Monthly Archives: March 2006

The fine comedy writer Ken Levine agrees with me about Jon Stewart.

A lovely human being named Bridget Holloman was found dead in her apartment this afternoon, having apparently died in her sleep a day or two ago. The cause of death is not yet known but she had been complaining to friends of headaches for a week or so.

Bridget was an actress, a model, a dancer, a choreographer, a make-up expert, a magician's assistant, a teacher of dance and exercise, and a businesswoman. In this last profession, she opened and operated an antique clothing business, exhibiting at Los Angeles fashion expos. She had also costumed and done make-up for hundreds of films, commercials and print campaigns.

Bridget hailed from Albuquerque, New Mexico where her mother — the acclaimed choreographer, Suzanne Moore Johnston — is the known center of the dance world. Bridget moved to Los Angeles in 1975 where she was immediately cast in Slumber Party '57, a dreadful teen comedy that is remembered only because its cast also included a then-unknown Debra Winger. She worked often as a dancer, often on the variety shows of Sid and Marty Krofft, which is where I met her, and racked up dozens of TV and movie roles and commercials. She had recurring roles on Days of Our Lives and a short-lived Tim Conway sitcom called Ace Crawford, Private Eye, and was seen in The Goodbye Girl, Stoogemania, Evils of the Night and about a half-dozen other films. For about two years, she had to dye her lovely blonde hair to red as she appeared in a series of print ads and commercials for Nexxus Hair Care products.

She was an industrious, talented lady who, in all the years I knew her, never had a mean or selfish thought about anyone or anything. Tonight, everyone who knew her is stunned and shocked and wondering aloud why someone like that has to die so young. Especially when so many more deserving candidates walk the planet.

A friend of mine who attended the Academy Awards sent the following note and asked me to post it here…

Right on that one difference between Ebert's review of Jon Stewart and Tom Shales', beyond the fact that Shales has never known what he's talking about, is that Ebert was there. Most people who were there loved Stewart. He got plenty of laughs, certainly more than Steve Martin the last time he hosted. If it didn't sound that way at home, that's not his fault. I watched a little of it on TiVo when I got home and the audience didn't seem as loud as it did if you were sitting there.

Also wrong to judge how a host is doing by the expressions of the stars sitting in the first ten rows. Those are people who are sitting there with cameras in their faces and they're nervous about being singled out and distracted because they have a lot riding on the evening. Where I sat, we were all howling at Stewart. They liked the monologues. They really liked the lines he did later in the show that seemed improvised because they were mostly commenting on things that had just happened and you should have heard some of the things that went on during the commercial breaks.

After reading some of the reviews that said no one was laughing, I went back and — also through the miracle of TiVo — watched Stewart's monologue again. People were laughing just fine at all but a joke or two, which is all you could ask for. But you're right that the audio on the audience could have been increased a bit.

I get the impression there was a slow bounceback on the laughter in the Kodak Theater. That's when the nature of the room, in part but not wholly due to its size, adds a fraction of a second delay to the time it takes the audience to hear the funny line and also to the time it takes the comedian to hear them laughing. When Victor Borge used to play large amphitheaters, he'd explain the problem to the audience — especially the folks way in the back — and ask them to please laugh a second or two before he said anything funny or it would throw off his timing.

My guess here is that when they sit down in a few months to discuss who'll host the 2007 Oscars, Jon Stewart will be among those considered. Steve Martin and Billy Crystal, if they'll do it, might be ahead of him but he'll be on the list. Unless some promising new contender emerges, we may well see Stewart again next year. Maybe they can crank up the audio on the audience for him.

If you know what's good for you, do not — I repeat — DO NOT click on this link.

Fred Kaplan thinks Bush gave away the farm in his nuclear pact with India.

The reviews might make you think there were two separate Oscar telecasts last night. Some folks, like Tom Shales, saw the one "hosted with a smug humorlessness by comic Jon Stewart, a sad and pale shadow of great hosts gone by." Others, like Roger Ebert, saw the one where…well, here. I'll quote him in a separate paragraph since he's the one I think is closer to right…

After all of the speculation about the selection of Stewart as a host, his performance deserves perhaps the highest tribute: He was as relaxed, amusing and at home as Johnny Carson. The assignment is his again in future years, and in one night he positioned himself as the likely heir of a major late-night network talk slot.

