Cinema
Oscar longueurs
Mark Steyn
parody lyrics is to stick as closely to the original as possible, and Billy Crystal's Oscar opener was exemplary. He was using `Tonight' from West Side Story:
`Oh moon, grow bright And make this endless day Endless night ... '
Or as Billy sang it:
`Oh moon, shine bright And make this endless show End tonight ... '
I'd guess it was the work of Marc Shaiman, who was nominated in his own right for Best Song with 'Blame Canada', but it proved, alas, all too prophetic. On the East Coast, Sunday had long since turned into Monday by the time the producers of American Beauty staggered up on stage to collect the award for Longest List of Co- Executive Producers.
In 1971, when George C. Scott declined to turn up to collect for Patton, he dis- missed the Oscars as a 'two-hour meat market'. If only. Now it's a four-and-a-half hour meat market, but without any meat. Richard and Lili Zanuck, this year's pro- ducers, went around town boasting about everything they'd slung out: the dance numbers — gone; the Best Song nominees — compressed from five individual perfor- mances into one perfunctory medley; the leaden TelePrompter exchanges read by glassy-eyed presenters — reduced to one leaden TelePrompter line per glassy-eyed presenter. The Zanucks had cut everything, and yet amazingly the show was longer than ever.
So while it was, as they say, a great night for British film — or anyway for Britons in films, which isn't quite the same thing — it was a lousy night for American awards cer- emonies. The Oscars are now beginning to take on the same schizophrenic quality as British awards shows from the Eighties, when the orchestra would play 'This Could Be The Start Of Something Big' and then Ken Loach would be presented with the award for Bleakest Indictment of Thatch- er's Britain by some flown-in top-rank American star like, er, Raquel Welch, wearing a gown that cost more than his film. This year's Oscars were supposed to be a hip, ironic show, but you can't have a hip, ironic awards ceremony: it's showbiz or it's dead. And, as Billy Crystal seems to be the last guy in town man enough to stand up and be openly showbizzy, that means after his razzle-dazzle curtainraiser there isn't a lot going on. I didn't particularly mind the Burt Bacharach movie-song med- ley, but it seemed cruel to then give the Best Song Oscar to Phil Collins for a song which will never be heard of again.
Incidentally, what have the Zanucks got against dance numbers? In the old days, the Oscars had big routines because Holly- wood made musicals and they had a lot of song'n'dance men hanging around. But all those guys died or retired and by the Eight- ies we were down to Rob Lowe duetting with Snow White on 'Proud Mary, Keep On Burning'. So they junked the big dance spectacular and replaced it with the 'inter- pretive tap dance' in which some dancer usually black — would tap out his interpretation of The English Patient or Schindler's List or My Left Foot. After last year's Saving Private Ryan routine, in which the tap-dancer interpreted D-Day in tap, it was felt that the form had run up against its natural limits. But don't blame the poor old interpretive dance boy: he's only there because — unlike Sammy Davis Jr or even Burt Lancaster — Ethan Hawke and Toby Maguire (both apparently big Hollywood stars) can't dance.
So the question is: what can they do? It seems there's no dramatic academy in the world that can teach an actor how to pre- sent the nominations for Best Original Song In An Adapted Screenplay. But who knows? Maybe it's been part of the Moscow Art Theatre syllabus for decades: `Today,' says Stanislaysky, 'we will study how to read the introduction for Gwyneth Paltrow convincingly.' What's my motiva- tion?' says Matt Damon. 'You want to look like a jerk in front of a billion people?' `Come again?' says Matt. 'I see dead peo- ple' from The Sixth Sense was the big line of the night, but I found myself thinking: I see dull people. Aside from Michael Caine, who was at least human, most of the other winners just read out lists of names, which is the equivalent of a box of Kwikkie Krap- ola breakfast cereal thanking his E-num- bers. Why can't the Academy just tell these butt-numbing yawn-mongers that all the people they want to thank will be listed on the official website but that they have to use their 45 seconds on TV to say some- thing else? When Emil Jannings picked up the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Last Command in 1928, I'll bet he said something more than simply thanking Tamsin Weiner, Doug Vest, Armand Croissant and everyone else in develop- ment at MiraWorks.
But it's hard not to feel that these surly, charmless grunters really don't have any- thing to say: they're all credits and no show. The only contentious moment came when John Irving, screenwriter of The Cidar House Rules, dedicated his award to the fight to keep 'a woman's right to choose' — not exactly a controversial stand with this crowd. In the Seventies, Bert Schneider, winner of Best Documentary Feature, read out a telegram from the Viet Cong. Then Frank Sinatra came on, attacked Dustin Hoffman and Francis Ford Coppola, and read out a disclaimer from the Academy about the Viet Cong stuff. Then a furious Shirley MacLaine attacked Sinatra because she too was a member of the Academy and no one had asked her if she'd wanted to dissociate herself from the Viet Cong. Then John Wayne said the Viet Gong guy was a pain in the ass. In those days, Hollywood was still diverse enough to have two points of view on any subject. Now it doesn't have any view, just a lot of portentous generalities about how motion pictures 'show us the truth in all our lives'.
With hindsight, the Seventies were the golden age of Oscar shows. It was fun when Marlon Brando had his award picked up by Sacheen Littlefeather, Apache Indian and President of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee, protesting about the treatment of Indians by Holly- wood. It was even better when she turned out to be Maria Cruz, struggling actress and Miss American Vampire of 1970. It was touching, in 1977, when Debby Boone sang 'You Light Up My Life' backed by a chorus of 11 children from 'the John Tracy Clinic for the Deaf' interpreting the lyric in sign language. It was even more poignant when it subsequently emerged that they were just regular Equity kids pretending to be deaf and that the signing was complete gibberish. Ali, happy days. For next year's Oscars, I intend to turn the sound down and sign it myself.
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