On aging, beauty, the Oscars, and Kim Novak

She was the “anti-Marilyn” sex symbol, a defiantly sensuous creature onscreen who seemed to defy the viewer's lustful gaze. She was a “thinking man's bombshell” who wasn't the greatest actress in Fifties Hollywood, but her virtues as a intoxicating presence were wonderfully showcased by the wildly underrated Richard Quine, the bombastic George Sidney, and the of course, the master of suspense (and obsessive-compulsive behavior), Hitchcock.

This week Kim Novak was back in the news for the first time in decades because she appeared as a presenter on the Oscars looking as if she had had bad plastic surgery on her cheeks and mouth (she also behaved somewhat stiffly, as if she was on sedatives — speculation was that this might have been a result of her having a horse-riding accident in 2006).

A debate was thus sparked on the Net about what is “expected” of female stars as they grow older, led mostly by women bloggers who were (justly) annoyed at the many bad “Kim Novak's face” jokes that have appeared online since Sunday night.

One of the most interesting tweets having to do with Novak's appearance on the Oscars came from actress Rose McGowan (herself a performer who has been rapped on the knuckles for having had plastic surgery, following a car accident). She wondered why there was no standing ovation for Novak – on a program, it must be added, where all the musical performances and pretty much any beloved performer gets a “standing O” as a matter of course.

Novak was a major star in the Fifties and early Sixties, but she was also an outsider — she was one of the last major-studio “creations,” remade and remodeled by Columbia president Harry Cohn to star in a string of notable high-profile pictures (and serve as a “threat” to Rita Hayworth, much in the way that Marilyn was a threat to Betty Grable).

While she underwent all of Cohn's demanded changes — she had actually been discovered by a Columbia talent scout in a chorus line of “heftier” girls grouped together to make Jane Russell look slimmer — Kim retained as much of her identity as she could. “I had to fight not to be manufactured, “ she told an interviewer recently. This brash attitude made her the polar opposite of the Monroe/Mansfield/Van Doren model of the blonde bimbo sexpot.

There are only two books thus far about Novak, and one of them – the one by Peter Harry Brown in which she supplies “commentary” in between the chapters – is quite accurately called Kim Novak: Reluctant Goddess (St. Martin's Press, 1986). It is her reluctance to be part of the Hollywood machine that made her recent foray into plastic surgery such a surprise and a sad event for those who've followed her career.

Kim's “comments” in the Brown biography are very enlightening in this regard, especially one about being a sex symbol: “You become a slave to the glamour-girl syndrome. They require certain public rituals, and, though I smile and go through the motions, I guess I'll never get used to them. You have to play a role – the star, the glamour girl. That gives me an uneasy feeling. Even though you appreciate the attention of the fans, you wonder if people who come to watch would like you if they knew who you really are.

“...But no matter how much makeup they put on me, no matter how much of a facade they thrust on me, I know the public was always able to see through it – to see the real me – that was some compensation. I fought, and fought hard, to maintain my own identity.” (pp 40-41)

Let me emphasize that I am not condemning Novak for having gone in for “de-aging” surgery. I am merely saddened to see that she finally did consent to play Hollywood’s game, and at such a late point in her life. At this point she has quit acting, often citing Mike Figgis’ 1991 film Liebestraum as her final disappointment. (She has spoken in interviews about how she argued with Figgis in regard to her character. He disagreed with her, and proceeded to cut most of her part out of the picture. As it stands, my only memory of her performance is a vague one of a quite sleazy line of dialogue involving another woman's smell on a man's fingers....)

In the 1986 Brown biography, she is quoted as saying “I have also never been afraid of getting old. To tell you the truth, I never cared that much about my career.... I was more interested in trying to find myself so I could express that essence onscreen.” (p. 255) She apparently underwent the surgery (or series of botox injections) sometime in late 2010, as is evident from this photo promoting the release of a box set of her movies.