The above variance of opinion may represent more than the fact that Ebert has always been a far more perceptive critic than Shales. It may reflect the fact that Ebert was actually at the ceremony, seeing how Stewart went over with the live audience, whereas Shales was far, far away, pouting as he so often does that what was on his TV set failed to please Tom Shales. (Shales also thought that Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep must have taken "weeks" to master the banter they performed to introduce Robert Altman. These are two of the best actresses alive and I'll bet it took well under a half-hour.)

I think what some folks don't get is that the Oscars are the Oscars. The movies of '05 were not the kind that generated vast amounts of dramatic tension as to who'd win and who wouldn't. They were probably good films, by and large, but well before the ceremony, America didn't care that much if it was Reese Witherspoon or Felicity Huffman. Most people didn't see either of their films, nor was there any special reason to feel that one was so much more deserving than the other. And if the underlying show doesn't matter to us, there's only so much the host can do. I thought Jon Stewart did just fine.

Also this morning, a lot of people are asking if Brokeback Mountain was snubbed and if so, what does that mean? Was the Academy afraid of being seen as too Liberal or too gay? Did they flee from controversy or what?

The problem with these discussions is that there is zero data on how people ever vote or why. You can look at a race for governor and say that there was a swing of Hispanic voters in the 18-49 age bracket who identify health care as the most pressing issue. There's polling and there are studies and there are breakdowns of how different precincts voted. About the Oscar voting, there is darn near nothing. If I declare that people voted for the films they viewed on weekends and passed over the ones they caught on weekdays, there isn't a shred of empirical evidence to argue against me. It's also highly unlikely that there was any one reason for how everyone voted.

It may be that some people thought Brokeback Mountain, whatever its merits, has received enough attention and that Crash had gone unfairly unnoticed. It may be that the local campaign for Crash — they mailed a DVD to just about everyone in Hollywood — paid off. It may be that all the Academy voters this year played Rock/Paper/Scissors to determine their votes and all across Southern California, Scissors won. It may be that…oh, just make up any silly reason. No one can prove it's wrong. Maybe Brokeback lost in certain categories by a single vote because one guy just plain didn't like the movie as much as he liked some others…or see it.

These are the Oscars, people. They matter to agents and actors and technicians and people in the movie industry whose incomes are pegged to how many tickets or DVDs get sold. They shouldn't matter that much to anyone else. I wish some of my friends spent less time caring about who wins Best Supporting Actor and more time worrying about who wins President of the United States of America. Personally, I think we'd be better off in both cases with Paul Giamatti.

I am informed by several folks that the Academy has a February 1 cut-off for each year's "In Memoriam" reel. I'm not sure how long they've had this, and I suspect they'd violate it for a big enough star. But that's the reason Don Knotts, Darren McGavin and Jack Wild weren't in this year's montage. As I look over the list of movie people who passed away during the applicable period, I don't see any glaring omissions.

The management of this website apologizes to anyone who was induced to watch tonight's Jimmy Kimmel Live thinking that Jon Stewart would actually be appearing live on it. Turned out, he was in a pre-taped bit of no visible humor.

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.

I wrote a little while ago that I liked that Jon Stewart wasn't acting like the evening was all about him. I haven't changed my mind about that but I also have what may seem like an opposing thought. The problem with the guy as Oscar Host is that he isn't a big star, at least in this context, and doesn't act like one. His low-key style is refreshing in some ways but it diminishes the event in others. Hosts like Bob Hope, Johnny Carson and Steve Martin brought an air of importance to their intros. Stewart's just a guy out there being funny and keeping it moving during his limited moments on stage. I think it's a good job but it's a quiet good job, the kind that probably won't be appreciated by a lot of people.

The "In Memoriam" montage seemed too short to me…and not just because they didn't make the effort to include Don Knotts and Darren McGavin. Weren't there a lot of people who should have been in there and weren't?

By the way: I started watching the Oscars an hour after most of you. I've been using the Fast Forward button on the TiVo and also the 30 Second Skip feature, and now I've caught up with real time. I don't think I've missed a thing.

