Wake me when it’s over. The Academy Awards not only went on and on last night, but went nowhere. They solved the writers’ strike to salvage this?
At least it wasn’t the writers’ fault. The producers and other ultimate decision-makers of this year’s Oscarcast made such brilliant choices as to kick off the night with the award for costume design -- excuse me, everybody knows you start with one of the supporting acting awards -- and went downhill from there. (For the record, it wasn’t till 45 minutes in that Spanish actor Javier Bardem won best supporting actor for “No Country for Old Men.”)
Even when they tried to do interesting things, they did them badly. The intercut clips of vintage winners’ reminiscences -- clearly a leftover from strike plans to fill time with anythingeverything -- were not only half-hearted, but half-brained. Barbra Streisand talks about the wild tie on the night she won for “Funny Girl,” and you don’t say whom she tied with? (Katharine Hepburn in 1968’s “The Lion in Winter.”) A montage of great on-stage Oscar moments builds to the climax of Charlie Chaplin getting his honorary award in 1972, and there’s no context, no mentioning his enormous impact on the industry in its infancy, and no backstory that he’d been run out of the country by the 1950s communist witchhunt and hadn’t set foot here in two decades? For that matter, there was no perspective given to Sidney Poitier remembering his historic 1963 win for “Lilies of the Field,” the first lead trophy for a black performer, in the heat of the civil rights movement.
This was an Oscars for the insiders, not movie fans. You had to know why you were watching what you were watching. And you had to have seen the nominated films, which this year were hardly big-time crowdpleasers. We can’t say host Jon Stewart and his writers didn’t warn us, kicking off the proceedings with a joke about nominating “psychopathic killer movies. Thank god for teen pregnancy” was the punchline of that (referencing best script winner “Juno”), which made clear what kind of night we were fated to suffer.
And then there was Jack Nicholson, the Oscarcast director’s great fallback, seen preening in sunglasses as a Hollywood “character” whose persona was cool, maybe, 25 years ago. Yet he’s still in the front row for no reason, in sunglasses for no reason, a joke target for the reason of laziness. (Do they not know that to a younger generation he just seems a dirty old man?) Please. Stop it. Stop it now.
The best moments were, pretty much the antithesis of I-am-hip Jack, the spontaneous, heartfelt ones. The honorary Oscar to 98-year-old production designer Robert Boyle, whose speech was a valentine to the art of movies, not the industry, also included a clip reel so wide-ranging as to be awe-inspiring -- from such 1940s classics as “Saboteur” through the ’60s suspenser “The Birds” on to John Wayne’s 1976 valedictory western “The Shootist” and up to the 1987 parody “Dragnet.“ Boyle was elegant, and eloquent. [At right: Boyle's work on "North by Northwest."]
Jon Stewart shone, too, when he became not a joke teller but an honest reactor. Clearly moved by the best song Oscar to Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (“Once”), he not only admired their excited humility (“Wow, that guy is so arrogant,” he deadpanned in wonder) but brought back Irglova after the commercial break to finish her acceptance speech cut off by the keep-it-moving orchestra.
But then it was almost another hour of filler -- documentary short subject, as time runs down? -- before the “biggies” of best actor, director, picture. Any time this Oscarcast seemed about to gain momentum, another wacky producers’ decision would strangle it. But then the year in movies pretty much did the same thing. Sorry, but Americans tend toward the parochial, and most movie fans are just not going to care about Englishman Daniel Day-Lewis (he beat George Clooney and Johnny Depp!) or France’s Marion Cotillard or Spain’s Bardem or Britain’s Tilda Swinton. Even the animated feature winner had a foreign name (“Ratatouille”).
Maybe next year. Wake me up for it.