Sunday, March 5, 2006

An Apology

The management of this website apologizes to anyone who was induced to watch tonight's Jimmy Kimmel Live thinking that Jon Stewart would actually be appearing live on it. Turned out, he was in a pre-taped bit of no visible humor.

• Posted at 11:55 PM · LINK

Oscar Reflections

You know what's changed about the Oscars for me over the years? I seem to remember a time when you watched because you figured something would happen that was special and spontaneous. Someone would have an emotional outburst. Someone would screw up beyond belief in front of the alleged "billion" people. Someone would say or do something outrageous. Some Oscar would go to someone that no one expected would win but everyone was very happy that they did. When I think back at the memorable moments of Academy Awards past, they're almost never things that were under the producers' control. (And of the few that were, they're still mostly surprises — surprise presenters, for instance.)

For the most part, the Oscars now seem so safe, so lacking in danger. I don't think there was a single win possible tonight that would have had the impact of Roman Polanski's award in 2003. I don't think there was a nominee whose win would have had the impact of George Burns in 1975 or Jack Palance in 1991. There was no one to cause trouble the way Marlon Brando or Vanessa Redgrave or Michael Moore did. (Did Jon Stewart even mention George W. Bush? I don't think so...at least, not directly.)

This is not so much a criticism as a realization. I was just thinking of Oscar moments I remember. One that comes to mind was in '77, I think, when Peter Finch won a posthumous Best Actor award for his performance in Network. A few years earlier, Marlon Brando had sent an Indian woman to decline his Godfather Oscar and deliver a speech. Because of that, the Academy had made a rule that if you weren't there to pick up (or even refuse) your Oscar, the person who accepted for you had to be a member of the Academy. So when Finch won, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky went to the stage and immediately said that the person who should be up there was Finch's widow. Breaking the rules but demonstrating his flair for drama, he called her to the stage. There, she delivered a touching, tearful speech that a lot of people probably still recall because, among other reasons, it wasn't about the movie business.

It's not just that nothing like that happened tonight. It's that nothing like that could have happened. Forget for a second who was actually nominated this year. Can anyone suggest any nomination that might have been made that could have yielded a big, emotional scene at the podium? Or us really cheering the way we cheered certain long overdue wins of the past?

One of the reasons for this is that the nature of Hollywood has changed. Here's a list of the men who won Best Actor in the seventies: George C. Scott, Gene Hackman, Marlon Brando, Jack Lemmon, Art Carney, Jack Nicholson, Peter Finch, Richard Dreyfuss, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman. What did those men have in common? Answer: They had a lot of history. Most were known for many film roles prior to the one for which they won. Philip Seymour Hoffman may well be in the same class as those men in terms of acting ability and he's certainly not a beginner. But I'll bet you most people can't name two movies he was in before Capote. He's not someone we've known a long time, admired in other films and felt was overdue for recognition. The same was true of the other Best Actor nominees this year — great actors but they weren't on most folks' radar screens before they did the roles for which they were nominated.

There's probably no way to change this kind of thing and maybe there's nothing wrong with it. Maybe what we need to do is to change our expectations of how interesting the Academy Awards telecast is going to be. I've stopped being shocked that the thing runs three and a half hours. I need to remind myself that apart from the opening sequence and maybe one or two awards, all it's going to be is a show where a lot of people you don't care about thank their families, co-workers and maybe an agent or two. And what the women are wearing matters more than anything else.

• Posted at 11:31 PM · LINK

Still Watching the Oscars

I wrote a little while ago that I liked that Jon Stewart wasn't acting like the evening was all about him. I haven't changed my mind about that but I also have what may seem like an opposing thought. The problem with the guy as Oscar Host is that he isn't a big star, at least in this context, and doesn't act like one. His low-key style is refreshing in some ways but it diminishes the event in others. Hosts like Bob Hope, Johnny Carson and Steve Martin brought an air of importance to their intros. Stewart's just a guy out there being funny and keeping it moving during his limited moments on stage. I think it's a good job but it's a quiet good job, the kind that probably won't be appreciated by a lot of people.

The "In Memoriam" montage seemed too short to me...and not just because they didn't make the effort to include Don Knotts and Darren McGavin. Weren't there a lot of people who should have been in there and weren't?

By the way: I started watching the Oscars an hour after most of you. I've been using the Fast Forward button on the TiVo and also the 30 Second Skip feature, and now I've caught up with real time. I don't think I've missed a thing.

