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I received this email today from Gene Oliver, of the RKO ALLRED5 movie theater in 
Pryor, Oklahoma. He's responding to Sunday night's Oscar diss of cineplexes by Jerry Seinfeld. (Said the comedian: "In movie theaters now, they're trying to get you to pick up the garbage around your seat. I'm picking nothing up. I'm the one who threw it down. How many different jobs do I have to do?" Then Jerry accused movie theater owners: "You rip us off on overpriced crap.") I live-blogged that I thought the theater owners would be pissed. (From the Internet: The Allred is located in downtown Pryor, OK. From its big triangle-shaped marquee to its tiled ticket booth to its blinking light bulbs, it dominates the street. Operational since 1919, the Allred underwent an expensive renovation to put three screens in the main building, and another two screens in an annex.)
Oliver starts: "Hello Miss Finke: I am a theater owner in small town America and read your column every day. My family has been in exhibition since 1933. Thank you for including your statement about Seinfeld and the price of concessions. My theater works on a profit margin of 8-10% and we work very hard to keep movies available to the public. 
The only reason that theaters MUST charge the prices for concessions is to survive. Without concessions there would be NO venues for the exhibtion of film. Without popcorn there would be no industry, it is that simple. There is distribution AND exhibition of films. One does not exist without the other. "It would be helpful if 'stars' understood that without concessions they would have nowhere to play their films. It is hard enough to withstand the criticism of our customers who have no idea what it takes to keep a theater profitable. Now they have an advocate who benefits in dollars for the fact that theaters are open at all. Read More »
Post-Oscars Paramount is going announcement crazy today. Guess it's that studio's way of over-compensating for Babel's Best Picture loss. (Chin up, guys: at least you got the An Inconvenient Truth documentary win.):
Newly crowned Oscar winner Marty Scorsese will join with Mick Jagger and direct The Long Play, a film set in the world of the music business spanning three decades. Project will re-team Scorsese with The Departed screenwriter Bill Monahan, also fresh from an Academy Award victory. Scorsese, Jagger and Victoria Pearman will produce. Film is based on Jagger's original idea which he and Pearman’s Jagged Films took to Scorsese several years ago. Together they developed the project and brought it to Paramount. Scorsese recently entered into a 4-year, first-look deal with Paramount to direct and produce entertainment across all platforms. Jagger and Scorsese recently collaborated on a Rolling Stones feature length concert documentary shot at The Beacon theater in New York to be released in the Fall. 
and... Star Trek will return to the big screen under J.J. Abrams. The team behind the film will include Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci (Mission Impossible III) who wrote the screenplay and will executive produce with Bryan Burk. Abrams and Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof will produce. The film begins shooting this fall for a Xmas Day 2008 release. 
So now that he's officially boasting movie bonafides, he could be cleared to take over as Oscar host. What would be great about Seinfeld emceeing is that he's the essence of autonomy: he'd ignore the show producers trying to control him and everyone else. (They always try to terrorize the hosts, to the detriment of creativity and comedy.) Seinfeld would just do his own thing, the consequences be damned. I'm certain the Academy threw a fit when they heard Jerry last night dissing cineplexes. 
("In movie theaters now, they're trying to get you to pick up the garbage around your seat. I'm picking nothing up. I'm the one who threw it down. How many different jobs do I have to do?" Then he accuses the movie theater owners: "You rip us off on overpriced crap." Now, an Oklahoma theater owner has 
UPDATED: *According to news reports, ratings for the 2007 Oscars improved a little over last year's telecast. An average of 39.9 million people watched the 79th annual Academy Awards on ABC last night. That's an improvement of 1 million viewers over last year's Oscar telecast. The show ran about 3 hours and 50 minutes -- the longest Oscarcast since the 2002 show, which stretched over 4 hours. Despite the ratings bump over last season, it still fell a couple million viewers short of the '04 and '05 Academy Awards shows. ABC is also trumpeting improved ratings among younger viewers. The benchmark adults 18-49 rating for this year's show was 14.0, up just a tenth of a point from last year's 13.9. In the smaller group of adults 18-34, though, the awards improved from 12.0 in 2006 to 12.9 Sunday, the best in that demographic since 2002. Ratings in all the adult-women demos were up too. The 39.9 million viewer average makes the Oscars the most-watched entertainment broadcast of this season. The season premiere of American Idol, at 37.4 million, was the previous leader. ABC says about 74.8 million people watched at least six minutes of the broadcast. Cut that down to one minute, and the number rises to 87 million....*
I heard Alan Horn's name (Warner Bros.). And Brad Grey's name (Paramount, along with John Lesher's at Paramount Classics). But one merciful first of this Oscars broadcast was that hardly any lawyers or agents were thanked this time around. There'll be hell to pay come Monday morning for that oversight, trust me. Agencies will raise their commissions to 20%. Lawyers to 10%. 
