2013 Academy Awards Wrap-Up
By David Mumpower
February 25, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
For the second time in three years, the producers of the Academy Awards attempted to freshen up the stale nature of the show by selecting a host who appeals to a younger demographic. The rationale for the decision is straightforward. Even though the average age of an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences member is 62, people under 30 have only marginal interest in the show as a general rule. Attempting to attract these viewers has been a treacherous path. Two years ago, James Franco’s stoner hijinks instantly became a part of the show’s folklore as Anne Hathaway struggled to survive the experience. She very well may have won an Academy Award last night for being such a good sport back then.
Despite the prior hosting fiasco, Seth MacFarlane was selected because the creator of Family Guy, American Dad and the other sitcom nobody can name is an iconic figure to the under-30 crowd. His popularity was undeniable last summer when Ted became the least likely $200+ million domestic performer since Wedding Crashers in 2005. I put a great deal of thought into the apt comparison for the Ted situation. The reason I selected Wedding Crashers is that in light of its success, people like Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn became frequent participants in Academy Awards ceremonies, generally with disastrous results. Note that none of them appeared last night. The reason why is that with Seth MacFarlane hosting, the prevailing belief is that other hit-or-miss comedians like him would be superfluous. MacFarlane was given every opportunity to excel or fail on his own.
Personally, I have never been a huge fan of MacFarlane’s work. I am one of those painfully few people who enjoy American Dad much more than Family Guy. The former program at least attempts to have a main story each episode. The latter sitcom delivers too low a signal to noise ratio to keep me entertained most of the time. I felt the same way about Ted although I enjoyed it more than the usual Family Guy episode because a lot of the Flash Gordon stuff was inspired. The debits and credits of Ted reflect MacFarlane’s sense of humor. When he’s funny, he’s hilarious and when he’s not, lengthy awkwardness ensues.
To wit, when people discuss their favorite Family Guy gag, the random chicken fights are inevitably the topic of conversation. What I would note instead is the frequent cutaways to Conway Twitty. The purposeless appearances are the brand of humor that defines Seth MacFarlane, for better and for worse. If he likes a joke, he will relish in it independent of whether the people surrounding him agree.
This ability to stay true to his comedy instincts is why he was such a daring choice to host the Academy Awards.
Many of the people in the crowd last night are the ones he has lampooned over the years. After all, his pop culture riffs have made him a celebrity. Telling the same jokes on a television show is altogether different from telling a George Clooney joke with Clooney sitting in the front row, lording over his people, the members of the Academy. I found myself remembering that this is the same George Clooney MacFarlane masterfully lampooned in an American Dad episode. MacFarlane’s willingness to tell truth (or at least crack wise) to power was the story of the evening, for better and for worse.
Generally, I felt that MacFarlane fell on the "for better" side of the ledger much more often than "for worse". Even though I am not a huge fan of his, he cracked me up several times. Yes, the William Shatner bit at the start of the show went on too long, but a lot of that had to do with Shatner’s mugging. Which bit would you have removed out of the set? We Saw Your Boobs was silly fun, the Charlize Theron/Channing Tatum dance sequence represented classic Hollywood grace, the Flight puppets had some of the funniest jokes of the show and the Sally Field/Smokey and the Bandit bit overcame some awkwardness to become wildly entertaining. There was probably a superfluous dance sequence, whether you feel that is the Rubber Tree or Be Our Guest bit, but I understand the argument in favor of each one.
Overall, there were many great ideas to start the telecast. Oddly, this is where MacFarlane’s struggles began. I presume he expected that with a few clever jokes and dance numbers, the audience would warm to him. Instead, he was treated like unwelcome medical news. I mentioned last night that using a DVR to examine slow motion shots of the crowd was entertaining. The micro-expressions MacFarlane received would have thrown anybody.