There have been several sad cases of actresses deforming their faces with surgery in the last two decades – mostly notably Faye Dunaway, comedic actresses Mary Tyler Moore and Carol Burnett, and the Jocelyn Wildenstein of comedy, Joan Rivers.

Younger, very successful actresses like Nicole Kidman have indulged and have subsequently seemed to try to “set things right” by “un-freezing” their features. The most extreme example found Cher, who had developed an extremely respectable career as an actress, sabotage it entirely with face work that made her look as if she was performing behind a Kabuki mask (this as far back as 1990’s Mermaids, where she is unable to cry convincingly because of the immobility of her face).

As for Novak (seen right at the age of 71 in 2004), she was all the more special as a Hollywood star because she “pulled a Garbo” and got the hell out of town while the gettin’ was good. True, her fortunes were uncertain after the mid-Sixties, but she didn’t stick around to play a slew of aging matrons, maids, and (the eventual) grandmothers. She made a handful of movies and TV appearances in the Seventies and Eighties, with only a scant few (The Mirror Crack’d) being worthy of her talents and presence.

Thus, she would be one of the last older stars one could imagine worrying about wrinkles. However, those who saw the TCM interview with her that aired in March of last year witnessed a side of her personality that was well hidden during her heyday as one of America’s top box-office attractions: the vulnerable, sad woman who could still break down and cry when talking about her father’s disinterest in her accomplishments.

In that interview she also spoke openly about being bipolar. The moment when she cried on-camera was heartwrenching because it didn’t seem staged or phony, as so many interviews do (pick any of the many, many apologies made on television by public figures). It explained why she hadn’t consented to being interviewed at length in a very long time.

If a cream-puff interviewer like Robert Osborne could unintentionally lead to a topic that would make her break down, one can only imagine the kind of fascinating chat she could’ve had with the dean of star interviewers, the great Dick Cavett, in his prime.

Despite her wonderfully defiant presence, Novak was and is a fragile soul who has often noted that she never really wanted to be a star. She has also, as was noted by the bloggers who rose to her defense, lived through seeing her possessions go up in a fire in 2000, had the aforementioned horse-riding accident, and survived breast cancer just a few years ago.

Thus, when not mentored by major-studio advisers — from the nasty but effective Cohn to her one-time companion Quine — she seems like a woman adrift. And there we again collide with the question that sympathetic bloggers have been discussing in the past week — namely “how should an aging movie star look?”

Perhaps the only two stars who kept their privacy in their later years — one can’t help but cringe thinking of the final months of Bette Davis, where she continued to perform post-stroke, heavily made up — are the “Glimmer Twins” of Thirties glamour, two of the most beautiful women ever in film, Garbo and Dietrich. Garbo’s solution we all know; she simply left Hollywood and never came back — I know she toyed with returning at one point (with the amazing Max Ophuls), but the project sadly lost its financing.

Dietrich (who coincidentally had her last movie role in David Hemmings’ film Just a Gigolo, which costarred Kim) took a more radical approach. She stayed hidden in her Paris apartment, not granting interviews and not allowing pictures to be taken of her — only her voice is heard in the late Maximilian Schell’s superb 1984 portrait Marlene. Along the same lines, Billy Wilder told documentarian Volker Schlondorff a wonderful tale about Dietrich ducking him on the phone (affecting a bad French accent) in her later years when he tried to connect with her in Paris.

Novak certainly doesn’t have to be as extreme in her behavior as Greta and Marlene. One could easily imagine her going the route of another one-time Hollywood pin-up girl, Janet Leigh. Leigh might have had “touch-ups” as she got older, but I was always impressed that she let herself get wrinkled — something that is absolutely verboten in Lotus Land. The result might have been that some assholes made jokes about her appearance, but Leigh’s face was still her own, not a surgeon’s “project,” until her death.

For the male equivalent, take a look at Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins’ creased forehead is so much more laudable than the odd appearance of, say, Mickey Rourke.