Jon Stewart's doing fine. It's a tough room…big, cold, impersonal and full of people who really aren't there to watch a show. I like that he kept the monologue short and he isn't acting like this is An Evening With Jon Stewart.

Great to see Lauren Bacall there. I really think the Academy misses something by concentrating so totally on the current movie business. No viewers are going to tune out because of a couple of folks who represent bygone days. Okay, so she had trouble reading the prompter. She's still Lauren Bacall. What they need to do though is to connect the past and the present, and not just trot out a Lauren Bacall to introduce old clips.

And hey, wasn't that Stephen Colbert announcing those fake actress political commercials?

A painful Hollywood memory from Larry Gelbart. It's on the L.A. Times site so some of you may have to register. Too bad.

Jimmy Kimmel is doing a live post-Oscar show tonight. Ordinarily, his show comes from the El Capitan Entertainment Center, which is across the street from the Kodak Theater where the Academy Awards are being distributed. Tonight, the traffic and security for blocks around will be insane so Kimmel's program is emanating from the El Portal Theater. That's in North Hollywood, something like eight miles away.

Some listings say that Jon Stewart will be among his guests but the website for Jimmy Kimmel Live makes no mention of Stewart. I'm guessing that if he's on, it'll be a brief remote. I can't imagine the Oscar host completing the most important performance of his career and then instead of going to the parties or being with his loved ones or collapsing, getting in a car and fighting the world's biggest traffic jam to get to North Hollywood in time for another live broadcast. But even as a short remote interview, it might be worth watching.

By the way: Is Jimmy Kimmel Live actually done live every night? All of it? I see by their ticket page that studio audiences have to be to the regular telecasts at 6:15 PM. The show airs on the East Coast at 12:06 AM Eastern time, which is 9:06 PM out here. If it's live, people have to get there almost three hours before the show and wait that long. The website refers to it as "the first live nightly talk show in over 40 years," which I don't think it is. The Joan Rivers program on Fox was live for its first few months, at least. But that page on how you can attend the Kimmel show also refers to attending a "taping."

One of the possible disasters at the Oscars which has often been joked about but has never (they say) occurred is this: A presenter gets out there, opens the envelope and reads or announces the wrong name. There are rumors that a couple of the more unexpected winners have been crowned that way but it has never apparently happened.

There's a safety net set up to prevent this. The ballots are tallied by an accounting firm that is now called Price-Waterhouse-Cooper and there are two men on the premises from that firm. They travel to the Academy Awards via separate routes, each with a briefcase that contains a full set of the envelopes containing the winners' names. During the ceremony, one man is at stage left at the theater. One is at stage right. Presenters enter from both sides and when they do, they receive the envelope they'll be opening from the Price-Waterhouse-Cooper person on that side of the stage.

But the two accountants have another function. They've both memorized the full list of recipients and if a wrong name is read aloud, they're supposed to sound the alarm. There's some sort of code word for this. Near them always is a stage manager and if Jack Nicholson goes out there tonight and announces the wrong winner, the accountant will turn to the stage manager and give the code word. The stage manager will then relay this to the control room and then…

Well, no one outside the Oscarcast knows exactly what would happen but it's been planned and it's been rehearsed, just in case. My guess is that the orchestra leader would be told to stop the music and the host would be hurried out onto the stage to announce that a mistake had been made. The other Price-Waterhouse-Cooper man — the one who hadn't handed the envelope to the presenter — would open the one in his custody, make sure it had the correct name and then it would be hustled out to the host. But that's just my guess since it's never happened.

But it almost did one year…or so I was told by someone who worked on the broadcast. According to this person, a Very Famous Actor was presenting one of the most important Oscars. He was an older man and he got very confused and as a result, managed to announce the winner without opening the envelope.

His speech and the names of the nominees were on a TelePrompter but in rehearsals, he had trouble reading it. Just in case he needed it, he was provided with a card that had the five names. He had the card and the envelope in his hand as he entered.

When he got out to the podium, he found he couldn't read the prompter. Flustered and confused, he stumbled through his opening remarks from memory and then reached for the card with the nominees' names. As he did, he erred and instead of saying, "The nominees are…" he said, "The winner is…" Everyone assumed that he was forgetting to read the names of the nominees and had opened the envelope prematurely.

