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 Dev Patel and Freida Pinto, the young lovers from "Slumdog Millionaire," were present Sunday night to see their film win the Best Picture Oscar. |
New doubts arise about
the Oscars' future on TV
"SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE" WINS BEST PICTURE
and seven other Academy Awards
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Despite some very important improvements in the presentation of the annual Academy Awards telecast Sunday night, the venerable show still may be in serious trouble defending its status as television's top-rated awards show from now on.
I'll have more to say about that below, but first let's get to the major awards handed out at the 81st Annual Academy Awards show. Well, ho-hum; no surprises! Best Picture: "Slumdog Millionaire." Best Actress: Kate Winslet for "The Reader." Best Actor: Sean Penn for "Milk." Okay, call that one a mild surprise. Mickey Rourke was supposed to be the favorite for "The Wrestler," the role that saved his career from a liquidation sale. Best Supporting Actress: Penelope Cruz for "Vicky Cristina Barcelona." Best Supporting Actor: The late Heath Ledger for "The Dark Knight." Best Director: Danny Boyle for "Slumdog Millionaire."
And therein lies the No. 1 problem: Too many earlier awards shows had already picked most of these people for their awards. Try to arouse interest in a show with no surprises and you'll lose every time. And that's the main reason why the ratings have been slipping for the show that once drew nearly half of all people watching TV at the time.
But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, along with its network, ABC, this year mandated an overhaul in the program, trying to speed it up and make it more interesting. They brought in a new team of producers and experts to hypo nearly every possible department. And, by and large, it worked.
The biggest and best innovation was to have all the acting award nominees introduced by former Oscar winners in that category, each delivering a colorful spiel in place of the usual overexposed clips from their films. This obviously took considerable thought to bring the right 'introducer" together with the right nominee, but there was a big payoff--some true emotion showing on the faces of the nominees as they were praised and encouraged by peers in the acting trade who already had been there and sweated out whose name was in that envelope.
For instance, how perfect was it to have one of America's all-time best screen actors--two-time Oscar winner Robert DeNiro--introduce the iconoclastic Sean Penn? Each man is known for his full involvement in the characters he plays and for his outspoken ways on and off the set. They've even acted together before in "We're No Angels."
And when he accepted his Oscar--his second in the Best Actor category--Penn laughingly kidded his gnarly public image by thanking the Academy voters for appreciating him despite "how hard I make it for you to appreciate me."
Bless the new producers, also, for not honking a horn at Penn when he acknowledged the anti-gay protestors outside the Kodak auditorium in Los Angeles, where the awards ceremony took place, and scolded them and all who voted to make gay marriage illegal once more in California last year. (Penn, who's straight, plays the martyred gay mayor of San Francisco in "Milk.") Previous producers refused to permit any political messages by winners and had vowed to cut them off if they broke that rule. That's absurd. Letting these famous people be themselves is part of the attraction to viewers who need as many surprises as they can get to stay interested.
Other match-ups also were inspired: Halle Berry, surprise winner for the small, little-seen "Monster's Ball" in 2001, introduced Melissa Leo, Best Actress nominee for a similarly small independent film, "Frozen River." Another fine example: Adrien Brody, Best Actor winner in 2002 for "The Pianist," a European film from disgraced director Roman Polanski, introducing Richard Jenkins, the obscure supporting player elevated to leading man in the little seen "The Visitor."
But this can't be a very long-running proposition because there really aren't that many former winners to go around. Still, it was a refreshing shift away from the showing of clips that most of us will have seen already on the other awards shows. Only the Academy Awards could bring out the legendary stars for such a gimmick--as they did this year, rounding up the likes of Sophia Loren, Michael Douglas, Shirley MacLaine, Nicole Kidman, Joel Grey and Goldie Hawn, to name just a few.
Hugh Jackman, the first non-comic to host the Oscars in some years, was quite good, in my opinion. He's a versatile actor who can play a comic book superhero like Wolverine in the "X-Men" action films, a romantic Aussie drover in "Australia," then do a musical number in top hat and tails with Bayonce Knowles on the Oscar show and do it very efficiently. I was quite impressed and wouldn't mind seeing him host again.
Humor was in reasonably short supply Sunday night, but there were some very pleasant interludes, such as the pairing of Steve Martin with Tina Fey for presentation of the screenwriting awards. Both are clever writers and both veterans of "Saturday Night Live," so they have a lot in common. When Fey began to look longingly at Martin, he warned her, "Don't fall in love with me!" That was a magic moment, all right.