Nathanael West taught us 75 years ago in The Day of the Locust that Hollywood eats up and spits out its denizens. There is no better example of this than the Oscars, a deadly dull affair (leavened in theory by attempts at “comedy”) that these days allows no time for an appreciation of the history of American movies.

The film-clip montages are few and far between, and contain nearly no b&w material; the Lifetime Achievement Awards are presented at another, prior ceremony, and aren’t allowed on the main broadcast anymore; and, of course, older stars are rarely seen on the program.

Sidney Poitier, Robert De Niro, and Harrison Ford were the only other “older” [read: over 70] performers on this year’s Oscars; Hollywood’s idea of “veteran performers” now points strictly to TV stars who later became movie stars (60-somethings Sally Field, Goldie Hawn, John Travolta, and Bill Murray). Glenn Close is over 60 but best known for film.

Why all these names? To illustrate that Novak was the ONLY person on the program who had a link to old Hollywood, and they had her curiously present the Best Animated Feature award.

Hollywood essentially spits on its past (unless it can merchandise it — thus the Wizard of Oz trib), and we get to watch it on television every year. This time out a great star who had one of the most intriguing screen presences of the Fifties became a laughingstock because she chose to eliminate her wrinkles and went to the wrong surgeon.

The fact that she felt that was necessary is attributable not only to her own insecurities, but to the fact that America has a problem with age and thus does not want to see stars who carry their age proudly, like Janet Leigh or Anthony Hopkins.

Kim’s star will continue to shine brightly. I hope that she can “do a Nicole Kidman” and possibly reverse whatever procedures she underwent, but even if she can’t she will remain a luminous presence, and her films will live on. From the terrific noir Pushover (1954) and the iconic Fifties “lust-drama” Picnic (1955) to Billy Wilder’s brilliantly nasty Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) and Robert Aldrich’s equally incisive and brutal The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), she has given movie viewers a lot more than we’ve given her.

Why is the Oscarcast so horrible, no matter what changes are made?

It is a truism that the Oscarcast can’t help but suck horribly. No matter what tweaks are put into effect, no matter what technological innovations are displayed, the show is a stiff for several reasons, including:

—the fact that moviemakers only make movies well, they can’t put on a live show properly (haven’t ever been able to);
—it’s grating to watch a community pat itself on the back for over three hours of TV time;
—the attempts to snare young viewers are hopeless and pathetic (young viewers have better things to do than watch the Oscars)
—and the lip service given to the “respect” the Academy has for its legacy and elders is of course disproved by the disrespectful treatment those same elders receive during the program (which is related to the previous point).

So, let’s run through the statistics, shall we? What I’ve always found interesting, and thoroughly obnoxious, about the Oscars is the constant back-patting about what a great industry they’re a part of. If you check the MPAA’s website it is noted that 560 films were theatrically distributed in America last year — if you remove nearly half of those in the expectation that many are independent features (one hopes) and/or foreign releases (these days, quite few), you still have a good 300 films made and released by Hollywood annually.

So the fact that a small handful of movies get saluted at the Oscars each year has always been a don’t-watch-that-watch-this bit of misdirection. The fact that the “sweep” factor finds less than 10 films nabbing most of the nominations contributes to this, as does the sporadic instances, as with this year’s King’s Speech, where a film made in the U.K. receives many nominations and most of the top prizes. So Hollywood is indeed proud of the fact that about 10 out of every 300 films that are produced here are very good — and that better movies are often made elsewhere.

And then we come to the dead folk. As regular readers of this blog know, I am devoted to saluting the Deceased Artistes whose work I loved, so of course one of the reasons I have to watch the Oscarcast is to see what they do with their annual necrology segment. For years it was an odd popularity contest in which they led up to the biggest names, and the audience was encouraged to applaud wildly at whomever they recognized. That iniquity was taken away a few years ago, when they started doing severely solemn necrologies that gave less than 10-15 seconds to every person saluted.

