I heard there was an Oscar broadcast last night, but when looking back on the evening, it seemed that there was less of an awards show and more of an attempt to draw in a younger, hipper audience to the annual event, which was mocked at least three times in the first half –hour by hosts Anne Hathaway and James Franco, who welcomed us to the “younger, hipper” Academy Awards.
And, maybe this was the shtick the Academy was going for, playing off of the snarkiness and sarcastic tone of the younger generation, but the train wreck begins when the snarkiness is scripted, rendering this awards show like many others: predictable in awards and gimmicks, resulting in more boredom than entertainment.
Predictability in Awards hardly bothers me now unless the show runs over four hours. As Anthony Lane has suggested, “people who seriously expect movies to be original should find themselves another art form,” and he has a fine point here. Many of the movies we are surrounded by are derivative, and the challenge is to convey the content in some variation of a variation of a variation. In the same vein, the Academy Awards is a rat looking for a food pellet in a maze while avoiding being zapped by a phony feeder bar.
The pellet for all of these shows is ratings: do people tune in? If so, they are satiated, and despite some of the terrible shows in recent memory, people keep watching. Despite the running times that fluctuate from 180 minutes to 269 minutes, people keep watching. In a sense, it can be likened to NASCAR: there’s a high percentage of a wreck, but if not, the finish could be close.
Who could turn away last night while watching the uncomfortable juxtaposition of Hathaway’s over-exuberance with Franco’s uncomfortable – and seemingly unprepared – dopey-straight man performance. Perhaps they were both just performing and went a tad overboard; on the other hand, Hathaway is an actress who took a role in Havoc, one in which she stripped naked a handful of times, just to shatter the Disney image procured through The Princess Diaries. She wants to belong, and she wants to stand on that stage with her very own Oscar, so perhaps her quandary of when nakedness stopped equaling a nomination is more truthful than tongue-in-cheek, though it certainly came off as scripted.
And perhaps Franco, who has been magnificent in a number of films including this year’s 127 Hours and Howl, wasn’t acting so much as showing how indifferent most of us are to who hosts the Oscars. What more could you expect from a guy who spends his days on General Hospital, his nights on a full course load at Yale, and the rest of his time rumored to be producing adaptations of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying? The Academy might have been driven to use Franco because of his current hot streak in Hollywood, but what else could they have expected?
It seems evident that they expected little more from their hosts than to move the show along, particularly in the decision to put Hathaway in a tux to slander Hugh Jackman (Why did he get so much flack last night?), which leads to the predictable emergence of Franco in a dress. Cross dressing can be funny, but please see my previous post about why this was not. The same can be said for Kirk Douglas announcing the Best Supporting Actress Award. Kirk Douglas deserves the respect any storied actor does, but that segment might have been the most uncomfortable scene in recent memory – ranking right up there with the last few Rocking New Years Eves where Dick Clark delivers the coda through the side of his mouth. It’s noble to think “once a performer, always a performer,” but both inclusions border on embarrassment and humiliation – kind of like asking Muhammad Ali to announce “Let’s get ready to rumble!”
It is wonderful that Douglas is still mentally sharp and has a sense of humor – one of the funnier parts of the broadcast was certainly his recurrent pregnant pauses before Melissa Leo became catatonic and then tourretic on stage – but most of his appearance was scripted, which is evident when the suited stage hand took his cane and held it on the bottom — an awkwardly shot moment because no one would hold a cane as such – which prompted Douglas to enter into a hand-over-hand competition to see who wins the cane.
In the end, the Academy favorite won the award for Best Picture, Firth took last year’s Best Actor award home this year, Christopher Nolan remained shut out, as did David Fincher who – if not Aronofsky – deserved the Best Director Award. Therefore, regardless of who hosts the Oscars, the predictability is constant, and perhaps instead of moving to a younger, hipper audience, the Academy is going for the indifferent kind.