• Posted at 7:44 PM · LINK

Watching the Oscars

Jon Stewart's doing fine. It's a tough room...big, cold, impersonal and full of people who really aren't there to watch a show. I like that he kept the monologue short and he isn't acting like this is An Evening With Jon Stewart.

Great to see Lauren Bacall there. I really think the Academy misses something by concentrating so totally on the current movie business. No viewers are going to tune out because of a couple of folks who represent bygone days. Okay, so she had trouble reading the prompter. She's still Lauren Bacall. What they need to do though is to connect the past and the present, and not just trot out a Lauren Bacall to introduce old clips.

And hey, wasn't that Stephen Colbert announcing those fake actress political commercials?

• Posted at 6:40 PM · LINK

Jon and Jimmy

Jimmy Kimmel is doing a live post-Oscar show tonight. Ordinarily, his show comes from the El Capitan Entertainment Center, which is across the street from the Kodak Theater where the Academy Awards are being distributed. Tonight, the traffic and security for blocks around will be insane so Kimmel's program is emanating from the El Portal Theater. That's in North Hollywood, something like eight miles away.

Some listings say that Jon Stewart will be among his guests but the website for Jimmy Kimmel Live makes no mention of Stewart. I'm guessing that if he's on, it'll be a brief remote. I can't imagine the Oscar host completing the most important performance of his career and then instead of going to the parties or being with his loved ones or collapsing, getting in a car and fighting the world's biggest traffic jam to get to North Hollywood in time for another live broadcast. But even as a short remote interview, it might be worth watching.

By the way: Is Jimmy Kimmel Live actually done live every night? All of it? I see by their ticket page that studio audiences have to be to the regular telecasts at 6:15 PM. The show airs on the East Coast at 12:06 AM Eastern time, which is 9:06 PM out here. If it's live, people have to get there almost three hours before the show and wait that long. The website refers to it as "the first live nightly talk show in over 40 years," which I don't think it is. The Joan Rivers program on Fox was live for its first few months, at least. But that page on how you can attend the Kimmel show also refers to attending a "taping."

• Posted at 2:03 PM · LINK

An Oscar Anecdote

One of the possible disasters at the Oscars which has often been joked about but has never (they say) occurred is this: A presenter gets out there, opens the envelope and reads or announces the wrong name. There are rumors that a couple of the more unexpected winners have been crowned that way but it has never apparently happened.

There's a safety net set up to prevent this. The ballots are tallied by an accounting firm that is now called Price-Waterhouse-Cooper and there are two men on the premises from that firm. They travel to the Academy Awards via separate routes, each with a briefcase that contains a full set of the envelopes containing the winners' names. During the ceremony, one man is at stage left at the theater. One is at stage right. Presenters enter from both sides and when they do, they receive the envelope they'll be opening from the Price-Waterhouse-Cooper person on that side of the stage.

But the two accountants have another function. They've both memorized the full list of recipients and if a wrong name is read aloud, they're supposed to sound the alarm. There's some sort of code word for this. Near them always is a stage manager and if Jack Nicholson goes out there tonight and announces the wrong winner, the accountant will turn to the stage manager and give the code word. The stage manager will then relay this to the control room and then...

Well, no one outside the Oscarcast knows exactly what would happen but it's been planned and it's been rehearsed, just in case. My guess is that the orchestra leader would be told to stop the music and the host would be hurried out onto the stage to announce that a mistake had been made. The other Price-Waterhouse-Cooper man — the one who hadn't handed the envelope to the presenter — would open the one in his custody, make sure it had the correct name and then it would be hustled out to the host. But that's just my guess since it's never happened.

But it almost did one year...or so I was told by someone who worked on the broadcast. According to this person, a Very Famous Actor was presenting one of the most important Oscars. He was an older man and he got very confused and as a result, managed to announce the winner without opening the envelope.

His speech and the names of the nominees were on a TelePrompter but in rehearsals, he had trouble reading it. Just in case he needed it, he was provided with a card that had the five names. He had the card and the envelope in his hand as he entered.

When he got out to the podium, he found he couldn't read the prompter. Flustered and confused, he stumbled through his opening remarks from memory and then reached for the card with the nominees' names. As he did, he erred and instead of saying, "The nominees are..." he said, "The winner is..." On the screen, it looked like he was opening the envelope when he was actually just picking up the card that was in the same hand. Everyone assumed that he was forgetting to read the names of the nominees and had opened the envelope prematurely.