This year each person was given approximately three and a half seconds of screen time, no matter if they were an agent, an executive, a producer, or a Hollywood stalwart performer like Tony Curtis or Dennis Hopper. Four seconds, and yer out! So much for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ respect towards its elders.

Of course, there is also the shameful move instituted last year, where the Lifetime Achievement awards were shunted off the program and thrown into a separate event held months before the Oscar telecast. This year our Funhouse deity Uncle Jean (aka Jean-Luc Godard) didn’t make the trip from Switzerland to Hollywood to receive his five-decades-delayed Oscar for Breathless, but the three other honorees were in attendance, and all four gentlemen were given 20-25 SECONDS each to be saluted on the puffed-up Oscar show.

Some of the tech awards remain, the shorts remain, the wretchedly bad comedy bits remain, the tributes that come out of the blue and go back into the blue and make no sense remain — Billy Crystal talking to Bob Hope? (That guy’s immense ego hasn’t deflated since he made himself a partner to Laurel and Hardy some years ago) — and yet the Lifetime honorees get 25 seconds each.

It was only natural that one of those honorees, the brilliant film historian Kevin Brownlow, displayed the MOST respect for Hollywood’s legacy of filmmaking by simply saying in his acceptance speech, "I really do regret the loss of black and white...."

Does God Really Need an Oscar, numero deux

Two articles appeared this week relating to Uncle Jean getting the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oscars. The first confirmed that Godard had indeed received his wacky little we’re bestowing-on-you-our-highest-honor-that-we-refuse-to-broadcast letter from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. His longtime ladyfriend and collaborator (identified as his “wife” by The New York Times — which apparently doesn’t bother to fact-check or proofread much of anything these days [I'm available at reasonable rates, folks!]) Anne-Marie Mieville knowingly stated that “it’s not the Oscars,” referring, of course, to the fact that the Academy has broken off its Lifetime Achievers and put them with the technical-award winners. She also asked, “Would you go all that way for a bit of metal?”

In the second piece, which appeared in various publications online, it was noted that JLG sent a “cordial, handwritten note” to the president of the Academy saying that, “schedule permitting,” he will come to the not-fit-for-prime-time ceremony on November 13th. I’m hoping he fakes them out, does interviews as if he’s coming (as he did when he was getting the Lifetime Achievement from the European Film Awards a few years back), and then just blows the whole thing off. And please, Academy folk, don’t consider Quentin Tarantino to be the central presenter — I’m sure his love of cute Sixties Godard is legitimate, but there’s a lot more to Uncle Jean’s work than the “Madison scene” in Band à Part….

Does "God" really need an Oscar?

Every self-respecting film fan knows that the Oscars are a game that Hollywood plays with the world (and itself). Mainstream multiplex fare is worse than it has ever been in history, even the best films are pathetically derivative and the biggest stars are blander and less talented than ever. But at the Oscarcast each year they tell us about how today’s best films (maybe 10 out of the few hundred they produce every year) are part of a continuum, they are the current-day “descendents,” so to speak, of the masterworks made during Hollywood’s Golden Age, and Silver Ages like the stunning period in the early Seventies when some of the best-ever American films were made with major studio backing.

Each year’s Oscar telecast has less and less time for anything to do with Hollywood’s past, though. The old-movie montages get quicker and shorter, each dead-this-year tribute now lasts maybe 10-20 seconds instead of a minute or two (unless you're John Hughes!), and finally, this past ceremony saw the “erasure” from the official telecast of the Lifetime Achievement winners (Roger Corman, Lauren Bacall, studio exec John Calley, and cinematographer Gordon Willis), which I wrote about here.

So this week the new Lifetime Achievement winners were announced, and they are as worthy of the prize as Corman, Bacall, Calley, and Willis. The announced honorees are the most pre-eminent writer about silent cinema, Kevin Brownlow (right)(the first time a film historian has gotten an Oscar), character actor extraordinaire Eli Wallach, a “Hollywood maverick” generation director who still is trying to make challenging cinema (Francis Ford Coppola), and a legend who is one of the greatest living filmmakers, Uncle Jean, aka Jean-Luc Godard.

