Oscar Day, and this year’s curiously flat mood shows no signs of lifting, despite the redoubled – or desperate – promise by Academy President Sid Ganis that things will be different this time.
After last year’s lowest-rated Oscars broadcast ever, with 32 million viewers, we've been hearing about all-new twists: Presenters have not been announced in advance, to build suspense, and the 24 awards will be given out in some heretofore unimagined fashion.
Snippets of the musical numbers will be combined into one big production. Judd Apatow is making a short film just for the event.
And there’s a host, Hugh Jackman, capable of some showbiz razzle-dazzle rather than the usual Oscars night medium-wattage stand-up comedy schtick.
Still, the smart money says the show will be bad, and the ratings will be too.
The most obvious reason is that the nominated films are of the small, intricately wrought variety, which means fewer viewers will tune in to see the movies they loved compete. This is nobody’s fault. Hollywood periodically contracts itself in order to do penance for its mindless bloat and greed, paying homage to more modest, “meaningful” movies like “Frost/Nixon” and “Slumdog Millionaire.” We must accept this as we accept that April comes after March.
But ultimately, for Hollywood to be Hollywood, the Academy must reward the “Titanic,” the “Schindlers List.”
And so the Oscars achieve their true potential only when they’re dominated by movies huge in scale but that boil down to comic-book simplicity: A big boat sinks. A good guy tries to stop a bad guy.
This year, of course, we had a good guy trying to stop a bad guy – “Dark Knight” – and it didn’t make the Best Picture cut. Instead the best bet is a kitchen-sink Bollywood charmer. “Slumdog” may have an uplifting romance on its side, but the TV-watching public will not be fooled. Its DNA is depresso-British, not gleaming Hollywood monumentalism.
And then we have the more serious predicament facing the Oscars, the show’s equivalent of global warming: The Oscars show has come to rely on our fascination with celebrity to power its engine, and that is a fast-diminishing resource.
Big Movie years will come again, but never again will the Oscars provide a thrilling, once-a-year-only unmediated peek into the lives of Hollywood royalty.
Back when the likes of Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway reigned over the event, the Oscars were the pinnacle of celebrity culture – not that such a concept had even been invented yet.
Now we have armies of prying, sanctimonious celebrity magazine editors who revel in exposing stars’ foibles and creating insta-narratives out of their everyday ups and downs.
We have thuggish teams of paparazzi to provide the anywhere-any-time photographic goods. We have obsessive, lightning-fast bloggers who live to express their instantly formed opinions on celebrities’ choices in fashion and romance. When don’t we see Hollywood unmediated?
It just may be that the “celebrities without makeup” movement killed the Oscars.
