You know what's changed about the Oscars for me over the years? I seem to remember a time when you watched because you figured something would happen that was special and spontaneous. Someone would have an emotional outburst. Someone would screw up beyond belief in front of the alleged "billion" people. Someone would say or do something outrageous. Some Oscar would go to someone that no one expected would win but everyone was very happy that they did. When I think back at the memorable moments of Academy Awards past, they're almost never things that were under the producers' control. (And of the few that were, they're still mostly surprises — surprise presenters, for instance.)
For the most part, the Oscars now seem so safe, so lacking in danger. I don't think there was a single win possible tonight that would have had the impact of Roman Polanski's award in 2003. I don't think there was a nominee whose win would have had the impact of George Burns in 1975 or Jack Palance in 1991. There was no one to cause trouble the way Marlon Brando or Vanessa Redgrave or Michael Moore did. (Did Jon Stewart even mention George W. Bush? I don't think so…at least, not directly.)
This is not so much a criticism as a realization. I was just thinking of Oscar moments I remember. One that comes to mind was in '77, I think, when Peter Finch won a posthumous Best Actor award for his performance in Network. A few years earlier, Marlon Brando had sent an Indian woman to decline his Godfather Oscar and deliver a speech. Because of that, the Academy had made a rule that if you weren't there to pick up (or even refuse) your Oscar, the person who accepted for you had to be a member of the Academy. So when Finch won, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky went to the stage and immediately said that the person who should be up there was Finch's widow. Breaking the rules but demonstrating his flair for drama, he called her to the stage. There, she delivered a touching, tearful speech that a lot of people probably still recall because, among other reasons, it wasn't about the movie business.
It's not just that nothing like that happened tonight. It's that nothing like that could have happened. Forget for a second who was actually nominated this year. Can anyone suggest any nomination that might have been made that could have yielded a big, emotional scene at the podium? Or us really cheering the way we cheered certain long overdue wins of the past?
One of the reasons for this is that the nature of Hollywood has changed. Here's a list of the men who won Best Actor in the seventies: George C. Scott, Gene Hackman, Marlon Brando, Jack Lemmon, Art Carney, Jack Nicholson, Peter Finch, Richard Dreyfuss, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman. What did those men have in common? Answer: They had a lot of history. Most were known for many film roles prior to the one for which they won. Philip Seymour Hoffman may well be in the same class as those men in terms of acting ability and he's certainly not a beginner. But I'll bet you most people can't name two movies he was in before Capote. He's not someone we've known a long time, admired in other films and felt was overdue for recognition. The same was true of the other Best Actor nominees this year — great actors but they weren't on most folks' radar screens before they did the roles for which they were nominated.
There's probably no way to change this kind of thing and maybe there's nothing wrong with it. Maybe what we need to do is to change our expectations of how interesting the Academy Awards telecast is going to be. I've stopped being shocked that the thing runs three and a half hours. I need to remind myself that apart from the opening sequence and maybe one or two awards, all it's going to be is a show where a lot of people you don't care about thank their families, co-workers and maybe an agent or two. And what the women are wearing matters more than anything else.