"), though she likes Alfred Hitchcock's simple "thank you" from 1967 (which at the time was widely taken as a subtle slap at an Academy that had ignored him for decades), "Sense and Sensibility" writer/actress Emma Thompson's witty salute to Jane Austen in 1996 ("I went to visit Jane Austen's grave in Winchester Cathedral to pay my respects … and to tell her about the grosses"), and Tom Hanks' speech when he won for "Philadelphia" in 1994. Kate Winslet, Angelina Jolie and James Cameron do not fare so well in her estimation. I don't understand, though, why she thinks that Halle Berry's 2002 speech marked the moment when "everyone began thanking their agents." Heck, they'd been doing that for years, if not decades. (Star-Telegram)
Advertisers have averaged $72 million a year over the past decade to showcase their wares on the Oscar show, reports Meg James. Drawing from an analysis by Kantar Media, she adds that this year stands to join 2006-2008 as the fourth recent year to top $80 million – an important figure to the Academy, she says, "because the organization relies heavily on ad revenue from the telecast to finance its operations." Actually, the Academy relies on the fee that ABC pays to broadcast the show; ABC's the company that relies on the ad revenue. Other tidbits include the fact that five advertisers are responsible for more than half the total revenue, and the median age of the 2010 Oscar audience was 50. (Los Angeles Times)
What the …? Germain Lussier says that ABC has hired (that's the word, "hired") a cross-eyed opossum named Heidito predict the Oscar winners on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" as part of the Oscar preshow. Heidi is apparently "a Facebook and YouTube sensation." No word on exactly how she'll make her prediction, but I suspect it won't involve looking at the results of the Hollywood guild awards. To repeat: what the …? (SlashFilm)
