Cultural Differences

Some clever dialogue from last week's episode of Justified, one of my new favorite shows:

Marshall: Do you know where I'm from, asshole?

Bank robber: No.

Marshall: Harlan County.

Bank Robber: So?

Marshall: Down there we know the difference between dynamite and road flares.

The marshall then punches the bank robber.

The Big Show? The Big Sleep

I have been watching the annual Oscar telecast since at least the mid 1970s. (Before then, I was too young and would fall asleep before the show began in Mississippi. Damn those different time zones!) I think I've seen enough of them by now to have a sense when one is incredibly bland and predictable and, well, beige (to use a term from an episode of Will & Grace). I know it's been two days already since we found out this year's winners, but I do have a few random thoughts I wanted to share.

First, when did the Academy members decide to stop picking the winners for these awards for themselves and just slavishly follow whatever choices the various guilds (Screen Actors, Writers, Producers, Directors, etc.) have already made? There was a time in the past when you could expect a surprise or two before the evening was through. No longer. I can't recall the last time the Oscar voters picked someone who hadn't already been "vetted" by the guilds and by the hundreds of awards shows that have sprung up over the years. Every one of those other, usually lesser shows claims to be an accurate predictor of Oscar winners, but really, by the time the Academy Awards roll around, the winners have been so consistent that there is little chance of an "upset" despite all prognostications to the contrary. Boring.

I'm not necessarily complaining about any of the choices. The King's Speech, Colin Firth, Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, Melissa Leo--all were fine selections, really. It's just that all five of them have been given numerous awards in the past couple of months. Surely, there was room for Annette Bening or Amy Adams or even Geoffrey Rush to pick up an award or two here and there so that we could have more suspense coming into the (hopefully) final ceremony of the awards season.

I am not going to spend a great deal of time complaining about this year's co-hosts, James Franco and Anne Hathaway. Frankly, I thought Hathaway was a game participant, and I would love to see her cast in a musical and soon. She is charming and beautiful, and she can wear almost anything and make it look stunning, and she can sing and dance too. She had, though, no help from the script this year. It was all pretty lame. And Franco just seemed completely out of sorts. Maybe live television just isn't his forte, but he just didn't seem to be all that interested in punching up his line readings. I liked some of the opening stuff, where the two of them were "inserted" into different movies from the past year, but otherwise, I could have done without either of them.

In fact, I don't really know why we have a host for a show like this anyway. They don't introduce all of the segments or all of the presenters. They really just seem to eat up time that could be better spent, you know, handing out awards and letting people thank whomever they want without the orchestra drowning them out. I have never liked that musical "playing them off." Whoever invented it needs to be punished. Maybe we can have an orchestra play them off early when it's time for them to die so they can see how it feels. The show isn't really about the hosts. It's about who wins, and why can't the winners have a little more time to say whatever they want to say rather than have us cut back to two hosts chatting about someone in the audience?

Or, worse yet, why do we have to drag out a popular host from the past, Billy Crystal, to make things worse. He got a couple of minutes on Sunday to do some shtick, but Aaron Sorkin has to leave after his few allotted seconds are done. Cue music. Someone's priorities are horribly misplaced. Then, to add insult to injury, Crystal introduces a segment about another popular host, Bob Hope, so that the ceremony can grind to a halt while we listen to a tape from the 1950s. What was the point again? Even a dead host seems to get more time than the winner of Best Live Action Short, and that guy, whose hair deserves an award of its own somehow, needed and should have received more time. And a coupon for a haircut. I'm sure his mother would approve now that she's already helped his career by serving as the craft services person on his short film.

I know that Franco and Hathaway were allegedly chosen because they would appeal to a younger demographic. The two of them even joked about it at the start of the ceremony. But the powers-that-be should realize at some point that young people don't really care about the Oscars. They don't tend to go see movies like Winter's Bone or The King's Speech--at least until after the awards have been handed out and they're curious as to what they've missed. It's middle-aged and older people (and some of the younger ones in the industry) who pay attention to these awards shows. Oh, sure, eventually they'll get around to renting or downloading (or "whatever") a copy of 127 Hours, but given the low box office for many of the nominees, the youth aren't flocking to the theaters to see films of reputed high quality.

By the way, where were last year's winners for Best Supporting Actor...excuse me, Best Actor in a Supporting Role and Best Actress in a Supporting Role, Christoph Waltz and Mo'Nique? Instead we get Kirk Douglas and Reese Witherspoon. Douglas' appearance was just depressing to me. It went on for too long and just made me miss the vital, powerful actor he was in his prime. And, as nice as it was to see Witherspoon again, I would have much preferred keeping the format from the last couple of years when five previous winners announced the nominees in the acting categories. I enjoyed seeing some of the great names from the past, but I guess we wanted to streamline the process so that there would be more time for clips of movies that had won the Oscar dozens of years ago (or even longer).

Speaking of which, I never really quite figured out why we had those moments from Gone with the Wind and Titantic and the others. I know the Academy was paying some sort of tribute to its past, but the link was pretty flimsy each time, and those moments just detracted from the award that was being handed out at the time. If you want to talk about film technique, why not use the nominees in the category instead? I also never quite understood why some of the awards were paired up. Cinematography and Art Direction, for example, or Music and the various sound awards? (True confession: I still don't think I know the difference between sound mixing and sound editing, but I'm happy that a few more people have that gold statuette on the mantel now.) It just seems odd to me. Was it a matter of having fewer presenters or did the producers think that the connections between the awards would be more apparent?

Since I've already wondered, in a way, what the producers were thinking, I have to talk about the montage of this year's ten nominees for Best Picture. Whose idea was it to use dialogue from The King's Speech throughout? The other films had dialogue as well. They even had scripts and words and actors to speak them. Instead, even before the winner was announced, the audience was given the impression that The King's Speech was the only one worthy of having its words delivered on air--and by a stuttering man as well. I found it tacky and disrespectful to the other nominees and all of the people who had worked on them.

I did enjoy listening to the nominees for Best Song being sung, for the most part, by those who originally performed the songs in the movies. How else would I know that Zachary Levi actually has a lovely singing voice? Or that Florence of Florence and the Machine is a very intriguing substitute for Dido? I didn't particularly care for any of the songs, but it was at least respectful to allow the original artists to sing this year rather than have someone younger and allegedly hotter (in most senses of that word) to take over instead.

Finally, I'd like to talk about the children from P.S. 22 who arrived on stage at the end of the awards to sing "Over the Rainbow" (with images of the Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz behind them, no less). As charming and adorable and talented as these kids are, the show's over. No one needs to have another five minutes of a show that's already gone on way past the time that it has been allotted. After Best Picture has been announced--by Steven Spielberg yet again, yawn--we just want to change channels to find something else to watch.

I'm not one of those people who claim they'll never watch the show again. Harumph. No, I'll be back next year and the year after that too. I still find the Oscars a fascinating spectacle, and I still wonder each year who will win. I don't really know how to "fix" the awards show, to be honest, and I'm sure that plenty of other people have given all of the advice and suggestions in the past two days that the producers needed but probably didn't want to hear. I'm just disappointed, yes, again, with the fact that Hollywood, the so-called "dream factory," cannot do a better job with its own annual ceremony.