"Ohhh, Oscar, Oscar, Oscar...."

[captainsblog]

The Academy Awards are on tonight, if you cared.

You probably didn't, and ratings for recent years suggest you are not alone.

I'm from the Bob Hope/Johnny Carson era, with some Crystal-ball memories after those and of course the dabble with Famous Dave we will get to below.  I have a couple of comments about the show on the blog of television writer/director Ken Levine, who addressed the issue of Oscar's pop-cultural demise the other day.  Other commenters came with more than the usual amount of vitriol about the politics of the hosts, presenters and films than is typical on his page (and those have all been deleted), but there's nothing new about politics and other brouhahas working their way onto the Academy stage.  In the early 1970s, George C. Scott famously refused to accept his Patton award, calling it all a bunch of bullshit, followed three years later by Brando sending a Native American to refuse his for Godfather.  We've since had a streaker, a weird singalong, an "Adele Dazeem" botched introduction, and the worst sin of all, the wrong Best Picture being announced at the end of what is still a very long show night.

Now I'm seeing people boycotting on account of efforts to make it shorter: not by reducing the production numbers or cutting mikes for overlong or overstupid speeches, but by moving a number of important awards, including editing, onto a separate-but-unequal bus of preannounced winners.  The Academy has made some efforts to broaden appeal, expanding the Best Picture slate from six films to ten and relaxing the rules to allow streamers to compete, but tonight's ten are still in that same range of relative obscurity that has always marked the field. We've seen exactly three of them and I stared briefly at a fourth:
Belfast
CODA
 Don't Look Up
Dune
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Drive My Car
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
West Side Story

At least all of those last six were accessible to us without having to leave the house, all but Licorice being included in one streaming service or another for no additional charge (and that one finally having come down to around six bucks). Yet there's still rarely room for the truly popular among the films arriving during the year: Black Panther remains the only true blockbuster to crack the Top Ten since the expansion. Indies don't do any better: Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard were brilliant in Leos Carax's Annette, but nobody tonight will know that. Likewise, Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, which we're also waiting to freestream, got snubbed except for one actress and one score nomination.

As for my own comments on why this is no longer the event it once was in popular culture, I offered these:

One reason the Academy Awards aren't what they once were is the Academy itself.

At the time of the height of popularity-culture, I lived in Rochester, New York. The biggest party in town was at a restaurant on the outskirts of downtown called Oscars. All year, there were photos of past winners on the walls, and statue replicas abounding, but on Oscar Night, they went all out. There were theme desserts and film critics from the local media and maybe even a red carpet. Then the Academy burst in with their lawyers and shut it all down. Oscars became Ozzies and before long Dead, the party couldn't use any Unofficial Unlicensed Merch, and the winner was.... nobody.

"Film critics from the local media" have, of course, mostly become an oxymoron; even the recapper of things like this from Rochester is on hiatus, with his pieces about things like the Monroe Avenue Oscargate getting recycled and/or paywalled.

I then added this thought, about the author of another sort of  Top Ten List:

There's a common conception (mis- or not) that there hasn't been a "good host" since Carson, who, as somebody above pointed out, only did it a handful of times compared to Bob Hope.

I've always considered David Letterman to have been Johnny's natural successor in late night, and I think there are only two words that kept him from becoming his successor on this event's night:

"Uma? Oprah!"

We were watching. We were puzzled. We watched the frowns in the front-row faces and read the Bomb Reports over the next days and weeks. He took his lumps and never returned, and I figured it was just one of those Dave Being Too Dave moments....

until a few months ago.

There, in the marvelous memoir by Mel Brooks, is the story behind the "Uma Oprah" moment. His beloved wife Anne Bancroft was given a prime time special on NBC in the early 1970s, where she adapted a 1962 New Yorker piece about the singer Yma Sumac into a five-minute riff including her, Abba Eban, Oona Chaplin and other oddly named people being randomly introduced to each other. Dave clearly knew the bit- Yma Sumac's last televised performance was on his NBC show in 1987- but just as clearly nobody else did.

I linked to a video of Anne's performance right after reading the memoir, and it's worth posting again, if only to remember an era where a television network gave an entire prime time spotlight to a single performer known for her talent and not her politics and/or stupidity:
 

Watch on YouTube

Enjoy if you watch. We won't; I picked up a copy of the original Catch-22 film, adapted by Buck Henry and with Art Garfunkel, Bob Newhart and Orson Welles in the cast and Mike Nichols behind the camera. Oscar's not gonna do any better than that tonight....