Oscar recap madness! Hugh grinds, Coke pwns, and Frito-Lay’s TrueNuts finds its calling.

What stood out:

• Mickey was robbed. (I just hope his chihuahuas are ok after he lost to Penn.)

• Having parts of the script read over the actual scenes was cool.

• Having the Who’s in Your Oscar Five read the nominations for best actress/actor? About as comfortable as a Hugh Jackman Barbara Walters lap dance. Someone spray down the lavalier please.

• Way too many musical numbers. Hugh can dance, I just don’t want to see it.

• Just once, would love to hear someone respond to the “What are you wearing” question by going: “Old Navy.” Nice placement if you can get it.

A few updates from Twitter:

Kevin Pollock: “Boy, you'd never know Jerry has been one of the TRUE pricks for over 45 years.”

FrankAdman: “I have no desire to direct a movie. It's hard enough to get a headline to work.”

qoolquest: “dog will someone send HSM cast friggin home already?!?!?!?”

Oh yeah, and commercials:

Coke and Coke Zero had a nice series of cause-specific spots out and overall, had the most even tone of the night, especially the skywriting “Ahhh” spot. JC Penny tried to convince you they were are will be cool, and Hyundai beat you down like Rodney King throughout the night with their buy-back offer spots. The nicest, coolest series though was for Frito-Lay’s™ TrueNorth Nuts, and it’s also the one that drives me nuts now.

Directed by Helen Hunt, it’s the story of Lisa Nigro, a former Chicago police officer who opened up a restaurant for the homeless, and then won the chance to have her story made into a commercial. Read about it here and watch the clip. Before you read further and feel the love, I do like these spots a lot.

Problem though: I’ve never seen a brand make it more difficult to get the word out with one of its commercials. Surprising to me that the interactive people on the TrueNorth microsite didn’t even include an embed or share link for the actual clips, let alone having the clips already up on YouTube.

Hugh’s nuts were already posted on YouTube before he finished the dance, so not really seeing why they couldn’t post these spots. Ad bloggers left and right will be covering the TrueNorth ad today. Pepsi must have had a media buy in the millions, and they couldn’t even include a clip to help them get the word out? All they had was a PR release. Way to grab onto the future.

Wait, what, people actually talked about the spots?

That said, more than a few people who liked it also wondered what the connection to nuts was. Yeah there’s a connection to the actual name of the brand, TrueNorth. Yes, the story of TrueNorth was about finding the one passion to make your their nuts be the one thing they focused on most when starting the company. A story about someone else’s one “true north” in life to play off that? Sure. Fine. That works.

Still, it’s one of the common themes for major brands in vogue: Take the name of the product and personify/humanify/verbalize/nounalize it. (Kraft your salad anyone?) Even if you connect the two dots between product name and purpose in life, and even if you know the origin of the True North name, people’s reaction was still:

“Oh, odd commercial for a peanut brand.”

It just doesn’t connect to the actual product beyond actual name. Taking it one step further as only I do, it also rings less true because the parent company is megalithic Frito-Lay, and not some smaller independent Mom & Pop brand trying to establish itself. At least then I’d give them a pass.

(Note: While they said there was to be only one commercial shown during the awards, Majora Carter’s South Bronx story also ran.)

Until next year.

(Image via.)

Tags: True North nuts