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Natalie Portman, left, won the Best Actress award for "Black Swan," but didn't knock anybody out with her dull acceptance speech. Meanwhile, Melissa Leo, right, was bleeped for using the "F-word" in her speech after winning the Supporting Actress Oscar for "The Fighter." |
No upsets, no surprises,
no issues! Hey, no fun!
of TheColumnists.com
We didn't have a TV in 1953, so I missed the first televised Academy Awards ceremony, but I'm pretty sure I saw most of them over the next half a century or so. Add to that the fact that I've been reviewing the telecasts for the last 30 years, either in newspapers or online. So, based on my great familiarity with the Oscars, here's my take on Sunday night's telecast of the 83rd Annual Academy Awards:
PHOOEY!
Talk about your yawn-producer! There wasn't a single, solitary surprise in the whole 3.5 hours of television. All the award-winners were predictable well in advance. Hey, I even guessed most of them correctly. Does that mean I'm disappointed in the winners? No. I won't argue with any of the choices.
And, for the record, here they are:
Best Picture: "The King's Speech," the story of how King George VI of England overcame his speech impediment--a severe stutter--with the help of his speech therapist and rallied his nation in World War II.
Best Actor: Colin Firth, who played King George, in the movie. It was the English actor's first Academy Award.
Best Actress: Natalie Portman, who played
a sexually-repressed ballerina in "Black Swan," coming
apart at the seams under the pressure of dancing the leading
role in a new production of "Swan Lake."
Best Supporting Actor: Christian
Bale, who playeddrug-addicted ex-prizefighter
Dickie Eklund in "The Fighter."
Best Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo, who played the mother/fight manager to boxers Micky Ward and Dickie Eklund in "The Fighter."
All four actors had won other awards for the same roles earlier in the awards season, which now leaves the Academy Awards looking like yesterday's news.
Best Director: Tom Hooper for "The King's Speech." Best original screenplay: David Seidler for "The King's Speech." Best adapted screenplay: Aaron Sorkin for "The Social Network." Best Song: Randy Newman for "We Belong Together" from "Toy Story 3."
The closest thing to a surprise came when Melissa Leo apparently uttered the "F-word" during her otherwise unimpressive acceptance speech. It was successfully bleeped, so only the folks in the Kodak Theatre in L.A. auditorium heard it.
Every effort to liven up the proceedings failed. Billy Crystal, the best Oscar host since Bob Hope, came on to show a clip from the first telecast of the Oscars and explained how Hope once "flipped me off" when the cameras weren't looking during one of Crystal's hosting gigs. It was a tantalizing glimpse of Crystaliana, but hardly enough to relieve the abiding atmosphere of ennui that afflicted the whole evening.
This year the Academy chose young stars James Franco and Anne Hathaway to co-host. They're both charming and pretty, but they can't really do anything evne halfway entertaining without a script. Nobody wrote any real material for them, so they were just human furniture. They might have qualified for an Oscar in set decoration.
Mostly the acceptance speeches were banal. Natalie Portman, who's lovely and visibly pregnant, looked sweet, but said nothing memorable while working through her long list of thank yous. Colin Firth made some attempts at good-natured humor, but wasn't especially successful with them. Melissa Leo, who offended some people by running ads in her own behalf in the Hollywood trade papers in the hope of rounding up more votes, probably offended a lot more people by resorting to profanity.
Again, I must resume my crusade to dump the Best Song category if the four nominees this year are any indication of how low things are dipping in that category. Newman's winning song was the best of a very bad lot, but it's nothing you'll want to be humming in the shower.
Glamour is also on the wane. At least the sort of outre glamour we've come to expect from the Oscars. The guys were all nicely tuxed and nobody that I saw came in bluejeans and sneakers. The girls were all nicely tucked into their gowns and stayed there. There were no "wardrobe incidents."
When I think back on great Oscar shows, I remember some of the special numbers that rocked the place. I go back to the days when Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster came out singing--and dancing--a song called "It's Great Not To Be Nominated." And I also remember the number done by Mae West and Rock Hudson, which was like an advance preview of "Myra Breckinridge." I remember the Billy Crystal opening parody numbers with such fondness that I almost cry when they're not there anymore.
But nobody does original creative numbers anymore. Instead we got a chorus of elementary schoolkids from New York singing "Over the Rainbow" to close the show. What genius thought that one would fly?
And, speaking of Kirk Douglas, it was weird seeing him hobble on stage as an award presenter, using a cane, still struggling with the effects of a stroke a decade ago, and making snarky remarks to Anne Hathaway like, "You're gorgeous! Where were you when I was making pictures?" (As they tried to hustle Douglas off the stage, I imagine somebody was telling him Hathaway's parents probably weren't even born when he was making pictures. His remarks didn't play well.)
If there was anybody on stage that night that I felt like I'd like to meet someday, it probably was "King's Speech" screenwriter David Seidler, who was witty enough to thank England's Queen Elizabeth for not sending him to the tower of London for writing a script that had her father (King George VI) say the same "F-word" that Melissa Leo was bleeped for Sunday night. Seidler, who battled a stammer himself in his youth, struck me as a pretty sharp guy all around.
I have one other carping moment: Why did they leave my dear friend Johnny Sheffield out of the "memorial" review of show business folks who died during the past year? Sheffield was "Boy" in the popular Tarzan movies of the late 1930s and early 1940s, then played "Bomba the Jungle Boy" in his own series later on. If they included nearly everyone else, why not him?
In my earnest opinion, the Oscars are in deep trouble. There are so many other awards shows stealing their thunder that they need to find ways to make what th;ey do much more entertaining. If not, ratings erosion is bound to continue and advertisers will refuse to pay higher prices for a program that's no longer unique.
Still, I'm not complaining about the actual awards distributed this year. I thought all the winners were deserving in the major categories listed above. The one honored film I personally disliked--"Inception"--got four Oscars, but all in technical areas, so I didn't exactly gag on my popcorn.
I'm an eternal optimist. I believe there's enough talent left at ABC and the Academy to somehow stop the decline in quality that's so obvious in the Academy Awards telecasts. So that's why I'm crossing my fingers and waiting until next year once more.
©2011 by Ron Miller.
The terms "Academy Awards" and "Oscar" are
trademarks of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences
and are used coutresy of the Academy. This column first posted
Feb. 28, 2011.
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