Ed Begley Jr. somehow received great seats for the show (which is probably a great story in and of itself), and his wife apparently feels the same way about MacFarlane that Begley Jr. does about carbon emissions. Samuel L. Jackson and Helen Hunt were sitting side by side on the front row, by all accounts having a smirk-off. Even Kathryn Bigelow, who was married to James Cameron long enough to learn how to hide her displeasure at aggrandizing people, shot MacFarlane some dirty looks.
MacFarlane had to have been thinking, “If they don’t like these jokes, the next four hours of my life will feel like an eternity.” And from that point forward, MacFarlane turtled a bit. The aggressive comedy that has made him a media juggernaut was neutered, and he became somewhat docile. There were a couple of valiant attempts to recover but after taking his best shot, MacFarlane accepted his grim fate. He was much better than history will remember him being. In my estimation, he deserved a better fate because this was as good as Seth MacFarlane can be. Anybody who did not like it simply does not like him and will never bend on the topic.
With regards to the presenters, I would divide the list into the good, the bad and the ugly, but this is Hollywood’s Super Bowl. Nobody ugly is ever going to get a close-up. Instead, what we have are the good, the bad and that special category reserved for the cast of Chicago, Paul Rudd and Melissa McCarthy.
Yes, there was a celebration of Chicago last night. Already, the Academy had lost me in that I thought Chicago was in the bottom half of the releases of 2002. Its winning Best Picture is almost as bad as Crash a couple of years later. Even so, I was perfectly willing to bite my tongue regarding the "All That Jazz" performance. It was the Academy Awards presentation that left me flabbergasted. Queen Latifah, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Richard Gere and Renee Zellweger were asked to present a pair of music Oscars.
What happened next is up for debate. Gere was wearing his reading glasses yet he could not decipher the text contained within the envelope. He asked Zellweger for help. She demonstrated the reaction speed of a drunken tortoise. Down to their third choice to announce the winner, Queen Latifah stepped up and shouted the result. Unbelievably, Zellweger was presented an opportunity to redeem herself and once again failed to read a name. It wasn’t even something complex like Quvenzhané Wallis. The only text was “Adele – Skyfall” yet she couldn’t say the words. I was left to ponder how much elephant tranquilizer Zellweger had snorted.
The bit with Paul Rudd and Melissa McCarthy, two of my favorite thespians, was even worse. Tasked with an ill-advised gag about vocal acting, the duo spent two minutes suffering. It was as if the Academy gods were against the joke from the start. Rudd clumsily jammed his nose into the microphone at the start of the segment, which foreshadowed the disaster to come. I will spare you a reminder of the specific events. I am, however, amused that they were forced to present two awards. It was almost as if the show’s producers left them out on the stage for five minutes as punishment. Had the afore-mentioned Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller appeared, this probably would have been their segment, so they caught a break by being left off the evening’s presenters list.
The Avengers segment was the other failure of the evening. The normally engaging Robert Downey Jr. started off on the wrong foot when he led (most of) the cast in taking a bow over its box office performance. Then, an odd decision was made to poke fun at Samuel L. Jackson and Downey’s history of drug abuse. Jeremy Renner’s heart was not in the dialogue, because he knew on a fundamental level it was a bad idea.
Once the first award was given, Jackson turned heel on the idea of doing another terrible gag. First, Mark Ruffalo tried to point out his mistake and then Downey attempted to espouse the correct dialogue. Jackson basically told his castmates to shut the Hell up and announce the award. The discomfort of the middle three actors - Ruffalo, Chris Evans and Jeremy Renner - is so spectacular that it almost accidentally saves the awkwardness of the moment. If Jackson and Downey are always like this, Joss Whedon is an even better director than I had believed. And then, The Avengers lost the category of Visual Effects to Life of Pi. This was one of two moments during the show that a category loser was left to stand awkwardly as the winner delivered their acceptance speech. Moments like that embody an inexcusable amount of poor planning.
