The TV Zone

OK, so maybe I'm wrong. Maybe last night's unwatchable telecast WASN'T the lowest-rated ever, as I confidently predicted.

[Note to reader: Always beware when I "confidentially predict" something.]

But at least I'm not terribly far off. I could go with ABC's propaganda at this point, but I think I'll go with Fox's instead. ABC takes the glass-almost-entirely-full approach to the numbers, while Fox takes the glass-is-bone-dry-except-for-a-drop-or-two approach. That latter seems more interesting to me:

Here's the line from Fox's press release: "From 830-11p, the 81st Annual Academy Awards delivered an 11.2/26, showing modest improvements over last year’s ceremony which delivered the lowest-rated Oscars telecast ever with a 9.8/23 in the Fast Nationals and a 10.7/26 in the finals."

Good old Fox. Don't ya just love 'em! Now, about the "American Idol" numbers...

The final Nielsens are out after 3.

[Now, final finales tomorrow, but the news so far is not grim - about 36 million last night, compared to about 32 million last year...]

Time to hand 'em out...And here goes:

Host: B + (The only element of the night that worked - and yet he's on-stage barely at all; plus the yawning set conspired to reduce him to ant-size insignificance when he was on-stage. )

Set: C - (A Strange polyglot of style and styles that perfectly reflected the Academy's conflicted feelings over this night...should we go BIG or small?...GRAND or demur...intimate or OUT THERE...The arch, that glittery thing that reminded me of the onset of a migraine, was certainly eye-catching but was at war with the rest of the set decor for most of the night. Then, when awards were presented, directors cued as backdrop this jarringly tacky diaphanous bluescreen that reminded viewers of either floating jellyfish or dust motes...)

Comedy sketches: D. (Maybe I was cranky because of the dust motes, but I found Tina Fey/Steve Martin endless - the sort of cute prattle that is designed to remind you just how charming and brilliant this charming and brilliant pair is but managed to add new dimensions to the word "cloy." Jack Black/Jenn, awkward...James Franco/Seth Rogen, insufferable...Stiller as Wacky Joaquin, obvious...)

Music: C - (Relentlessly downbeat and old-fashioned. Was the music director trying to invoke depression-era musicals with that plodding pastiche by Jackman and Beyonce? If so, objective achieved. I found it endless, and uninspiring. Busby Berkeley lite...)

Presenters: D - (The solos were serviceable, but Will Smith - the biggest star on stage, by far - seemed reduced amidst the rubble; even HE wondered why he was up there so long when Jackman shoulda been...Meanwhile, the star group grope. What was THAT! Did it not occur to anyone that - while it may seem like a lovely idea to have multiple-lived Shirley MacLaine speak lovingly and lengthily to an aspirant - most VIEWERS AT HOME HAD NOT SEEN THESE MOVIES. As the opener even joked, I gotta go see "The Reader." So, someone is saying something very nice on-stage to (say) Penelope Cruz, but viewers simply have no idea WHY. Best to have shortened these mini-speeches to a few words, then buttressed them with clips. A simple adjustment that would have worked wonders.)

Technical awards: D (Well, not technical, per se, but "best adapted screenplay" is hardly a main attraction; sure, it's vital to the membership, vital to the industry, but unessential to the viewers at home. So, they dress it up with Cute - Steve and Tina, for example - or Action, like some clip job to introduce special effects. This is the toughest job for ANY Oscars' telecast director, and I've long believed that speed and brevity are preferable to clogging up the middle hours with this stuff by dressing it up with set pieces that tell you just how important it is, or how it kinda works. You could easily shorten these interminable broadcasts by dropping these categories, or forcing them to the Saturday night off-broadcast ceremony where they belong. )

Overall: D. (I'm afraid the Academy was handed lemons this year and made lemons. It struggled mightily with the Zeitgeist, knowing the the top-nominated film was set in the slums, and that millions of viewers were out of a job. Yet Hollywood, by its fundamental nature, is out-sized, lavish, ostentatious, and deeply full of itself. Good Lord, if any of these people wanted something modest, they woulda gone into the accounting trade. This is Hollywood! This is Oscar! They DEMAND spectacle! We got that. But we didn't get that. The most spectacular movie? ("The Dark Knight"). Not even a best picture, because of course the Academy just HAD to make room for the message movies - "Milk," "The Reader," Slumdog," even "Frost/Nixon." There was not a single nod to spectacle in this front line, with the possible exception of "Ben Button," which everyone in the audience knew or suspected was a rip-off of "Forrest Gump" anyway. Jackman? As mentioned, he was good, very good even, but there were moments when I thought I had fallen asleep and woken up during the Tony Awards.
Ah well, next year...