The nominees were listed on the card in alphabetical order and he read the first name there. The orchestra began playing the appropriate music. The winner jumped up and ran to the stage to accept. The Very Famous Actor, still a bit disoriented, assumed he'd done what he was supposed to do and stepped back.

The announced winner got to the stage and launched into his speech. He was a bit puzzled when he looked down and noticed that the envelope in his category was lying there on the podium, unopened. But he figured that since no one was stopping him, he must have won.

In the wings, a stage manager realized what had happened. Frantic, he turned to the accountant and asked who had won in that category. The accountant didn't see what his panic was all about. The winner was out there making his acceptance speech. By dumb luck, the victor in that category was the first name in alphabetical order.

Nothing was ever said, so as to not embarrass the Very Famous Actor. The Academy may even have been worried that some people would think the Oscar hadn't gone to the proper nominee and that they'd just gone along with it to avoid a nasty scene. But that's the only time I've ever heard of a glitch in the system and even that one turned out all right. I kinda hope that one of these days, some presenter actually does read the wrong name. I want to see what happens.

A few quick points about the Oscars…

A billion people are not watching. People who ought to know better keep saying this and it's never been close to true. Back in 2001 in this article, I debunked the claim. Since then, others have finally taken note — like this article in The New Yorker and this article on the website of The Los Angeles Times. As the second of these notes, the Super Bowl doesn't draw a billion viewers, either.

People shouldn't take the winners and losers too seriously, especially since we never hear vote totals. You may think it's an outrage that your favorite Sound Mixer didn't win…but maybe he only lost by one vote.

Not knowing the vote totals also make it difficult to infer any real trends among the voters. Supposing all the gay-themed nominees win tonight. That doesn't mean Hollywood went for gay-themed movies. They may have all won by one vote. Assuming the Academy voting reflects everyone in Hollywood is silly. It's like assuming everyone in America wanted George W. Bush as president in 2004.

One should also remember that the voters are not Hollywood and Hollywood is not the voters.

Never forget that one of the reasons a film or person gets nominated (or doesn't) for an Oscar has to do with when it's released. Each year in each category, the Academy nominates five. If there are three great movies, they nominate five for Best Picture. And if there are thirty great movies, they nominate five for Best Picture. Woody Allen's movie Match Point qualified for this round of Oscars by being released on December 28, 2005. If the distributor had delayed it a few days, the film would be in next year's contest and some writer who didn't get nominated would be up for Best Original Screenplay tonight. Getting nominated is not just a function how good you are. It also has a lot to do with when your film (and someone else's film) got released.

The ratings of this year's Oscars will tell us absolutely nothing about Jon Stewart's popularity since we have no way of knowing how this particular broadcast would have done with someone else hosting. A recent Harris Poll said that 84% of Americans say they don't tune in or not tune in because of the host and the rest were pretty much split of whether Stewart would make them more or less eager to watch. For the most part, people probably watch because they care about certain pictures or certain nominees. There don't seem to be great dramas hovering over these decisions this year.

Every year, I hear someone moan that the Oscar voters are out of touch with the American people because they don't honor the films and achievements that the country voted for at the box office. This is a stupid way to look at it. If that's all the Academy Awards should be about, they can save a lot of time: Just give the statuettes to the producer, director, stars and writer of whatever film had the highest gross in the past year. The awards are supposed to honor excellence, not popularity.

That said, one of the reasons we have things like the Academy Awards is because movie studios want them to boost business. Selling tickets is not irrelevant to the proceedings. It often seems like the voters want to reward the films that were made without obvious commercial appeal and to give those movies a bump. Awards are supposed to recognize courage and it doesn't take a lot of courage to make some of the high-grossing high-concept movies.

Lastly: Yes, the ceremony lasts a long time. It's supposed to last a long time. There a lot of very expensive commercials to air. If you don't like it, record the thing and watch it later with your Fast Forward button at the ready. Tonight during the telecast is a great time to go to that restaurant that's usually too damn crowded on Sunday evening. You might have a much better time that way.