Was the Academy on crack?

Rating: 4/10 (2 January 2009)

Juno--Best Original Screenplay?? Incredible. The trailers prompted me to expect a funny, touching comedy about a girl in trouble. What do we get instead? Juno, and it's not a nice surprise. Yes, I've seen worse, much worse, hence the four stars which simply means I can understand how it made it to cinema. 4 out of 10 is still an "F" in my book, so I'm definitely calling Juno a failure.
The great shame is that it had so much potential. None of the actors are bad, the subject is great, and there's even a nice bit of resolution at the end of the plot. What's bad about Juno is everything else; direction, dialogue, delivery.
Juno sounds like an endless loop of smart-ass wisecracks cut from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," mixed with incomprehensible and pointless pop culture references, played at twice the speed and made a dozen times ruder. The result is too embarrassing to laugh at, an amazing morass of mindlessness trying to make a movie out of relentless verbosity alone.
Juno, the protagonist, very quickly alienates us with her in-charge-of-the-world witticism when we need to see just a touch of vulnerability to empathize with her character. Unfortunately, there's no other character stepping out on stage to be an alternate protagonist, and very quickly, we cease to care about what happens to anyone, and the hope that it gets any better becomes the sole reason to endure it.
Most lines are played for laughs, many of them solely for cheap shock value, but hardly any deliver. (The only one that made me laugh was when the adoptive father tells Juno that his music is "more commercial." "What do you write?" asks Juno. "Commercials," he answers.)
Paulie Bleeker, the father of Juno's baby, is cast as the ultimate dork, and made to constantly look ridiculous. It's unclear if the goal was to try to out-Napoleon Dynamite "Napoleon Dynamite," or to underscore just how naive and unready for parenthood he is. No matter, though, because he actually only appears in a handful of scenes.
And the "tender" moments are marred by absurd lyrics sung off-key over acoustic guitar by the teenage stars themselves. The aim was almost certainly to bring authenticity and "realism," but no matter how realistic it is to hear kids singing lines like "if you were a floor, I'd be a rug," it's still a crime to be inflicted with that when some inconspicuous mood music is called for. It does get better in the last few minutes, but it's far too little, too late.
And just how the hell did the "experts" in the Academy decide this was the BEST original screenplay? "Adequate" itself would be debatable, but the BEST? Please, please, explain that to me!