So the ratings for the Academy Awards on Sunday night were in the toilet: An all-time low of 32 million viewers. Much moaning and groaning about what went wrong, which joined earlier speculation that the whole event has become irrelevant. My editor thinks the event's going the way of the Miss America pageant and we'll be watching it on Turner Classics in a few years.
Blame the lingering effects of the writers' strike if you want, but to my mind there are two things at work here and one of them is cyclical. As plenty of other people have pointed out, the award-worthy movies this year were a dark, dark bunch that did not play mainstream. Of the five best picture nominations, only one could be described as remotely upbeat and that was the movie about the pregnant high schooler. Every five years or so, a movie comes along that's a critical and commercial hit and that has an unstoppable pop culture momentum that draws audiences to the Oscar telecast like flies: "The Return of the King," "Titanic". And then you have years where the quality of the nominated films seems in inverse proportion to their commercial appeal. That would be 2007.
Tough. When you set up an award ceremony to honor the "best pictures of the year," you run the risk of looking elitist. "Spider-man 3" and "Shrek the Third" were the top-grossing movies of 2007 -- the most popular, in other words. Is anyone really going to suggest they were the best?
Of course not, so take your periodic lumps, AMPAS. What has changed over the years is that there are exponentially more diversions: other channels, other media, other awards shows, most of which are a lot more fun and have pushed Oscar into the status of the staid old lady of the genre. And that's where things need to be fixed if ratings aren't to continue in free-fall.
Sunday night was elegant, graceful, tactful, and dull as dirt. Where was the showmanship? Why bring on Amy Adams to sing the "Enchanted" song and dress her like she's playing the Oak Room at the Algonquin? Memo to Gil Cates: We want the glitz, the spectacle, the energy, and we don't mind if it's a little tacky. I found myself missing the days of mindbending Alan Carr production numbers because at least there was a pulse there. (Racing, overmedicated, but a pulse.) Even Jon Stewart seems too tamped down as host, and that's all wrong.
My modest proposal, then: Next year, get someone other than Cates to produce the thing. Someone-- and this is important -- with a lot less taste. Front-load the evening with star presenters who matter to moviegoers under 40. Serve alcohol. And give Jack's front-row seat and sunglasses to Sacha Baron Cohen.
One other matter I just have to get off my chest: That bit during the ceremonies where Cameron Diaz led off the cinematography nominations -- excuse me, "the cinematopolography nominations" -- by making fun of "Sunrise," the first film to win the award back in 1929? Diaz recited the names of the movie's characters -- The Man, The Wife, The Woman from the City -- as if to say: See how far we've come in eight decades? See how sophisticated we are, how primitive the movies used to be?
What a moron. Anyone who knows the least bit about the silent era also knows movies were hugely sophisticated by 1927, when "Sunrise" was first released, with mammoth sets, complex camera moves, multi-layered narratives, realistic performances. It was the talkie revolution kicked off by "The Jazz Singer" -- which hit theaters just two weeks after Murnau's movie -- that dialed Hollywood back to zero and inaugurated a new crudity while they worked the bugs out of the machinery.
"Sunrise," then, was a work of conscious, purposeful naivete -- a gentle piece of primitivism made by one of the medium's greatest artists, F. W. Murnau ("Nosferatu"). In a time of increasingly baroque silent productions, Murnau dared to shoot for poetic simplicity, and the resulting film won the 1929 Oscar for "Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production" -- the art-house award, basically.
Once you get past the melodramatic opening scenes in which the other woman (Margaret Livingston) almost talks the farmer (George O'Brien) into drowning his country-mouse wife (Janet Gaynor, in photo above), "Sunrise" moves into a beautifully shot, astonishingly tender tale of a man and a wife falling in love again during a trip to the city. It's not a movie for hardened sensibilities or "Transformers" fans, but it does still play very, very well in 2008, if you can find it (a standalone DVD is out of print -- probably available in libraries -- but you can buy the film as part of a "Best Picture" boxed set from Fox).
Seriously, this one's in my personal Top Fifty, and I'm hardly alone. I can't say the same for "Charlie's Angels".
