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And the winner is ... not the Oscar show
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Published: March 10, 2008
They handed out the Academy Awards not long ago, those little golden statuettes that I craved winning throughout my Hollywood career as a producer. And I lost again.
I didn't have a film nominated this time -- I never had a film nominated, so that was no surprise. Over the years, I got used to losing, since I rarely made a movie big or important enough to even suggest Oscar possibilities.
The reason I feel a sense of loss once again is for a different reason -- I lost my affection and respect for the annual ceremony. I've been a proud member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for 15 years now, and I take the honor seriously. It's very satisfying and humbling to know that my peers nominated and elected me to the most august artistic body in the movie business.
But this year's show was, in a word, boring. Dull. Obscure. Unenlightening. Not entertaining, which is about the worst thing you can say about the most important event in the entertainment industry. If there was one more horrendous musical number from Enchanted, I was going to throw my bowl of popcorn through my TV screen.
Part of the problem in recent years has been the movies themselves. I can't remember a year with more dark, bleak, depressing films, and those were almost uniformly the ones that were nominated and whose makers walked away with little Oscars tucked under their tuxes and designer wraps. Movies about serial killers, psychopathic oilmen, neurotic French singers and sweaty corporate lawyers do not a pleasant evening make.
The other problem is the ceremony itself. It seems predictable, yawn-inducing, laugh-dampening and, as always, endless. The big winners inevitably seem pre-ordained, given the plethora of critics' prizes, other televised awardathons, and mountains of press coverage that take all the fun and suspense out of what used to be a nail-biter.
And the audience tuned out, as they never have before. This was the least-watched Oscar broadcast in the last 20 years, and 21 percent below last year, a ceremony in which director Martin Scorsese finally got the Academy Award he should have received, well, 20 years earlier. Nowadays, American Idol draws more viewers on its Tuesday-night broadcast than the Academy Awards can deliver on its only show of the year.
My beloved academy is going through an identity crisis. I mean, if host Jon Stewart (who was pretty funny, I thought, and the only ray of sunshine in the otherwise cloudy picture) can't deliver the young audience, who can? Should they ban European actors from winning? Should they drop the short film, make-up, art-direction and sound categories? Should George Clooney do a striptease?
The answer to these panicked questions is surprisingly simple: Make better, more accessible, more popular movies that are not all visual effects, not loaded with psycho killers, morally compromised heroes and obscenity-spouting pregnant teenagers.
The Academy Awards used to be a confirmation that the box-office hits could also be good movies, if the right director got hold of the right story and cast the right actors. But now it all seems wrong, and the studios put their marketing muscle behind big, dumb movies for kids and teens. Place Pirates of the Caribbean, and its multitude of sequels, against such films as Lawrence of Arabia or Dr. Zhivago, and the contrast is telling.
No one's asking Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton about how to solve the Oscar nosedive, and in the larger scheme of things, it doesn't really matter. But for those of us who started watching the Oscarcast back in the 1950s (the first one was aired in 1953), it's sad to see this slow and steady decline in both entertainment value and genuine suspense in the show.
When I lived in Los Angeles, I was invited by a friend to an annual viewing party in her living room. She covered the floor in plastic, put Saran wrap over her TV screen, and had buckets of eggs, tomatoes and rotten fruit conveniently stationed around the room. When one of those ill-conceived best-song numbers came on, or someone won whom we didn't like, the barrage of fruit and veggies came flying. The bigger the mess, the more popular the show.
I'm calling Whole Foods and putting in my order now.
■ Dale Pollock, a former dean of the School of Filmmaking at the N.C. School of the Arts, teaches film there now.
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