Hey, Academy: What's with all the sloppiness and silliness?
I know this is a new era at AMPAS. Online voting is on the way, the old documentary voting process has been overhauled, some new staff is in place and some of the old staff is grumbling -- and it can't be long before we hear about streaming movies and moving the Oscar show earlier.
Brett Ratner even got his hands on the show, at least for a few weeks.
And while many of those moves may well turn out to be for the best, a barrage of little things this week made me wonder about these new directions.
Individually, they're small, maybe even insignificant. Together … I'm not sure why, but they bug me.
I realize that harping about them might cast me in the role of an old Oscar coot yelling, "Hey you kids, get off my lawn!"
But here goes:
DOWN IN FRONT!
At the nominations announcement on Tuesday morning, I took my usual spot in the audience – an inside aisle seat toward the back of the right-hand section of the Samuel Goldwyn Theater. It gives me a good view of the stage while the 10 on-air categories are announced, and also lets me get out of the room quickly to pick up the packet containing the rest of the nominations.
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This year, as soon as Tom Sherak and Jennifer Lawrence took the stage, I couldn't see a thing. The aisle was clogged with people standing there and taking photos.
In 17 years of attending nominations announcements, I had never seen people stand in the aisle without immediately being bounced. It just seemed so un-Academy like. Disorderly, which is something you could never have said about a major Academy event in the past.
POINT OF (RANDOM) ORDER
When it came time to read the Best Picture nominees, Lawrence did it in random rather than alphabetical order.
Why?
A couple of Oscar consultants asked me this question, and all I could come up with was: "Because they want to fuck with us."
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'One of them burst out laughing. "A studio asked me that question yesterday," he said. "And I told them, 'Because they want to fuck with us.'"
The point is, only a tiny minority of people are obsessed enough about the Oscars to use alphabetical order to figure things out while the announcement is going on.
Sure, some people from Universal would have groaned when "The Descendants" was announced and they realized that "Bridesmaids" had been passed over. And a few "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" partisans would have gotten a sinking feeling when "The Help" was announced.
