The high and low moment of the 2013 Oscars. Hint: Ben Affleck

Happy hour would have been on me today if I had had the good sense to join an Oscar pool. All of my picks won awards! You can find a complete listing here.

The highlight of the biggest night in Hollywood for me was Ben Affleck’s acceptance speech after winning Best Picture for Argo, a film he produced, directed and starred in. Affleck shares important wisdom about” don’t hold grudges, work harder than you think you possibly can and when you get knocked down – and Affleck promises you will; we all do – it does not matter how it happened but that you get back up.

The low point of the evening did not happen in the grand auditorium, but in the actions of editors at the satirical news site, The Onion. They were forced to apologize after a disgusting Twitter joke about Quvenzhane Wallis, a nine-year-old actress starring in “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” Sure, the Oscars makes for cheeky fodder about a group of overpaid and overindulged professionals, but obscenities about a kid marked a new low.

Earlier in the day, I read and then re-read a thought-provoking New York Times piece about the authenticity or lack of it in movies supposedly based on real events: Lincoln, Argo and Django Unchained, for example. Turns out the Lincoln movie wrongly portrays Connecticut’s lawmakers as voting against the 13th Amendment in 1865 and while there were slave rebellions and individual acts of heroism against a racist system, no freed slave named Django shot and pillaged his way through Mississippi.

These movies raise age-old questions about the separation of truth and fiction but as the Times article notes, these days, this ”acute contemporary anxiety about the truth … has less to do with how rightly or wrongly “Argo,” for instance, gets its facts than with the crumbling monopolies on the truth held by institutions like the government and the press.” Ouch. Well worth a read.

What was your favorite moment from the Oscars?

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