I didn't pay a lot of attention to the Oscars this year…and as far as I can tell, neither did anyone else. As I think we discussed here, the nominees turned out to be a lot of folks and films that might have achieved excellence but didn't generate the kind of emotional moments and issues where we really cared who or what won. To me, the biggest surprise of the evening was that they included Dabbs Greer in the "In Memoriam" montage and left out Joey Bishop. Jon Stewart, I thought, did an okay job of hosting, meaning he got some laughs and never really slowed up the proceedings. The clips from old Oscar telecasts were nice but there were times when you got the feeling someone had said, "Hmmm…we'd better remind the world what it was like to care about this event."
At least, those were my impressions after leapfrogging through the entire show in under an hour via TiVo. If you sat through every blessed minute of it, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Someone wrote to ask me what I'd do to make the Oscars interesting. Here's another one of Evanier's free brilliant ideas that no one will ever do: Leave the show exactly as it is but telecast an alternate version. Over on the ABC Family channel or some other network, run the exact same show with a live commentary track. Get together a couple of comedians — Kathy Griffin, for sure…maybe Lewis Black or Gilbert Gottfried…maybe four or five of them. Get someone who can make catty remarks about the gowns but who isn't Joan Rivers or Mr. Blackwell. Get someone like Leonard Maltin…no, on second thought, get Leonard Maltin. You need to have at least one person in this who knows about and cares about movies. Then let these people heckle the Academy Awards…or they can comment, annotate, discuss, whatever. So it's like you're watching the telecast at a real great party full of witty people.
Viewers who don't want their Academy Awards despoiled could watch the regular broadcast. Those who don't wish to see that — and they were not few in number this year — could switch over and watch the party version. I suspect there'd be a lot of them. In fact, let's find out with another one of our frighteningly unscientific polls. This one closes in one week…