Far less amusing to me was seeing Ben Stiller in dark glasses and false beard, doing silly schtick with Natalie Portman during presentation of the cinematography awards. If he had looked longingly at Portman, she'd have been justified in spraying him with insectiside.
Jackman did a musical number at the start of the show that was supposed to pay tribute to the year's best films. The lyrics may have been funny, but I didn't hear many of them. That routine reminded me of how superior the similar numbers were back in the days when Billy Crystal was doing them.
However, a later number, a tribute to musicals choreographed by director Baz Luhrmann ("Moulin Rouge," "Strictly Ballroom"), was much more exciting and was the sort of flashy musical number the Oscars show has been missing for some years.
One re-invented annual event that really was blown by the new producton team was the tribute to stars and other creative people in the movie community who died during the past year. It was a good idea to have Queen Latifah sing "I'll Be Seeing You" while pictures of the deceased were shown on the screen, but the pictures were too small and started about halfway through the alphabet, leaving out several that only the live audience probably saw.
I think it's finally time to do something serious about two categories: The best foreign film award now routinely goes to a film nobody has seen yet. The flaw is in the nominating process, which allows the foreign nation to nominate the films it wants entered in competition--and they usually are seen only by the awards committee until one of them wins and goes into general release in America.
The Best Song category is also no longer worthy of the Oscars. Only three songs were nominated this year and two of them were Bollywood-style numbers from "Slumdog Millionaire" and the other an undistinguished tune from an animated film, "Wall-E." This is the ultimate low year for Best Song. The winner was "Jai Ho" from "Slumdog Millionaire," not something I expect to be humming while I work anytime soon.
Now, here are my thoughts on the major categories and the ultimate winners: Kate Winslet was so good in "The Reader" that I herald her finally getting her Oscar. She was also superb in "Revolutionary Road." I also can't argue with Sean Penn's win because "Milk" has not yet played in my area. I've seen all his competitors and felt all were outstanding performances, though I favored Mickey Rourke. I'm a big fan of Sean Penn, though, so I don't feel cheated.
I'm not a big fan of Penelope Cruz, but I thought she was better than I've ever seen her in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," a film I loved. By the way, hers is one of at least five Oscar-winning performances by women in films directed by Woody Allen, Dianne Wiest won the supporting actress Oscar twice in Allen films ("Hannah and Her Sisters" and "Bullets Over Broadway"), Diane Keaton won Best Actress in his "Annie Hall," Mira Sorvino was Best Supporting Actress in "Mighty Aphrodite" and now Cruz. I might have picked Marisa Tomei for "The Wrestler," but that may be due to the fact she spent so much of the film dancing with little clothing on. I love that gal, naked or clothed.
Though I was disappointed that Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker in "The Dark Knight" won nearly all the awards it was competing for, I'll concede it was a pretty good turn by the actor, only the second in Oscar history to win an Oscar after his death. (The first was Peter Finch, named Best Actor for "Network" in 1976.) Acceptance of the award by his mother, father and sister made it a wonderfully emotional moment for viewers--and a warm tribute to the actor.
Once again there were no really outrageous outfits worn to the Oscars. I suppose the days of Cher are finally over, but I miss them. Even Mickey Rourke looked reasonably normal in his all-white suit and his lanky hair didn't look like he'd just combed a few rats out of it, for a change. If Jack Nicholson was there with his drug dealer-style dark glasses, they must have seated him behind a post because I didn't see him.
This year's telecast pretty much ended on time, which was 3 1/2 hours after it started. I think they ought to be able to do the show in three hours and the way to do it would be to relegate the technical awards to a separate night and maybe a cablecast instead of providing restroom breaks for those who could care less about sound mixing and film editing. I'm a movie junkie, so I don't mind any of that, but if slippage in the ratings is a real concern to the Academy and ABC, then eliminating the boring stuff is part of the answer.
They gave the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award this year to comedian Jerry Lewis in tribute to his many years of telethons for children with muscular dystrophy. Lewis looked unwell, but his voice was strong and his comments were succinct and made with dignity. It's sad to realize that Jerry is among the very few big comedy stars of his generation who's still around to take bows.
Obviously, the Academy Awards now reflect the real movie industry of today, which is a global business. Of the four acting winners, only Sean Penn is an American and the best picture was an English film shot on location by a British director in India. This is the climate for movies today, so if some U.S. viewers are staying away from the Academy Awards telecast on grounds they never saw any of the winning films because they sounded too "foreign," that isn't likely to change in the future.
©2009 by Ron Miller. This column first posted Feb. 23, 2009. The Oscar symbol is the property of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
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