How do these shows get away from us?
What had been an annual salute to the best movies of the year and Hollywood in general has now been bloated to the international celebrity party that won’t end.
Though the monologue was succinct, the best song nominees shortened, the best film clips clustered in threes, it was still about 11:30 p.m. — the listed end time — and they were still giving out best score.
I’s not that the winners blathered on forever — for once, producers understood that their thanks was the point of the show and so nobody was played off stage by an orchestra for the first time in a decade or more. And though they had electronic signals only the stars of the major acting roles or those with Important Issues to impart really went on.
It was rather arbitrary that the theme was heroes. It was as if it were another way to get young people involved in the telecast — here are all those superhero shows you like that will never get honored here. But three different clip packages on the topic?
It’s not necessary to package movie clips to make us feel good about movies; we’re interested enough in movies to be watching the Oscars already (I got the feeling though that putting in clips from this year’s nominees among well remembered classic scenes was a way to elevate them into the canon).
There was just one hat tip to Old Hollywood, with Pink singing a reverent “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” her feet firmly on the ground (Liza Minnelli and her siblings left to watch from the seats). Unless you count the parade of shocking plastic surgery disasters in presenters Kim Novak and Goldie Hahn.
Oscars is when we honor our best actors by featuring presenters who cannot read, from John Travolta mangling Idina Menzel’s super-simple name to Zac Efron stumbling the intro he had to do as well.
Bette Midler singing the gloppy “Wind Beneath My Wings” after the “In Memoriam” segment was meant as a way to equal last year’s Barbara Streisand moment. It didn’t, even with Midler waving her arms at the end, wing-like, in case we didn’t get it.
Ellen DeGeneres was a much more suitable host than last year’s horrible Seth MacFarlane, though she based her comedy on the same awards show template: Well look who’s here! And while stars squirm uncomfortably in their chairs, out comes the gag. Fine. But after that, DeGeneres had nothing, switching costumes late in the show in a way that suggested the old Whoopi Goldberg hosting years.
The running untold penis joke involving Jonah Hill was bad enough, but I would have preferred it to a long bit involving ordering pizza for the stars because they were getting so hungry (because the show was running so long; because you’re doing things like ordering pizza instead of giving statuettes). Worse yet was the selfie moment, when stars proved they were just like your grandma and liked mugging in the camera with this newfangled social media.
In the middle of it was Kevin Spacey, who got the most time at the Oscars for a guy whose role this year has been appearing on a Netflix series (Still his line as a presenter, done in Frank Underwood’s voice got one of the biggest laughs of the night).
All of the telecast was better than the terrible parade of excess and fashion salesmanship that is pre-show red carpet coverage — going on for hours and hours. Whatever happens in Crimea it won’t get this much TV time or analysis.
There have been few years with so few surprises among winners. Acceptance speeches had a couple of nice moments, but also a couple that strove toward importance and just got obscure.
Jimmy Kimmel is usually good at poking fun at all this stuff, and he used another big roster of stars to present his pre-filmed pieces in his super late after show that started about 12:30 a.m. But he is by now under the thrall of every internet thing, such that his theme this year were Hollywood versions of overplayed YouTube videos (that are also several years old). It wasn’t his best stuff.
But again Kevin Spacey took up a lot of time as self-promoting guest, proving that if anybody knows how to work the endless Oscar night it is Frank Underwood.