A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

OSCAR RECAP: Let's start today where I finished last night (and, when you have a moment, go through the thread for some wise commentary by many of the regulars here):

Really: how do you give Best Picture to Million Dollar Baby without, over the past three hours, giivng the audience any real idea of what it's about?

This was a broadcast trimmed down so far that there was no fat, but they cut out some of the muscle too. Learn from the Grammys: don't just hand out a pile of the awards; celebrate what the medium does well, and give the audience a real feel for what happened during the year in film.

I don't think anyone can complain about the specific recipients of awards, but as ceremony and entertainment broadcast, that was bad.

The efforts made to speed things up with the minor awards were fine, as far as they went, but I wouldn't mind if they moved some of those awards off-broadcast altogether (the Oscars are the only major awards which present every single award on-stage) and, as I first said here two years ago, "don't waste the viewers' time with performances of songs that no one knows, but do spend a little time to show clips from each nominated acting performance."

Whatever they do, use that extra time for something other than letting the local news start earlier. They need to bring back the 1-2 minute clips of each nominated movie so that viewers have some sense of why each was nominated -- you need Sylvester Stallone up there saying, as Ebert put it, "Million Dollar Baby tells the story of an aging fight trainer and a hillbilly girl who thinks she can be a boxer. It is narrated by a former boxer who is the trainer's best friend. But it's not a boxing movie, for reasons that become clear later on. In the scene you're about to see, Maggie tries to convince Frankie to manage her," etc. Otherwise, there's no context for the awards at all, and especially in a year where the nominated films were not mass blockbusters, it's necessary.

Rock was right to point out in his monologue that the Oscars are the only ceremony in which the nominees aren't called upon to perform live. Fine. Use their films. Paralleling Roger Ebert's famous formulation, no good Oscars broadcast is ever too long, but a bad one, like this, wasn't nearly short enough.