OSCAR'S
MAKEOVER
Ten modest proposals for juicing up
the Academy Awards' annual snooze-fest
Illustration by Charlie Powell
OSCAR'S
MAKEOVER
Ten modest proposals for juicing up
the Academy Awards' annual snooze-fest
Illustration by Charlie Powell
Like the Super Bowl, which is more often than not a really bad football game, the Oscars usually make for some of the most yawn-inducing TV imaginable.
I used to think that nobody took the Academy Awards seriously, that people mainly watched the show to make fun of Hollywood's pomposity and self-adoration, heckle the fashion mistakes and throw popcorn at the TV during the tacky production numbers. My favorite Oscar-casts of the eight I reviewed as TV critic for the San Francisco Examiner were the 1989 Academy Awards, which live in infamy as the Beach Blanket Babylon Oscars, and the 1995 telecast, a.k.a David Letterman Lays an Egg. The way I saw it, both the Beach Blanket Babylon show -- filled with riotous gay camp and climaxed by Rob Lowe and Snow White singing a salute to Hollywood -- and the Dave Oscars, in which Letterman turned the ceremonies into a three-and-a-half-hour version of "Late Show" -- were refreshingly irreverent tweaks of an unforgivably starchy institution.
Evidently, I was alone in my opinion.
Next page: Foot-kissing the stars
