LIVE OSCAR BLOGGING! — Just set the TiVo to record tonight's Oscarcast. On first generation TiVos, this was a problem because if the schedule said a show was three hours, that's how long TiVo would record. Now, you can pad, and I padded this recording by an hour. I don't expect it to run that long but in years past, I padded 20 or 30 minutes and it sometimes wasn't enough.
As I recall, the last few Oscar shows have come in relatively close to the announced three hours. It seems like we've moved past the day when the producers would say it would last that long, knowing full well it would be more like four. A theory used to exist in the teevee business that it was preferable to lie about the length of shows that ran late at night. One local Los Angeles station used to run a late movie that started at 11:00 PM and they always claimed "90 minutes" in the TV listing even though the movie, after commercial insertions, was always going to be an hour longer than that. (And the station knew it. If you looked closely, the start time of the next program was always around 1:30 AM.) The idea here was that you'd be less inclined to tune in the broadcast if you knew in advance you wouldn't be getting to bed 'til 1:30.
The Oscars have this problem that they have to be live. This means programming for the West Coast and East Coast. When they were Monday night, the network and producers didn't want to start the show any earlier than 6 PM in the West because people would be coming home from work. This meant 9 PM in the East. Which meant that for folks on the right coast, it would mean staying up well past Midnight…some years close to 1 AM. So they'd lie and say it would be three hours when they knew it would be four. They figured that though Eastern viewers might get annoyed at not being able to go beddy-bye by 12, they weren't about to tune out then and miss the big awards. A few years back, the ceremony was moved to Sunday. Since fewer people work on Sunday, it seemed possible to start the show at 5:30 Pacific Time, giving them an 8:30 start in the East.
One thing to remember is that the Oscar broadcast really doesn't run long in the sense that its producers thought it was going to be a lot shorter. Most of it is rehearsed and timed…everything except the acceptance speeches, which are usually limited in time. Even if everyone rambled an extra minute, that wouldn't add an hour to the show. If they say it's going to run three and it's 45 minutes longer than that, it's because they decided to let it run long.