In Contention

By Josh Spiegel

March 1, 2011

I was gonna host the Academy Awards, but then I got high.

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The Oscars are at war with the Oscars. Not until Sunday night was this notion made so clear, so evident, and so frustrating. Do the Oscars honor the new and try to stay hip and fresh, or do they represent the ideal of old Hollywood? There are so many problems with sticking to either of those concepts, unfortunately. As evidenced by the show on ABC two nights ago, the Academy is the equivalent of your grandpa. He means well, he’s very nice, but his taste in movies and humor is rooted in nostalgia, except when he tries to reference something “hip” like Twitter or that newfangled gadget called the Internet. Let’s not mince words, though. The actual awards be damned: the Oscars, this year, flat-out sucked.

Not to toot my own horn, but while I didn’t end up with the most overall correct picks in our yearly Oscar predictions, if you had an Oscar pool, it was likely comprised of the major categories. In the top 10 categories — Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Animated Feature, Documentary, Original Screenplay, and Adapted Screenplay—I was all aces, folks (and was the only person on our site to get those all correct). Some of my colleagues — and likely many viewers — were surprised that Tom Hooper won for Best Director, but there are times when all you have to do is look at who’s won the precursors. Whatever bile I shall spew against the Oscars this year, the awards themselves were unsurprising and expected.




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Maybe that was the first problem. As I’ve said in past columns, how do the Oscars remain relevant in an increasingly speedy culture? The awards season begins in December and runs for nearly three full months. Most people don’t follow the ups and downs of the season, but this year, we’ve just been flatlining for a month. The preliminary ratings for the show were down from last year, proving that having “young and hip” hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway was a wash. If they’d been funny or engaging or charming, I would be fine with the experiment, but at no point during the show were they any of those things. Hathaway has enough ebullience for everyone in that theater, but by the end of the show, her chipmunk-like enthusiasm was driving me up the wall.

From beginning to end, the Oscars were just another example of why Hollywood — or some surprisingly powerful factions within it — is so out of touch with the younger audiences that give it the money it needs to survive. As long as comedy writer Bruce Vilanch is the grand poobah of the Oscar jokesters, then we are stuck with pain for a long time. Who do you think came up with the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon joke? James Franco looked like he was being punched in the stomach for having to recite it. Anne Hathaway can clearly sell anything, at least to the point where it doesn’t seem like she hates herself for hosting. But there was no fun onstage except in the unexpected moments, which were rare. Kirk Douglas’s presentation of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar was a love-it-or-hate-it moment, but Justin Timberlake’s “You know…” reference minutes later, was hilarious.


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