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Nobody Likes The Oscars — Feb 26th 2007

By Karina Longworth


Remember last month, when Netscape handed out our own awards for the Golden Globes telecast? The plan was to do the same for the Academy Awards. But last night's production was a strange one, too odd in many ways to be reduced to bullet points, and one largely unworthy of praise. According to Matt Drudge, the general public wasn't even watching--if overnight estimates prove accurate, it will be the third least-watched Oscars in history. Nikki Finke warned us last week that telecast producer Laura Ziskin had a four-hour monster on her hands, but no one wants to believe that kind of bad news in advance. And based on the reports that have so far hit the Web, even those who get paid to watch these things could barely sit through this year's installment. The few bright spots have so far been glossed over by critics who seem appalled in equal measure by the show's lack of spectacle and host Ellen DeGeneres' velvet pantsuit.

These early reports (particularly Brian Lowry's review in Variety and Alessandra Stanley's analysis in the New York Times) sound simultaneously naive and hackneyed. At the Oscar viewing party I attended, at the IFC Center in downtown Manhattan, nobody in the local, primarily film industry-tangential crowd seemed particularly surprised that the show itself was overlong and, for long stretches, dreadfully dull. Certainly no one suggested that what the evening really needed was more production numbers and fewer flamboyant outfits. The New York crowd simply slogged through, clapping some but mocking more, waiting for the good stuff. For our perseverance, we were rewarded with four big wins (Film Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, Best Picture) for the hometown favorite, Martin Scorsese's The Departed. The genuine sense of joy in the room when the final award of the night was announced made sitting through the show's interminable middle three hours seem almost worthwhile.

To me, the fact that last night's show was bloated, cheesy, and poorly programmed isn't the issue. I'm far more concerned with the general tone, which struck me as uniquely schizophrenic. The producers seemed eager to please everybody and ended up pleasing nobody. Case in point: the musical number early in the show, in which Jack Black, Will Ferrell, and John C. Reilly saluted comedy's uneasy place at the Oscars. That bit ended up being one of the evening's high points, but its type of humor and style of address (Reilly popping up "spontaneously" from the crowd to join Black and Ferrell on stage; the self-consciously "bad" choreography; Black's empty threats of violence) seemed fundamentally at odds with the absolute sincerity of the rest of the show, particularly DeGeneres' gee-whiz opening monologue and transitions. The number played like an inauthentic appeal to the YouTube generation, a tactic which strikes me as completely wrongheaded. Nobody watches the Academy Awards to find out what the kids are into. It's not about celebrating trends, it's about placing new cultural products within the historical context of Old Hollywood, thus confirming a given movie's status as capital-A Art. To incorporate intentional, "ironic" amateurism into an institution designed to legitimize factory-produced mass entertainments undermines the entire enterprise.

Which is not to say that the Oscars couldn't use a bit of undermining. I would love to see a truly subversive Academy Awards ceremony, one which managed to subtly critique Hollywood as it was being celebrated. That feat was approached by the previous two Oscar shows, hosted by Chris Rock and Jon Stewart, but any progress made in 2005 and 2006 was destroyed last night. Only one star in attendance seemed interested in taking on the task. Noting that DeGeneres was by all standards a subpar host, Nikki Finke writes, "Clearly, Jerry Seinfeld was auditioning for the gig." At one point, while Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio were droning on and on about the climate crisis, the camera cut to Seinfeld seated in the audience, yawning. When he noticed himself on the monitor, he tried to cover by apparently cleaning his teeth with his tongue. The telecast's best reaction shot was also its sole spot of self-critique.

Later, taking the stage to present the Best Documentary award, Seinfeld (who always worked a populist love for movies into his sitcom) riffed on the horrors of the modern moviegoing experience. "You rip us off," he scolded theater owners. If the Academy really wants to appeal to the kids, they need to drop the pointless, endless tributes (I'm fairly certain that if Ennio Morricone had been consulted about his own salute, he'd nix the song from Celine Dion) and build next year's show around moments like that--moments which may make a few AMPAS members squirm, but which resonate with the viewers at home all the more for doing so.


Tags: academy awards, AcademyAwards, martin scorsese, MartinScorsese, movies, netscape reports, NetscapeReports, oscars, television

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