The nominees were listed on the card in alphabetical order and he read the first name there. The orchestra began playing the appropriate music. The winner jumped up and ran to the stage to accept. The Very Famous Actor, still a bit disoriented, assumed he'd done what he was supposed to do and stepped back.

The announced winner got to the stage and launched into his speech. He was a bit puzzled when he looked down and noticed that the envelope in his category was lying there on the podium, unopened. But he figured that since no one was stopping him, he must have won.

In the wings, a stage manager realized what had happened. Frantic, he turned to the accountant and asked who had won in that category. The accountant didn't see what his panic was all about. The winner was out there making his acceptance speech. By dumb luck, the victor in that category was the first name in alphabetical order.

Nothing was ever said, so as to not embarrass the Very Famous Actor. The Academy may even have been worried that some people would think the Oscar hadn't gone to the proper nominee and that they'd just gone along with it to avoid a nasty scene. But that's the only time I've ever heard of a glitch in the system and even that one turned out all right. I kinda hope that one of these days, some presenter actually does read the wrong name. I want to see what happens.

• Posted at 12:21 PM · LINK

Award-Winning Comments

A few quick points about the Oscars...

A billion people are not watching. People who ought to know better keep saying this and it's never been close to true. Back in 2001 in this article, I debunked the claim. Since then, others have finally taken note — like this article in The New Yorker and this article on the website of The Los Angeles Times. As the second of these notes, the Super Bowl doesn't draw a billion viewers, either.
People shouldn't take the winners and losers too seriously, especially since we never hear vote totals. You may think it's an outrage that your favorite Sound Mixer didn't win...but maybe he only lost by one vote.
Not knowing the vote totals also make it difficult to infer any real trends among the voters. Supposing all the gay-themed nominees win tonight. That doesn't mean Hollywood went for gay-themed movies. They may have all won by one vote. Assuming the Academy voting reflects everyone in Hollywood is silly. It's like assuming everyone in America wanted George W. Bush as president in 2004.
One should also remember that the voters are not Hollywood and Hollywood is not the voters.
Never forget that one of the reasons a film or person gets nominated (or doesn't) for an Oscar has to do with when it's released. Each year in each category, the Academy nominates five. If there are three great movies, they nominate five for Best Picture. And if there are thirty great movies, they nominate five for Best Picture. Woody Allen's movie Match Point qualified for this round of Oscars by being released on December 28, 2005. If the distributor had delayed it a few days, the film would be in next year's contest and some writer who didn't get nominated would be up for Best Original Screenplay tonight. Getting nominated is not just a function how good you are. It also has a lot to do with when your film (and someone else's film) got released.
The ratings of this year's Oscars will tell us absolutely nothing about Jon Stewart's popularity since we have no way of knowing how this particular broadcast would have done with someone else hosting. A recent Harris Poll said that 84% of Americans say they don't tune in or not tune in because of the host and the rest were pretty much split of whether Stewart would make them more or less eager to watch. For the most part, people probably watch because they care about certain pictures or certain nominees. There don't seem to be great dramas hovering over these decisions this year.
Every year, I hear someone moan that the Oscar voters are out of touch with the American people because they don't honor the films and achievements that the country voted for at the box office. This is a stupid way to look at it. If that's all the Academy Awards should be about, they can save a lot of time: Just give the statuettes to the producer, director, stars and writer of whatever film had the highest gross in the past year. The awards are supposed to honor excellence, not popularity.
That said, one of the reasons we have things like the Academy Awards is because movie studios want them to boost business. Selling tickets is not irrelevant to the proceedings. It often seems like the voters want to reward the films that were made without obvious commercial appeal and to give those movies a bump. Awards are supposed to recognize courage and it doesn't take a lot of courage to make some of the high-grossing high-concept movies.
Lastly: Yes, the ceremony lasts a long time. It's supposed to last a long time. There a lot of very expensive commercials to air. If you don't like it, record the thing and watch it later with your Fast Forward button at the ready. Tonight during the telecast is a great time to go to that restaurant that's usually too damn crowded on Sunday evening. You might have a much better time that way.

• Posted at 1:57 AM · LINK

March 6, 2006 • Current • March 4, 2006