The Oscarzzzzzzzz

Last night's Oscars were one of the worst in my memory. I'm a huge Oscar fan -- I've hosted countless Oscar parties, Oscar pools, etc. In my more active days on The Well I hosted the Movies conference and posted regularly during Oscar season about who was going to win, who should be nominated, etc. etc. It's not an exaggeration to say the Oscar telecast is one of the highlights of my TV-watching year, up there with Opening Day of the baseball season and the Survivor finale. Ordinarily I love nothing more than three hours in front of the TV spent critiquing dresses, speeches, and winners and losers.


An Oscar statuette hangs itself as the telecast enters its fourth hour

This year was completely and utterly disappointing. For years people have grumbled about the length of the telecast, how it drags, how boring it is, and I have typically sldiered on, always finding enough of interest to enjoy it. Not this year. For one thing, the producers backloaded all the "big" awards (they didn't give out an acting award until almost an hour in), presumably to build up suspense, but the result was that the first 2 1/2 hours just draaaggged. Then the acting awards came up, mostly foregone conclusions, and the pacing didn't improve!

In general, everything just seemed to take too long. It was maybe only 15 seconds or a minute in any one place, but added up over the whole night it felt stultifying. A perfect example was the shadow theater thing. It was neat, and it led to Ellen DeGeneres' funnies line of the night ("they're naked!") but each little bit lasted a minute or so for one payoff. Grouping them all together would have saved quite a bit of time.

People have a lot of strong feelings about the montages. Typically I enjoy them, and I certainly liked Erroll Morris' piece which started the show. Giuseppe Tornatore's foreign film piece was OK, but Michael Mann's America was just stupid. I would much rather have seen those 5 minutes given to an Altman tribute the way the Spirit Awards did on Saturday, or better yet excised completely. After all, if they did for Altaman whatthey did for Morricone, we might still be watching the show. My God, the Morricone tribute seemed endless! And you have to assume he knew he was getting the award - would it have killed the producers to make sure that Eastwood's translation happened a bit quicker?

Every year the producers try to shorten the show by limiting the amount of time on acceptance speeches, and once people start thanking their agent I start agreeing with Daniel Radosh that there should be a 3-person thanking limit. Thank your spouse, your kids, and your director, and that's it.

But really they could shave off 15-20 min just by having presenters already standing at the podium instead of having them walk. all. the. way. downstage. There was so much dead time that there was no way the show could get into any kind of rhythm. But even if they had tightened things up, the whole affair is so bloodless and obnoxiously self-congratulatory (the Oscars have gone green! What does that mean? Nobody knows!) that it's getting painful to slog through. I would have been much happier this morning if I had gone to bed at 11 and just looked at the winners list when I woke up this morning.

Such a shame.