This news report from Reuters makes the same mistake that a lot of news reports make every year about the Oscars…
Maverick director Michael Moore, director of the documentary "Bowling for Columbine," issued the bluntest denunciation of the war against Iraq from the winner's podium before an estimated audience worldwide of 1 billion people.
No, they did not have a billion people watching…not even close to a billion people. This is one of the great myths of the Academy Awards. (Another is that everyone votes with one, easily-explainable viewpoint; i.e., "Everyone voted for Roman Polanski because they want him to return to Hollywood," or whatever. You'll read lots of things like that in the days to come.) But no, the billion people figure is ridiculous.
While I'm at it, three people have e-mailed me to ask where they could find the exact text of what Moore said. Here it is…
Whoa. On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan from Canada, I'd like to thank the Academy for this. I have invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and we would like to — they're here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it's the fiction of duct tape or fiction of orange alerts we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. And any time you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up. Thank you very much.
Also: I checked the end-credits of the Oscars and someone was listed as being in charge of the seat-fillers. I saw enough empty seats to conclude that either they changed their mind at the last minute and didn't use them, at least to the extent they usually have, or whoever was in charge of dispatching them did a poor job.
Dave Barry, the syndicated humorist, was among the writers of Steve Martin's material this year. Here's an article he wrote about the experience.
Here's something I'm amazed everyone in show business doesn't know: When you introduce someone and you mention their name, audiences often applaud. If you say it in the middle of a sentence, you usually get interrupted by at least a partial ovation, and you muddy the moment. Some folks out there won't know if they should stop clapping so they can hear the rest of your sentence, or if this is the wrong moment, so you get that kind of hesitant "we're not sure" clapping. If you're introducing, say, Peter O'Toole, put his name at the end of a sentence, if not the entire speech. Give the audience a clean applause cue.
One other observation and then I have actual work to do. I thought the audience shots were very sloppy this year, especially during Mr. Martin's monologue. Now, getting shots of celebs in the audience is not as easy as one might think. The movements of the cameras are very carefully planned and rehearsed so that every camera is in the right place at the right time, and so the cameraguys don't get into each others' shots. Still, the director usually has the monologue a day or two in advance and since they know where all the biggies will be sitting, they can actually practice getting a camera positioned to shoot each star as he or she is getting mentioned. This year, of course, there was some question as to whether certain people were going to show, but I'm wondering if there wasn't some other security-related tech problem at work. The cuts to the folks in the audience all seemed unnatural, and not because 75% of them were to Martin Scorsese and Richard Gere.
Okay, back to a deadline…