Now I winced as I heard that Godard was up for this award, since I knew that either it meant he was severely ill — the Oscars seem to have the inside track on old filmmakers who are dying — or that they were prepping “Godard fan” Quentin Tarantino to make a presentation and gush about Band A Part once more. The award seems to be pegged to the fact that this is the 50th anniversary of A bout de souffle (Breathless), and someone at Oscar Central decided that seminal film needed to get some belated recognition. Hey, they passed on giving Citizen Kane anything way back when, so Orson got the same kind of honorary business many, many years down the line — pictures that change cinema don’t really have top priority in the skewed vision of the movies that guides the Oscars (Kubrick never really nabbed anything for being a visionary, so just forget about connecting the Oscars to what is taught in film school as genius filmmaking).

Ah, but this blog entry isn’t just a chance for me to carp about how this belated gesture seems too little, too late (since you know they’re not honoring Godard for the whole of his stunning cinematic oeuvre, but more for his having made a trendsetting pic back in the era of Mad Men). The “story” surrounding the announcement that Godard will receive this honorary award has become more about the fact that he hasn’t yet gratefully acknowledged the prize than the fact that he’s not likely to show up to receive it. Vanity Fair published a bizarre blog piece today noting that Uncle Jean hadn’t yet answered the Academy — a whole 24 hours after their representative called! (hey, be grateful we even considered you for this high honor, which we won’t be making part of our official ceremony!).

Another blogger mocked the ginned-up non-story, and noted that Kevin Brownlow, who is currently 72, was woken up out of a sound sleep at night in England to be told the news by an Oscar rep (Hollywood does not acknowledge that the rest of the world lives in different time zones). All these gents are being invited to a prestigious shindig that is taking place on November 13 of this year, which will most likely be glimpsed in a two-minute quick-cut montage on the actual Oscarcast.

Godard has a history of not showing up in recent years to any film festivals where his work is showing, or to fests that honor him with Lifetime Achievement Awards. He seemed to be considering accepting the European Film Awards' 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award when he agreed to a few interviews a few weeks before the ceremony — and then he never showed up to claim the prize (then again, please check out the EFA’s list of honorees — much as I dearly love the Monty Python troupe, their "lifetime achievement" in cinema is in the realm of one excellent and four very fun movies). The official quote he gave at the time to the EFA was "I say at the same time ‘thank you’ and ‘no, thank you,’" which is thoroughly consistent with his behavior in the past 45 years or so.

I believe that the Academy might waive its no-Lifetime-Achievement-presentations-on-air rule for Coppola, if only because his friends, and one assumes, presenters, are A-list names in the business. But the incredibly important Mr. Brownlow and the hardworking Wallach will certainly get merely what Corman and Bacall got this year on the televised ceremony — a quick mention from the stage, and a wave to the camera from the audience (I was surprised the honorees weren’t moved to the back where resident senior Mickey Rooney is always seated; so much for Hollywood’s pride in its past….).

I’ll end on a note that is quite familiar to Godard fans, his letter to the New York Film Critics Circle in 1995 when they announced they were giving him a Lifetime Achievement Award. It is written with tongue-in-cheek and with film references galore (including ones familiar only to students of his career). Ah... the Bleecker Street Cinema!

Dear Sir,

Thanks for your electronic mail dated January 20 — 11:24 am. Too little good health. Too big snow to the airport, and too few banknotes saved for the ticket. Hollywood always used to say that your servant is not fit for telling stories. I therefore said in the last chapter of my stories of cinema [Histoires du cinema(s)] that nothing is lost, except honor.

And it is then my duty — no copyright, only copyduties — not to accept any longer the honor of your reward. Do please accept the incomplete following reasons for such genuine and shy statement.