(Manicurists to 5%.) The first agent mention went from Little Miss Sunshine's screenwriter Michael Arndt to Tom Strickler at Endeavor. Congrats, but now the gentile has to bring bagels for everyone at the Wednesday motion picture meeting. Meanwhile, a CAA motion picture lit agent jumped off the roof. Endeavor's Ari Emanuel received the Oscar thank-you from Marty Scorsese. So it's Endeavor's night! That thud you just heard was Bryan Lourd, Kevin Huvane and Richard Lovett at CAA pushing Rand Holston off the planet. 
There's no great mystery as to why The Departed won Best Picture and Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing. It was a terrific film. It made a lot of money so the public liked it enormously. It had classy actors and a crackling script. Marty Scorsese was the sentimental favorite going into this contest. And, well, a comedy never wins Best Picture. And Academy members either loved or hated Babel. Despite what the Oscars pundits tell you, this isn't rocket science: all a motion picture needs to snag the award is for about 1,300 voters to feel passionately enough about it and mark their 
Since he’s never won for Best Director, the envy factor in his case is null and void." I also embraced The Departed as "my own favorite. I was floored that this tour de force from a major studio received less nominations than Pan’s Labyrinth from minor Picturehouse. Then I remembered that Warner Bros. is lousy at mounting Oscar campaigns." But, at crunch-time, I waffled: "So which pic will win? Hell if I know. It will be decided by PR. Oscar voters don’t want to seem out of touch with the public, which would favor The Departed, but they also pride themselves on not being prisoner to convention, which would favor Babel." I had Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker and Jennifer Hudson right, which wasn't hard: they were shoo-ins. But Best Supporting Actor tripped me up. I narrowed it down to Alan Arkin and Jackie Earle Haley, but I sided with Haley because of his child ... 
(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.
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." 
Erroll Morris' interviews of the nominees kicks off the show. And it lays a huge egg. The package is too inside. And the TV viewing audience has no idea who most of these people are. When, oh when, is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences going to stop being so "insider" on their telecast. How, in the world does a quirky piece like this endear movies to the world audience? It doesn't!
"It's my job to relax you and put you at ease.... I can't even imagine what you people are going through... But don't worry about that. What you should worry about is there are a billion people watching you." (I don't think that's true anymore!)
That's what the official Academy Awards website kept saying. That's what the ads said. So basically, the public was lied to! With the show starting 30 minutes later than expected, it's doubtful that people on the East Coast are going to stay up to see the end. S when people were predicting this would be the longest Oscarcast ever, they were inadvertently including this half-hour "bonus." Lying to an audience is not the best way to start off. 
Instead, there's this puff stuff. ABC's Road To The Oscars 2007 begins with a cute CGI piece starring the Happy Feet penguins and squeezing sight gag references to Borat, Cars, Little Miss Sunshine's yellow van and star Abigail Breslin. Then come the Red Carpet interviews with Chris Connelly hosting. Leonardo DiCaprio calls Marty Scorsese "my favorite filmmaker in the world". Steve Carell claims that, after being in that damn bus all those weeks, "Greg Kinnear has horrible body odor." 
Joan Rivers is sounding sane, although someone has given Melissa a thingamajig to "illustrate" the Red Carpet activity. So, on your TV screen, all you see are white scrawl marks. Will Smith's son, who starred with him in The Pursuit of Happyness, will be presenting tonight, Will tells Joan. Clearly Rivers is trying hard not to piss off the stars as they make their way down the line of microphones. After E! and after the TV Guide channel, where could she and Melissa go if they blow this gig, right? I still say the classic Joan Oscars performance of all time was when Rosa Parks was coming down the Red carpet. And, unable to think of a single thing substantive to ask her, Joan asked this civil rights icon: "Who Are You Wearing?" (Parks answered, "I bought my dress in a department store.") Joan interviewing Babel director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Joan asks him, 
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