THB #682: 1 Hour After Oscar

The telecast of The 79th Oscars was like drunk, mediocre sex… still felt pretty good… but not really thrilling or memorable.

The core problem remains that the producers of the show don’t have as much of a connection to movies as the Oscar nominees and winners. You know who said more for movies than the entire produced show tonight? Sean Baker… reading off a piece of paper. He’s not completely right about how things work, but his passion is much needed, both for indies and major studios.

Meanwhile, the opening of the show told you everything. The tribute to Los Angeles was not a particularly focused or poignant piece of editing. And then we got a 6 minutes ad for Wicked: For Good.

It’s not that listening to Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo isn’t fun or pleasurable. Clearly, the live audience enjoyed it. But neither Somewhere Over The Rainbow (from The Wizard of Oz) or Home (from The Wiz) had anything to do with what has happened in Los Angeles or with the Oscars themselves, at least not since 85 years ago. (And it’s not because I didn’t know Home… I was lucky enough to see the show on Broadway and had the Cast Album on vinyl and know every lyric of that show. Stephanie Mills and Ted Ross for the win!)

Then they just did the big song from Wicked… hit that giant note!!!

If the concert show was a big audience draw, then The Grammys would be much bigger than The Oscars. But they are not. Oscar producers keep making this mistake.

And now we are 8 minutes into the Oscars without really addressing The Oscars or movies, really, at all.

Then we got a Substance tape piece, that they must have hoped Jimmy Kimmel would do in the Demi Moore role… still funny, but…

Then “4-time Oscar viewer” Conan comes out and tells a bunch of jokes about himself. And when he finally gets to the awards, his first joke is about Netflix and their price increases. Not a bad joke. But what are we doing at this show?

Now we’re 12 minutes in. Conan does a nice job with his monologue. The only killer joke is about Karla Sofia Gascon. Lithgow being slightly disappointed is funny. There was an Amazon delivery joke. We get a cameo by Adam Sandler in shorts and a hoodie that kinda seemed to want to but didn’t really reference Volodymyr Zelenskyy at teh White House. Laughs… but nothing that will stick.

And then, at the 23-minute mark, a surprisingly ineffective 2-minute monologue chunk about the power of movies and the the fires not stopping The Oscars that would have been so much better achieved with an edited package.

Then, Conan wrapped up with the “I won’t waste time” song that was a complete waste of 2 minutes of air time.

For some reason, the producers decided to drop the tradition of the winner of the last year’s acting award presenting to the winner of the opposite gender. Last year, they tried something even more weird. Apparently, they think it’s a good idea. Why?

When Robert Downey, Jr did the set-up for Supporting Actor, he did this not-very-good thing where he honored each nominee like it was an apology for not delivering on the idea of 5 Oscar winners honoring each acting nominee. At first, it just seemed like he was calling out a particular nominee. But no… it was a bit. And it stops sounding sincere about halfway through.

This concept was even worse for the wonderful Da’vine Joy Randolph, who we couldn’t pretend she actually seen all the films, much less had anything to say about these performances. “You are pure magic.” Oy. Maybe she did see and love all the work. But ohmigod, there was so much baby oil, it felt like a Diddy party.

Cillian Murphy and Emma Stone were spared having to do this mess, probably because time was tight by the time they gave their awards out to Best Actor and Actress.

Again… can you really complain? Is it really BAD? No. But it’s really not good.

The first Best Picture package, for A Complete Unknown, come on. Less than a minute. Not really the best package… not terrible, but not evocative. And less than a minute. So now, we know that the 10 Best Pictures will get less than 10 minutes of television time across the length of this 210 minute scheduled show. How is this a love affair with the movies? How is this honoring the work that scores of millions and more than half a year has been invested in getting to this night? How could anyone who had ever seen an ad for these films have been any more impacted by these brief choppy clip packages than they have already been?

I’m not going to go through the entire show, bit by bit. Just the first hour. Andrew Garfield’s sincerity didn’t really play with Goldie Hawn, but the duo (Shirin Sohani and Hossein Molayemi) who won for Animated Short completely screwing up was truly charming.

At 53 minutes, we get 5 actors from the movies that were nominated for Costume Design honoring each of their film’s Costume Designers. But it was, as it can be, weirdly too personal. Lovely actors, but not experts in the category. Nor were they Oscar winners, as per the original Bill Condon idea. They we just actors who loved their costumes. (Insert tasteless joke about Lili Depp’s nipples being her primary costume in Nosferatu.)

Again, the love of movies would be so much more interestingly served by experts in the same arena, preferably Oscar winners, perhaps supported by some tape pieces and not just one example behind the honor-ors. What does a costume designer do? What is the job? How big is the department on a movie like Wicked? So much can be explained in just seconds. What about mixing up the presenters… have an actor if it fits and a director and a production designer who has to match their work with the Costume department, etc? There is no reason it needs to feel so artificial.

Of course, the thing that people actually love about Oscar are the speeches… top professionals expressing their love and passion and joy.

