"The Academy Awards has the most glorious short life of any enterprise I've ever been involved with," veteran Oscar producer Gil Cates once told me. For the 83rd Oscars, that short life is just about finished, save for a few more odds and ends. (Photo by Jonathan Alcorn)
Why did this year's Oscar lose viewers in the 18-to-49-year-old age group? How about this: too many interactive and behind-the-scenes features taking away the mystique. That sounds improbable, but Academy president Tom Sherak suggests as much to Melena Ryzik, wondering if the expanded Oscar.com website and mobile apps had an impact on viewers. (Online viewers, on the other hand, increased by a third.) Ryzik herself attributes the drop to "stilted hosting and odd juxtaposition of newfangledness and tradition," though how those young viewers knew that stuff was coming isn't too clear to me. (The Carpetbagger)
Rotten Tomatoes ranks all 84 Best Picture winners. (There have only been 83 Oscar shows, but they give "Sunrise" a break by including it as one of two de facto Best Picture winners at the first Oscars, whereas the Academy retroactively excluded it and pronounced "Wings" the big winner.) "The King's Speech" sits about halfway down the list, between "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Unforgiven." The top five: "All About Eve" is number one, followed by "The Godfather," "On the Waterfront," "Casablanca" and "An American in Paris." "The Hurt Locker" (number 11) and "No Country for Old Men" (19) are the only 21st century films to crack the top 20. On the bottom part of the list, "The Broadway Melody" is deemed the worst of all, "Out of Africa" the worst from the last 25 years, "Crash" the worst of the last decade. The rankings, by the way, are determined by "the strict and rigorous standards of Tomatometer science," so there. (Rotten Tomatoes)
In the aftermath of the Oscar show, Tom O'Neil set up a poll to ask a question: who were the worst recent Oscar hosts? And this year's team ran away with the crown, drawing nearly twice as many votes as David Letterman as of Tuesday night. Voters thought Chris Rock was a little better than Letterman, Jon Stewart better than that, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin better than Stewart, and Hugh Jackson best of all the possible worst hosts in the poll. Steve Martin solo, Ellen DeGeneres, Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal were not in the running. (Awards Tracker)
Here's one I missed from yesterday, but all those readers who voted for Franco and Hathaway as the worst might appreciate Guy Lodge's open letter to Franco: "While it’s perfectly acceptable (indeed, some might say mandatory) to roll your eyes and/or utter sneery asides and/or throw peanuts at the screen and/or get epically blazed while watching this expensively choreographed fiasco unfold from the safety of your living room, it’s considerably more problematic to do so from the Kodak Theater itself — particularly when you’ve been graciously invited to keep the whole lunky show running in the first place." That's his starting point, of sorts; it's quite long, but pretty funny. (In Contention)
