As someone who’s watched the Academy Awards for probably 50 years, I’ve hung on by my fingernails for an awfully long time. Yet somehow, The Academy keeps finding ways to keep tilting the platform and smearing grease under the soles of my feet.
The Oscars used to at least pay lip-service to the rich history of the industry it celebrates. There were montages assembled from celluloid classics. Iconic stars from yesteryear would take the stage to hand out important awards. And at the end of the night, the credits would roll over a medley of classic movie themes.
Last year, they squeezed the “In Memoriam” segment, the very soul of the evening, like it was a sponge. This is often the most poignant part of the broadcast, as we’re reminded of all those who devoted decades of their lives to crafting the entertainment that, once upon a time, made our days brighter, or those who were taken from us too soon.
Instead, each “memory” flashed by so quickly, a rapid succession of images edited with such manic intensity that each of them blew past before a number of them could even register, with jarring cuts that often didn’t even match the inappropriately up-tempo music bed. With the passing of the years, I get the impression that no one involved with the ceremony even knows who most of these people are anymore.
I have to say, because of COVID and because of what I read about what to expect from the ceremony, for the first time in nearly a half-century, I didn’t even bother to watch. But I caught enough of it on the web the next day to be glad that I didn’t.
I mean, the Academy has made plenty of boneheaded decisions over the years. Playing people off-stage, a huge pet-peeve of mine. The ones most likely to get played off are the technicians or documentarians or short-filmmakers whose passion and drive for excellence carried them from comparative obscurity to a few minutes at the podium. You know, the little people. The stars can ramble on as long as they want about anything.
Also, relegating the humanitarian awards and honorary Oscars to a separate ceremony, and then distilling them to soundbites for broadcast. Inexcusably disrespectful. Someone who devotes his or her life to the business, and you’re going to have them accept their award in a room full of technicians? These are the people I want to hear more from, not less! They are the legends, and they have stories to tell.
Since 2009, recipients dismissed as unworthy of inclusion in the actual, real-time broadcast include (among others) film historian Kenneth Brownlow, Roger Corman, Jean-Luc Godard, James Earl Jones, Angela Lansbury, Maureen O’Hara, Lalo Schifrin, ubiquitous casting director Lynn Stalmaster, Donald Sutherland, Cicely Tyson, Eli Wallach, and Lina Wertmuller. Any one of these is deserving of a sustained standing ovation at the actual, televised awards ceremony.
This year, The Academy is doubling-down with the announcement, made last month, that certain key categories have been deemed too insignificant, again, to be included in the Academy Awards broadcast:
Animated short
Documentary short
Film editing
Makeup and hairstyling
Live-action short
Original score
Production design
Sound
Some pretty egregious deletions. Editing, sound, production design, make-up and hairstyling, and score are essential components to the overall impact of a film, and music is right up near the top (along with editing).
This is only the Academy’s latest slap against musicians. Having the orchestra piped-in from offsite was another indignity and a major annoyance for several years. And I thought Julia Roberts addressing Awards music director Bill Conti as “stick man” was embarrassing…
Furthermore, the new ruling deprives me of the pleasure of rooting against Hans Zimmer.
As we’ve learned from the Olympics, in the age of social media, our satisfaction is diminished as results are posted as soon as the announcement is made. Which means those “honored” in the hour before the broadcast will be common knowledge by the time of their fleeting mention during the show. It’s like trying to tape a ball game for later enjoyment and then hoping not to hear any mention of the final score.
The omission of these categories from the ceremony is unconscionable. Yet there’s always plenty of time for inane segments involving people texting in to polls about their favorite jump-scare moments, or the host taking selfies in the audience, or ordering out for pizzas for the stars. If you’re going to waste valuable air time, at least make it entertaining and bring back Billy Crystal.
And don’t get me started on the red carpet prelude, which makes me despair for the intelligence of the average viewer. Keep your vacuous chatter and tabloid BS out of my Oscars. What good sports these stars must be to be able to run this shallow gauntlet. Imagine if Glenn Ford had climbed out of a limo and someone tried to engage him in this kind of nonsense. It would take them all night to sweep the teeth out of the carpet.
There has been a sad, inexorable decline in the quality of the ceremony in recent decades and a seeming shift in what the focus of the Oscars should be. I’m not one of these people that dismisses the Awards out of hand as being obnoxiously self-congratulatory, with a bunch of Hollywood types slapping each other on the back. I mean, that’s essentially what the ceremony was created for in the first place – to celebrate excellence in the industry. The television broadcast is an afterthought, or it should be.
Instead, the Academy keeps casting overboard what it seems to regard as ballast, in a losing bid to retain its dwindling viewership. Forget about it, Academy. It’s over. Not only do you not have a clue about what made the ceremony enjoyable or worthwhile to anyone who loves the movies, but mainstream movies are so terrible now that the only films worth being lauded are those that have become difficult to chase down in a theater and which don’t have as broad an appeal to the average viewer.
To be clear, I don’t believe one should pander to the audience, but maybe if the major studios still offered a wide variety of high-quality films in different genres, instead of twelve months a year of effing superhero movies and sci-fi dystopias, we wouldn’t be looking at a pallet piled high with Netflix or Amazon originals that only a small segment of the public has bothered seek out on cable, while the masses continue to flock to theaters to watch the latest, grimmest Batman or bloated James Bond.
As a radio host, for the last number of years, I’ve done my best to use the lemons to make lemonade. Academy Awards weekend became an excuse to celebrate Oscar history, as I continued to program memorable film scores from many of the screen’s great classics. But as the years pass, and one mediocre honoree bleeds into another, that vein is getting smaller and smaller.
Not having the freedom to do that kind of show anymore, going forward, I choose to celebrate not by watching the Academy Awards, but by ordering a pizza, loading up a playlist of classic film scores for my own enjoyment, and then working through a pile of DVDs of some of my favorite Oscar-decorated films.
In short, so long, Academy. Thanks for the memory.
