Paige Price, star of Broadway’s “Saturday Night Fever,” recently passed on some showbiz e-mail that came her way announcing a petition drive to have the beloved Debbie Allen dance number restored to the Oscar telecast.
The producers decided to drop the dance from the Oscar show this Sunday because it dawned on them (after several decades) that people actually find these spavined cavorts awful and boring and because the Oscars are now some four hours long and need to be trimmed somewhere.
The petition-drive promoter did not differ from this assessment. He described the annual dance as “that cobbled-together orgy of poorly thought out dance moves designed to illustrate the connecting theme of the nominated pictures. … As bad as you knew it would be, there would always come at least one jaw-dropping moment of truly transcendently stupid choreography … as if every idea Cher rejected as being too embarrassing, even for her show, flowed downstream to collect in the cloaca maxima that was the Debbie Allen Dance Number.”
He apparently, however, just loves this moment of “gleeful horror” and wants the Debbie Allen dance number restored, suggesting that the Oscars drop the Irving Thalberg Award instead.
I declined to sign the petition, electronically or otherwise. With all due respect to democratic initiative, not to speak of “gleeful horror,” I would suggest a better idea. Why not drop both the Debbie Allen dance number and the Irving Thalberg Award? No one remembers who Irving Thalberg was anyway, and it’s never been clear to me what one has to do to win one.
And why stop there? Indeed, if the dance numbers are being dropped because they’re boring, incompetent and tacky–and the goal is to get the Oscars down to under four hours–why not apply the same standard to other aspects of the show?
Get (rid of) Bruce. Whoopi Goldberg was dropped as host of the Oscar show this year in large part because of the vulgar, tasteless material she’s used in the past. That material was largely written by campy Hollywood gag writer Bruce Vilanch (gag is an apt term). But she’s being replaced by Billy Crystal, and his material also comes from Bruce. Instead of adding Crystal, why not simply subtract Vilanch? To move things along, they could replace the vulgar, tasteless jokes with, say, Sir Ian McKellan reciting Shakespeare for as long as the audience could understand it (37 seconds?).
Ditch the dreadful black tie. Easily as vulgar and tasteless as Goldberg’s jokes and as boring and incompetent as the Allen dance is the appallingly inappropriate–yes, even ghastly–alleged formal wear worn by male presenters and recipients. Even Daniel Day Lewis, the son of an English poet, showed up one year looking like Cardinal Richelieu’s chief executioner. Ban from the stage and camera any male formal wear that isn’t classic black tie, classic black jacket and white formal shirt with collar and studs. That’ll reduce the number of men on the show to–as memory serves–Nicholas Cage and film clips of Humphrey Bogart.
No wobbly walk-ons. Perhaps because so many movie stars have taken to attending fashion shows lately, Oscar fashions have vastly improved from the disaster days of homemade Kim Basinger couture, Daffy Duck-made Darryl Hannah couture, stratospheric Ashley Judd skirt splits and pretty much anything worn by Madonna. Nowadays, many take to the stage in sleek, chic Armani–but they stumble along in their clumpy shoes and high heels much as Dick Butkus might in the same outfits, and it takes them forever to get to the podium. Either replace them with real models, or wheel them out on skate boards.
Fewer thanks. Believe me, no one in Hollywood is at all as grateful as they seem to be on Oscar night. Certainly few of them could actually believe that anyone else was at all responsible for their long-overdue success. Yet, movies now seem to have about two dozen producers (none of them at all photogenic) and, when their project wins, each seems to have about three dozen people to thank. Some actors and actresses find it necessary to thank their film’s entire credits, as though fearing some grip or “best boy” is going to poison their cappuccino on their next movie set if they don’t.
Others (Gwyneth Paltrow comes tearfully to mind) find the Oscars the ideal occasion to tell each and every family member how much the actor or actress loves them. Gack. Limit every winner to one relative and one crew member to thank. They won’t dare pick just one, and so should be offstage quicker than you can say Debbie Allen. Better, limit the winners to Juliet Binoche, who took about 10 seconds to give one of the most gracious Oscar acceptance speeches on record–without, as I recall, thanking anyone but the Academy.
Cut the close-ups. The nominees should be spared the prying cameras as they await the opening of the envelopes, much as Sydney Carton’s seamstress friend in “Tale of Two Cities” awaited the dropping of the guillotine blade. It’s intrusive and ill-mannered. And anyway, Meryl Streep’s been nominated so many times that, in her close-up this year, I expect she’ll be asleep.
By now, I think we’ve cut the show down to about 22 minutes. If you want to reduce the time viewers spend watching it further, schedule the Debbie Allen dance number in the first segment.
And put Kathie Lee Gifford in it.
Finally: Next time, have them steal the statuettes five minutes before the show.