I fall in line with the majority on the Good side of the ledger. Shirley Bassey’s surprise appearance to sing Goldfinger was spectacular. You may not have realized this while watching her perform, but Bassey is 76-years-old. Don’t you hope to look that great as a septuagenarian? A bit later, Adele belted out a sublime version of one of the best songs of 2012, Skyfall. Fittingly on a night that celebrated half a century of James Bond, Adele and Bassey both stole the show. A debate about which of them was better would probably get heated enough to split the Avengers again.
I was also a huge fan of the acceptance speech for Inocente. Let’s not all pretend to have watched the winner for Best Documentary Short. Instead, we will focus on the meat of the subject. The girl who is the focal point of the story was an undocumented homeless 15-year-old at this time last year. Thanks to the vision of Andrea and Sean Fine – and $52,527 from Kickstarter – she is now the face of an Academy Award winning story. The Fines never lost sight of this accomplishment during the acceptance speech, imploring a billion viewers to patronize the arts more. I was heartened that the crowd shots of Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman showed them smiling broadly about a topic I am sure is dear to their hearts. Adams worked her way up through Colorado dinner theater (and Hooters), if you didn’t know.
I was also a huge fan of Grant Heslov (you know, Arpid from The Scorpion King!) quipping about his attractiveness. Working with Ben Affleck and George Clooney every day would require someone to sustain their self-confidence via any means necessary, after all. I also loved Affleck’s delivery of his acceptance speech at a speed almost fast enough to qualify him for membership in Alvin and the Chipmunks. Finally, I enjoyed writer Chris Terrio’s intensity in relaying in open terms how much Ben Affleck has meant to his career. The relationships people make with others are the best way to determine how likable celebrities are in real life. Affleck is clearly learning from Clooney in terms of emerging victorious in the Hollywood political game.
With regards to the awards themselves, my biggest takeaway is that the Academy felt the same way about the movies of 2012 that BOP’s staff did. There were many solid movies with memorable scenes and brilliant performances. None of them managed to separate themselves from the rest, which led to a split ballot. Consider that there are eight major categories each year, nine or ten when Best Animated Film and Best Foreign Language Film spill into Best Picture consideration.
Out of those ten categories, Amour won for Foreign Language Film and Brave won for Best Animated Feature. They were otherwise non-factors. In the other eight categories, Lincoln, Django Unchained and Argo all won twice while Les Miserables and Silver Linings Playbook emerged victorious in the other two categories. That is seven films splitting ten categories or five splitting eight categories. Simply stated, all of the awards bait movies of 2012 were viewed in generally equal terms.
While the smear campaign against Argo winning Best Picture is already well underway, I would argue that this criticism is misplaced. Here are the winners in the category in the 2000s with their Rotten Tomatoes scores in parenthesis: American Beauty (88%), Gladiator (77%), A Beautiful Mind (77%), Chicago (87%), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (94%), Million Dollar Baby (91%), Crash (75%), The Departed (93%), No Country for Old Men (94%), Slumdog Millionaire (94%), The Hurt Locker (97%), The King’s Speech (94%) and The Artist (98%).
Argo would finish third on this list under this metric with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 96%. Some people may not love it the way that they love say Return of the King or No Country for Old Men, but more critics enjoyed Argo overall. It is an unbelievable true story told very well and while it was only my ninth favorite film of the year, Argo is still undeniably one of the cinematic achievements of 2012. I suspect that if you rank the list above, an exercise I performed last week, you will realize that you like it better than most of the Best Picture winners of the 2000s as well.
Overall, the only metric that matters is eyeballs. We can talk about the specifics until we’re blue in the face (you probably think I already have), but Hollywood is a money industry. In that regard, this show was a smashing success. 40.3 million viewers watched, which is the second best total over the last six years. During that timeframe, the average number of viewers had been 37.4 million. The high point had come during The Hurt Locker/Avatar year of 2009 when 41.7 million watched. An almost 3 million viewer bump from average and a 1.1 million improvement from last year is a win for all involved. The combination of an unusual host and a rare amount of blockbusters nominated for Best Picture led to heightened interest.