Here’s a modest proposal — an actual modest proposal, not an ironically Swiftian one — for tightening up the Oscars telecast, which officially clocked in this year at 3 hours, 51 minutes and 48 seconds:
Dump the short film Oscars.
There are three of them: for live-action short, animated short and documentary short. About 40 million people watch the show in the U.S. — and many millions more elsewhere — and if 100 of these folks have seen or even heard of all of these films, I’d be surprised.
Mind you, I like short films. I wish movie theaters would show them before the main features instead of video-game ads.
But you have to consider the entertainment value of seeing films you’ve never heard of winning awards you don’t care about so people you’ve never heard of can go up on stage and thank more people you’ve never heard of.
Give the shorts their own night like the Scientific and Technical Awards get — televise it even, and show the films — and sum up the winners on the main telecast.
Then the Academy Awards would be focused solely on feature films that have played in movie theaters. Isn’t that the general idea? At this point you’re more likely to see a short on a cell phone than the big screen.
Ditching the shorts isn’t a new idea. The Academy’s Board of Governors tried to abolish the live action and documentary short awards in 1992 (in the pre-animated-short days), and filmmakers and critics went ballistic, according to “Inside Oscar.”
The book’s co-author Damien Bona recounted that Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Robert Altman were among the filmmakers who took out ads calling on the board “to continue awarding Oscars to this vital cinematic form.”
The board put off the decision for a year, and come 1993, unanimously decided to keep the categories.
“And they’ve been with us ever since,” Bona said.
So while year after year we’ve heard about how overdue Scorsese was to win one of the golden guys, filmmakers whose names may never grace a major release were taking the very same stage to receive the very same statuette.
The most compelling reason to keep these categories? “They basically determine who wins the [Oscar-predicting] pools at parties,” Bona said.
A good point, actually. But not good enough.
An online poll of more than 130 Pop Machine readers found that 62.6 percent agree: Make the shorts go away come Oscar night.
Maybe Chris Connelly can be their escort.
Gore: Too big to be prez?
After hearing several people comment on the possible political implications of Al Gore’s relatively beefy physique, as displayed during his victorious Oscars appearance last weekend, I posted another Pop Machine poll asking:
“Would you be less likely to vote for Al Gore because he’s added some poundage?”
Of the more than 1,000 respondents, 61.9 percent said no, a mere 7.9 percent said yes, and 30.2 percent said they wouldn’t have voted for him anyway.
Well, good, I’m glad that issue is off the table.
Adding grief to insult
After Kevin O’Connell lost the sound-mixing Academy Award Sunday night — adding to his winless streak of 19 nominations — he rushed to the hospital where his ailing mother died in his arms.
In the interview room adjacent to the Kodak Theatre, victorious “Dreamgirls” mixer Mike Minkler was trashing O’Connell for talking up his losing streak: “I just wonder what Kevin’s trying to do out there by trying to get an award by using sympathy. And Kevin’s an OK mixer, but enough’s enough about Kevin. . . . I just think that he should take up another line of work.”
Tom O’Neil of the Los Angeles Times’ “Gold Derby” column reached O’Connell by e-mail. O’Connell said about Minkler’s comments: “I have not seen them personally, and at this point I have no intention of looking at them or reading about them. I’ll get back to you when I get that far down of my list of what is important to me.”
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Read Pop Machine, Mark Caro’s blog about popular culture, at bancodeprofissionais.com/popmachine
