I’ll remember this 79th Academy Awards show as a mostly black-and-white amateur hour shot in the style of the 1950s. I feel compelled to ask whether the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is aware that the world now has color television? Where James Taylor singing Randy Newman’s song “Our Town” from Cars performed on a bare black stage with just a piano and a guitar. (At the very least, Sweet Baby James could have taken off his shirt and shown some middle-aged eye candy.) Where Ellen was performing shadow puppets behind a white screen to simulate a lame joke about Snakes On A Plane. (Looked more like Lobsters On A Plane To me. I’ll be seeing those shadow-puppets in my nightmares tonight.) Where the monologue and the commentary ignored topical jokes ranging from Bald Britney to that other dead blonde bimbo, Anna Nicole Smith. As a friend emailed me, “this was like a Reagan era show.” That was the low-tech level of this year’s broadcast. Which makes me wonder in disbelief why the very rich Oscar telecast seriously stinted on tonight’s production values. For chrissake, it didn’t even spring for a translator for lifetime achievement award winner Ennio Morricone, leaving poor Clint Eastwood to make sense of all that Italian. Tell me: Did Bernie The Accountant abscond with the show’s hefty budget? It was lacking in razzle-dazzle. It had no trash and flash. Halfway through this snore-fest, ABC was about to voluntarily pay the FCC $500,000 just to make Beyoncé’s boob pop out.

Nor did Sacha Baron Cohen appear. Asked to be a presenter, he said he would do it only if he could be in character as Borat. But the Powers-That-Be said, “No way,” thus eliminating what surely might have been an oasis of humor in a desert of mediocrity. Morons. (Click here for my live-blogging of the Oscar telecast.)

In summary, it was the night that the Academy finally killed off what used to be its show-stopper of a movie awards. The problem is that I and the rest of America are the ones who bear the scars of Oscars tonight, while Hollywood skips out the next morning to the doctor’s office for an emergency round of Botox. (Will someone please send me the name of Sherry Lansing’s plastic surgeon? He did a fab job. Or maybe people just look great when they’re no longer brow-beaten by Viacom’s Sumner Redstone.) Well, I say enough is enough. Who isn’t sick of getting stuck sitting through an ass-killing show that runs on and on beyond reason with no entertainment within it to speak of? Or waiting a full 15 minutes for even the first film clip to be shown? As a comedian friend told me: “If this goes on any longer, they’re going to be reporting next weekend’s Friday night box office, the obituary package is going to be out of date, and the ballots will be going out for next years’ awards.” Frustration echoed by this emailer: “If they show another montage, I think it should be of people killing themselves while watching the Oscars.” Read More »