The Oscars: Where's the Excitement?

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The Oscars are the Super Bowl for the rest of us — those of us who know that professional jealousy and bitchy remarks about designer clothes make for far more riveting combat than full-body blows, who know that Miramax's eternal ability to buy itself a Best Picture nomination is far more consequential than Bobby Knight's eternal ability to find himself another job coaching, um, hockey? And thankfully, it now has its own bloated pre-game show: not ABC's paltry, sycophantic half-hour with "Entertainment Tonight"'s addled Julie Moran, but the E! Entertainment Network red-carpet coverage, which I joined sometime around 1:30 p.m. Sunday afternoon but had apparently been in progress since about mid-January. Ultimate TV and TiVo, the fancy electronic video-recorder gadgets, advertise an inordinate amount on the E! pre-show, sending the implicit and quite accurate message that if you are spending a weekend afternoon watching, not just Joan and Melissa Rivers, not just Steve Kmetko and Jules Asner leading up to Joan and Melissa Rivers, not just Todd Newton and Cindy Hom leading up to Steve Kmetko and Jules Asner, but Michael Castner and Linda Grasso — the fourth string of E! anchors — leading up to Todd Newton and Cindy Hom... well, you obviously watch so damn much TV that you are in need of electronic assistance.

But if not for E!'s special blend of fawning and cattiness, what would we watch? Because the other way in which the Oscars have become the Super Bowl for the rest of us is that the tantalizing walk-up is really the show itself, otherwise, you're stuck watching a four-hour, snail-paced foregone conclusion, the only suspenseful element of which is the contents of the chip-dip bowl on your coffee table.

Since no one expects the awards themselves to generate much excitement, more depends on the host than ever before, particularly since this year Steve Martin was going to lift the schmaltz-coated fist of Billy Crystal. Martin, who's lately focused on his ar-teest side, writing humor for The New Yorker and plays for the stage, seemed to promise a brainier level of humor. Which, as David Letterman and, more recently, the Grammy's Jon Stewart can attest, you can usually count on to be cruelly rewarded at any L.A. awards show.

Martin did not bomb, as, I must admit, I was hoping he would. Because that would have meant pulling off a surreal, star-befuddling, one-time-only performance. Instead, he gave a safe, caretaker performance that was hardly a performance at all. True, his funniest jokes were laced with a measure of contempt for the industry (on the awards' use of the phrase, "The Oscar goes to..." rather than "The winner is...": "God forbid anybody should think of this as a competition. It might make the trade ads seem crass"). But Martin is thoroughly L.A. at heart, and he kept the crowd safely on his side with liberal name-dropping and use of the pronoun "we." He probably didn't guarantee himself an invite back with his competent, often funny job; but worse for him, he didn't guarantee that he'd never be asked back, either.

This year's Oscars were all about keeping it in control, a tight, safe and ultimately sterile production that was perfectly symbolized by the benighted "2001" set-design theme, full of monoliths and luminous spheres: the stage looked like the cover of a Yes album. To stay on schedule the producers even promised a high-definition television to the giver of the shortest acceptance speech (and who wasn't hoping to see Julia Roberts hoist her guaranteed Best-Julia-Roberts statuette for "Erin Brockovich" and say simply, "I'll take the TV too, please," and prance off?).

And they did a good job. Unfortunately, probably too good. The greedy, bloviating speeches may be the worst part of the ceremony, but they're also the best. If the Oscars are not a grand pageant of celebrity entitlement and hubris, then they are nothing. What you take away from the Oscars is not how early you went to bed that year: it's the hysterical Angelina Jolie moments, the irritating passive-aggressives saying, "Turn that clock off, you're making me nervous!" The latter comment came from the long-winded Roberts, who began "I have a television, so I'm going to spend some time here," but even with her whooping and unashamed use of her star power to bully the conductor in the orchestra pit — yet never quite getting around to thanking, oh, Erin Brockovich herself — she didn't quite approach a James Cameron "King of the World" moment.

Likewise with the musical numbers. There wasn't the bombastic excess of the past. But there wasn't much of anything else to replace it. The one strong number of the night was unadorned but nonetheless weird: Bjork, doing the eerie "I've Seen It All" from "Dancer in the Dark." The Icelandic singer once made a video with "Ren and Stimpy" animator John Kricfalusi, and here she looked like a winsome cartoon character in her meringue-y dress, alternating between a childish singsong and an operatic wail. Really, it might be worth getting rid of the Best Song category altogether, since it's basically been the same five songs for the last 15 years: one piece of Randy Newman hackery, one Disney song, one quasi-Disney song, one interesting song by a cool artist, which will lose, and song by an old guy — this year Bob Dylan, looking a touch like Salvador Dali. (Did Dylan alone get to play his song in full to justify the cost of the satellite link from Australia, or because the Academy is controlled by aging Baby Boomers?)

Indeed, the most interesting musical act of the night was Britney Spears in the Pepsi commercials. Maybe the solution is for Oscar to bring in commercial sponsors for each act. What commercials do is to make something square look artistic; what the Oscars do is to take original artists and make them look square.

This year's attempt to improve the Oscars tried to do so by removing the things we hate about the show. That was the problem. We want the things we hate about the show. The dirty secret is that we want the Academy Awards to be boring — we want, and we watch every year, the slow, predictable rituals that mark another year of our leisure time past. We want the In Memoriam roll. We want Dino De Laurentiis receiving the Irving Thalberg Home Audience Mass Sedation Award. We want the speech from the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. We want that four hours of tedium, the better to set off that one perverse moment of total surprise.

And this year, we didn't get it. We hoped that moment might come from the increasingly pissy-looking Russell Crowe, and not because of those death threats against him: every time the camera focused on his surly face, you wondered if they brought in that extra security to protect him or protect everyone else from him. Then he won and, of all things, turned gentlemanly on us, just when we needed him.

There was even a been-there, wore-that feel to Oscar fashion. Sure, Jennifer Lopez wore a diaphanous top that illuminated both the width and darkness of her areolae, but I mean — yawn — we'd pretty much had our curiosity satisfied on that front a year ago. No offense, J-Lo. But it would have taken more than a pair of perky nipples to perk up this 2001 odyssey.