Click for photos of the best 2009 Oscar dresses.

Click for photos of the 2009 Oscars red carpet.

(Pix: Peter Kramer, AP)

Why not?

I mean, why the hell not?

Everyone else does it - this live blog thing.

(Here's my tree-falls-in-the-forest question: If someone is writing a live blog during the Oscars, does that mean that someone is actually paying attention?)

Of course not. That's why you do a live blog - with the full and comfortable realization that no one is paying attention.

So here goes...

8:30: Interesting - first musical chords from "Lawrence of Arabia." Why? Nostalgia...

8:43: The opening number, what was not to like, honestly? Lively, energetic, funny, imaginative, different, charming, intimate, downscale...Jackman's opening number, any opening number, isn't just a scene-setter but a tone-setter, and get the tone wrong and you get the night wrong; by staging from a proscenium, and forging - or forcing - an intimacy with the audience - Jackman (who knows how to work those large unwieldy human masses) established a link. That's really hard to do. And this - the fact that the nominated movies are so small, and the fact that the stage is so small, was a wise bit of stage craft...

8:47: Good Lord, talk about blasting away the good will that Jackman worked so hard to establish...this long stuffy intro for BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS (God, you'd think this was a Nobel to be conferred)...the Academy puts us right back where we're so accustomed to being on this show - a place long of wind, and full of self. Certainly like Penelope, but she's acting like her shiny little thing is a Nobel for discovering the cure to cancer.

8:56: Best Original Screen play: Every year the Academy DESPERATELY tries to breath life in this award, make if friendly to audiences who don't read. Make it funny, they demand. That way the morons will pay attention! And it nevet ever works. Nor does this one. Steve and Tina - just...bot...happening...' This award is best given quickly, and without any fuss. A fine award..but people want stars, not writers. (Which is probably why no one reads live blogs...) "Milk" gets it. The movie that a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the national audience has seen, but which plays big with a tiny, tiny crowd inside the Kodak... Followed by Best Adapted..."Slumdog..."

9:03: Jen and Jack: Did I just say people "want the stars..." The pain, the pain...Just a half hour in and this is already turning into a deeply annoying broadcast. How can the Academy take something like best animated and turn into something akin to the scraping of fingernails across the chalkboard. But they did just that. "Wall E" gets it - a sad throwaway award for a movie that shoulda been nominated for best movie.

9:17: Art direction. I'm sure this is an important category, but am terribly sorry to say that - year after year (after year) the Oscars try to bring meaning and relevance to this one, and fail badly. We can understand "direction" but append that word "art" and I'm lost at sea...Costume design...that makes sense. "The Duchess" scores here and rightly so.

9:36: Well, praise be we got the Joaquin Phoenix jokes out of the way, quickly and harmlessly, relatively speaking.

9:46: Snark at the Oscars - been around forever and it's the industry's way of defusing its self-importance, and pretensions, while telling the world that it really doesn't take all this nonsense seriously..and that...and that...and hat's why God invented James Franco/Seth Rogen. But no one, no one, believes them when they make fun of themselves and the most important (and self-important) awards telecast on the planet . That's why long sketches like this one are so deadly.

9:49: I'm thinking, for no reason at all, that this is shaping up to be a pretty forgettable broadcast. Is redemption around the corner - or just after t his far more intriguing and adsorbing commercial about something?