And it was a good night for speeches. Kieran Culkin had his best outing. Sean Baker did it perfectly… 4 times. Paul Tazewell brought his passion. Peter Straughan started boring, but closed strong. The co-directors of No Other Land, a doc I think is better as a symbol than as a film and has become “the righteous vote,” gave a shared speech that was powerful.

There really wasn’t a cringe speech moment in the whole show. A couple of winners went on a little too long, but not long enough that they needed to play them off… which they started doing anyway around the beginning of the third hour, as time tightened… which kind of sucked. Literally 2 minutes more of patience spread across the entire show around would have meant not playing anyone off tonight.

Jacques Audiard got his first Oscar and he chose not to speak ahead of the songwriters he worked with for his movie. Was he in a little bit of shock? He even told them it was time to go.

Why is there a thing about the 20th anniversary of Kill Bill AND Tarantino presenting Best Director? Pick one.

The CinemaStreams pre-tape was funny and relevant.

Ben Stiller was funny.

I have very mixed feelings about the In Memorium. I wanted more of Hackman. And they did make the effort to give him his own space, so I have to respect that. But a 90-second clip package could have been epic and should have been part of Morgan Freeman’s package.

Once we got into the bigger package, it was a little shocking how many big names we lost this year. And not just actors. Losing Jon Landau meant losing the producer - the very real producer - of 3 of the 4 biggest grossers of all time. He was not just any producer.

The Amadeus chorus was a bit much. I think I liked it better than some pop star singing some sad song and the camera wanting to go back to the pop star… so there is that. But I was kind of waiting for Tom Hulce to drop dead while writing down the last notes of a symphony. It was heavy. Kinda made it hard to laugh at the jokes, like the delightful Teri Garr.

And they didn’t include the late, great Chris Pula, which kinda sucked. There was an effort made by old school New Liners to get him in, but my guess is that it was too late. This whole show seemed to have a “we locked it down in January” feel.

The curtain dropping over Shelley Duvall’s head as she rises in the shot got a laugh out of me that I assume was unwanted. But still… it basically worked.

But that doesn’t mean there were not time wasters.

The Bond Tribute shown above was 3 whole years ago. Why did we need another one this year? Why did we need Margaret Qualley dancing or “Lisa” singing for Paul McCartney or Doja Cat trying to (and failing to) keep up with Shirley Bassey or Raye trying to reproduce the experience of Adele? Great segment for American Idol… but it had no business sucking up more than 6 minutes of the Oscar show when there hasn’t been a Bond movie in 4 years and there is unlikely to be another one for at least 3 more years.

The sand worm from Dune wasn’t as funny as their popcorn bucket the first time or the second.

I love Quincy Jones as much as anyone, but a real tribute to him would not be singing a song that was in a movie in which he oversaw the music for but that had not changed at all from the Broadway show that he had nothing to do with. Let the orchestra rock what he brought to the movies over and over… fantastic jazzy scores… memorable aural moments. I like Queen Latifah a lot. But it was a non-event. And the Whoopi/Oprah reunion had no weight because going a week without seeing them both in any given week is about as rare as February 29. Six minutes and it really didn’t leave a mark.

Overall… it was… good. Not great. Not special. Certainly not game changing.

But nothing hurt. Nothing made me roll my eyes in disbelief. I never felt like the show wasn’t moving along at a reasonable pace.

And even though my personal taste doesn’t match some of the choices, I am not remotely upset about any of the choices. Would I have liked to have seen this or that? Sure. But it is a long journey and it is complicated and people slide this way and that and the flavor of the stew changes.

I mean, this is the line of “precursors” for Anora…

They won all the bolded ones. Pretty sweeping result.

Yes, there were a lot of feelings about a lot of movies out there. But 6 of 8 is hard to argue with… even if the “I can figure it out only with math” idiocy agrees. As it turned out, being right picking Oscar this year… not such a feat if you were willing to just go with the favorites.

It could have gone some other way. But it didn’t.

Anora became the movie that was most liked overall. It wasn’t just the international vote. And the low box office movie winning is, in spite of some terrible reporting out there, anything new. It’s not been 16 years with the expanded Best Picture race… and this is the 14th time one of the 3 top box office movies failed to win… the 15th in which the Top 2 failed. When the expansion happened, voters stopped prioritizing box office (they had chosen 1 of the Top 2 for 29 of the last 30 years)… when it was still mostly old white men, before Project 2020, and before the international membership explosion. So stop focusing on the biggest obvious change when the change predated it by years.

We can and will have a long conversation about what is still very wrong with Oscar… but not tonight. This is just about the show. And it was fine.

It’s like they need someone who really cares about movies first and above all to just give a gentle shove in one direction or another now and again. It doesn’t feel like that person is there. And it is the downside of hiring producers who are better at making TV than protecting the core of what the show is about… it’s the only clear advantage of having working movie producers produce the show.

But still… it was fine.

Until tomorrow…