JLG was never able through his whole movie maker/goer career to:
Prevent M. Spielberg from rebuilding Auschwitz,
Convince Mrs. Ted Turner not to colorize past and dear funny faces,
To sentence M. Bill Gates for naming his bug's office Rosebud,
To compel New York Film Critics Circle not to forget Shirley Clarke,
To oblige Sony ex-Columbia Pictures to imitate Dan Talbot / New Yorker Films when delivering accounts,
To force Oscar people to reward Abbas Klarostami instead of Kieslowski,
To persuade M. Kubrick to screen Santiago Alvarez shorts on Vietnam.
To beg Ms. Keaton to read Bugsy Siegel's biography.
To shoot Contempt with Sinatra and Novak, 
etc., etc.,

I'm still not over, dear Sir, through my long voyage to the home of cinematography, but I missed indeed quite a lot of ports of call — no girls in every port, but no honors neither I could deserve.

Do please ask the distinguished audience some indulgence for the piteous English of your colleague and send the reward to the Bleecker Street Cinema if remaining.

Faithfully yours,
Jean-Luc Godard

Thanks to David Arthur-Simons for passing on the text of JLG's letter.

The Legends That the Oscars Didn't Care to Honor on TV: Bacall, Willis, and Corman

So another annual dose of TV tedium has come and gone. What I find most interesting about the Oscars, and I find the same with “theme articles” that talk about today’s most successful movies, is that the movie industry’s Prime Directive is to convince us as often as possible that (old saw) “movies are better than ever!” In fact, we’ve gotten back to the Fifties so much that the biggest, newest invention is 3D, which came in when television hit the scene for real, and the studios were panicked no one would ever go to the movies again.

Thus, last weekend we got another Oscarcast that tried its utmost to convince us that the handful of decent Hollywood productions last year were as good as the masterpieces of old, the classics made overseas, and those hundreds of films that never received Oscars but are now acknowledged as the finest movies ever made. To keep folks tuned in, the show was streamlined — but still ran over three and a half hours, because they introduced five new Best Picture nominees (talk about hubris — or is that chutzpah?).

Thus, we didn’t hear the nominated songs, and the obituary tribute was pretty much insulting to all involved — not only to those who weren’t included (I like how a brouhaha is made over Farrah Fawcett and Bea Arthur, as if they were major motion-picture talents — gimme some Maurice Jarre and Arnold Stang, fellas!). The fact that over five minutes of the show was devoted to a tribute to John Hughes (who, as I noted here, only made like three good movies) and no more than ten seconds — more like five in most cases — was given to the rest of the filmmakers, performers, and writers who died, was an insult in general. More than likely, the film clips from Hughes' pictures were considered good for the demographic watching the Oscars, and those that might be channel-surfing around on a Sunday night.

In any case, the show’s most shameful event was not snubbing Farrah (although, if you’re gonna mention her movie career, do you feature a scene from Myra Breckenridge?), but that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has decided that we no longer need to see the honorary Lifetime Achievement awards on the show proper. In this case, we were told about a ceremony at which studio executive John Calley, incredibly influential cinematographer Gordon Willis, Lauren Bacall, and an absolute god of low-budget moviemaking, Roger Corman, received Lifetime Achievement awards.

I could go on and on about how pathetic it is that the producers of the program try to make a connection between the “great” films of today and the classics of yesteryear... and then don’t honor those who receive Lifetime Achievement awards on air. But it’s pointless to go on at length, since the show is always badly timed, badly produced (mainly because they focus their attention on ridiculous stagebound stuff, which is not the forte of moviemakers), and remarkably unfunny (does anyone really think Bruce Vilanch is a scream, outside of the Oscar producers?).

I guess I wasn’t paying attention when the program was on (can you imagine that?), but the presentation to the four Lifetime honorees wasn’t made a day before the Oscars, a week, or even a month. It was made five fucking months before the program! Here is an L.A. Times article from a few days before it happened, which was, for the record, November 14, 2009.