9:55: Beyonce, Zac Efron, and Hugh - this is the set-piece of the night, and it's terrifically old-fashioned. Aspiring for elegance and pulling ancient rabbits out of tattered top hats. Baz Luhrmann created, but Busby Berkeley might just as well. This broadcast doesn't know what it is, or what it wants to be - something modern or something old, something forward-looking, or something desperately looking to a past that richer, deeper and more socially relevant. A Depression-era-type number for a Depression-type-era? Are we supposed to feel - what? - like Fred and Ginger?

10:02: Well, yeah, this is sure a big moment. The Heath Ledger Memorial Award, AKA, best supporting actor. Surprise! Heath won! The family, dad and mother and sister ascend...they speak..they are somber..here is the one soundbite that will be replayed endlessly tomorrow...and yet...and yet...it seems so anticlimactic. The single great drama of this awards season - a brilliant acting performance and tragic death and it all ends, more or less, in this cold and oddly emotionless moment. That Maysles film plays, then Maher: "Everyone's crying and now I have to go on." Oh shut up.

10:17: Short Documentary Award Subject: Has it occurred to anyone on the planet besides myself that this award category should be dropped for all eternity?

10:24: Another intensely grating tribute...to action films, as some sort of ridiculous pretext for the special effects award. Some good, some execrable movies. And a clip job that's all bad. And of course, "Ben Button" wins, which had nothing to do with hard action flicks at all. What gibberish this whole thing has become.

10:29: And I now see "The Dark Night" won for some small award - reminding everyone at home and at the Kodak about- what-might-have-been.

10:39: Watching and enjoying another commercial, and am about to make a prediction that has just occurred to me: This WILL be the lowest-rated Oscars telecast in history. I can hardly wait for the Jerry Lewis tribute...

10:44: Wow, Jerry looks pretty darn good. Considering every conceivable health ailment he's gone through. His speech is short and dignified. Finally, a not-bad moment in The Lowest-Rated-Oscars-Telecast-in-All-Human-History (Recorded or Otherwise.)

10:55: Bollywood has come to Hollywood. I'm liking all the Slumdoggers; they have have managed to turn this, at least moments of this, into something no one quite expected, I imagine, which is something slightly exotic.I can only guess the reaction of the rest of America to this - which is most probably an insatiable urge to go to bed early, like right now.

11:03: Well, you've already gone to bed, but I do think the A.R.Rahman number from "Slumdog" was probably a high-point in a broadcast brimming with low ones. But again...a small movie adds up to small TV numbers. But I suppose we'll all just have to get used to it - this industry, and this academy, has looked to distant shores for growth and profit. An under-watched Oscars is the the consequence. But this show has many more problems than simply that.

11:15: The death march. A standard of the Oscars show, and it is always an effort to avoid morbidity, and I suppose Queen Latifah handled it adequately. But that brief and inadequate capper featuring Paul Newman? Yet another misfire in this awards show - a genuine legend in this industry dies - a figure who helped define what we all (once) loved about it, and he gets a quick, five-second "so long Paul!" What a joke.

11:24: Danny Boyle wins best director. The sense of inevitable builds...

11:26: The best actress posse is up there now. Is anyone loving this new routine? I find it strangely cold and insincere (imagine something cold and insincere at the Oscars.) Honestly though, most viewers haven't seen most of these movies - they have no idea what these people are saying, and why they're saying it. Much, much better just to show the clip and be DONE with it.

11:38: Well, lucky De Niro gets Sean. He gets tonight's winner. How did he draw that card? That's Bobby, for you. Plus, a few good lines, too. I guess this proves that this new process isn't entirely a flounder. But still, people, clips next time. Clips. We in the viewing audience ask nothing more (other than a watchable broadcast.) And Sean has the single best line of the night. The only good line of the night: "I do know how hard I make it to appreciate me, often." And then he has the worst - telling those who voted against gay marriage ban, that he hopes their grandchildren see the shame in their eyes. Oh what bull. Is this an acting award or an ideological one? I'm lost here.

11:48: The best movie. Lemme guess...lemme guess....Slum...slum...slum...slum...slum...Oh what a surprise. This is probably deserved, but it was so completely expected that to have bet against it would have been foolish indeed.
So that's it, friends. Thanks for hanging around. Check back here tomorrow for the numbers, and they will be disappointing.