It turns out that the missing presentations and acceptances are up on the official Oscars site, but they are not embeddable here. Instead, I link you to Jeff Bridges presenting to Gordon Willis, Anjelica Huston presenting to Lauren Bacall, and Jonathan Demme presenting to Roger Corman. The Oscar producers should be ashamed of themselves for “hiding” these honors.

Jerry, meet Oscar...

We've been following the minutiae of Jerry Lewis's career -- the great, the very bad, and the nasty -- on the Funhouse since the show started and now, finally, there is some big news while the Jer is still inhabiting this mortal coil. He's slated to receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award this Sunday at the Oscars, and already there is controversy. It was of course brought up that Jerry liberally comes out with the "f-word" (fag) out of the blue, but it won't be a gay group that is planning on protesting him before the Oscars begin -- the organization known as "Jerry's Orphans" has once again surfaced, to address the notion that Jerry raises funds for those with muscular dystrophy primarily through the use of pity.

There are arguments to be made on both sides here, but I thought it would be best to let Jerry speak for himself -- that usually does lead to him saying things that can be diplomatically described as "unscripted." The MDA has occasionally had to distance itself from his statements -- if I remember correctly, they issued a statement disapproving of him having said on a Sunday morning news program, “You don’t want to be pitied because you’re a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!” Jer's attitude and approach will be protested by folks outside the Oscars, and you can actually follow the action on the website called The Trouble With Jerry. (Thanks to Rich Brown for keeping me apprised of that event.)

In this interview, conducted for a primetime news magazine, he's very pissed off at the "Orphans" and does come up with some odd lines (as with the bit about "running down the hall"). All we can say is that Jerry is never dull. We wish him well on Sunday and, yes, I must do it: Salut l'artiste! (Those Tashlin movies and the first seven years of his solo work are pretty terrific....)

Two things about the Oscars

It's a dull show, a mighty dull show, but here are two things they might as well consider:

-If you're going to show the awards that the bulk of the populace considers "boring" (sound editing, special fx, shorts, docus) in the main telecast and not the tech-awards ceremony, give the winners the dignity of making a full minute/minute-and-a-half speech. The musical fanfare and disappearing mic business is obnoxious shit. This is the winners' one and only moment in the spotlight, and it's rather doubtful they could be as pointless and rambling as the "stars" who have wasted minute upon minute of my life (Mira Sorvino, Gwyneth Paltrow, Hallie Berry, Julia Roberts, shall I go on?). I was glad that Jon Stewart spotlighted how ridiculously obnoxious this rule is by letting the Song award winner return to make her tiny little speech. If we are supposed to watch their award, let's see their speech also.

-First let me say that I am perennially amused at how New York Times critic A.O. Scott tells us constantly how this is the Golden Age of Movies, cinema has never been better. Yes it has, A.O., there were indeed periods when even the B pictures had a crackle to them (and I'm not just talking '30s/'40s, '60s/'70s also fits the bill). This is the era when a good movie is an exception, not at all the rule. (Unless the formulaic mainstream is what you're constantly watching—then a halfway-decent indie would indeed appear to be extraordinary.) That said, let's acknowledge that the Oscar is about MOVIES, no matter the level of quality. So... let's watch some freaking clips, folks. It's been rather evident for a few decades now that these folks can't do a variety show properly, or showcase songs or sketches (like the Tonys or Grammys can...because those are PERFORMANCE awards, straight up). Thus, the only thing that makes sense would be to show longer clips, since that is, indeed, the only thing these symps can actually do. Take a look at the AFI ceremonies that were broadcast in the '70s — yes indeed, they were full of the same self-congratulatory nonsense, but the montages were healthy, chunky affairs that truly did introduce us to the work of the participants. The Oscars will always be a drag of a evening's TV watching (the Alan Carr days are long since gone, and Billy Crystal really did suck, man did he suck). Let's watch some fuckin' movies, can we?