The Academy Awards remind me of New Year’s Eve. For weeks, nobody can talk about anything else, and the hype keeps snowballing bigger and bigger until even non-entertainment-related publications like Scientific American and Car & Driver run cover headlines like “Our Oscar Picks, Which We Generated Really Really Scientifically, In America” and “Best-Actor Nominee Kevin Spacey Talks Turbo,” and by the time the day itself finally arrives, I just want it to come and go so I don’t have to hear about it anymore. I don’t care what pomade the supporting-actress nominees plan to use to keep their chignons in place, I don’t care how many hours of sleep the guy in charge of insurance at Bulgari will lose until the starlets turn their borrowed necklaces back in, I don’t care whether left-handed cinematographers with brown eyes historically lose out to their right-handed, blue-eyed counterparts, and I don’t care where the Academy voters eat breakfast in the morning – just get everyone past Scylla and Charybdis (a.k.a. “Joan and Melissa Rivers”) and into their seats, slap the restraints on Roberto Benigni, tell the guys in the control booth to pixellate Drew Barrymore’s butt-crack, and let’s get on with it, shall we?

Alas, the Academy Awards producers appear to have absolutely zero familiarity with the “get on with it” concept. When I heard that a clear-thinking individual had at last euthanized the interpretive dance number, I applauded the decision, not realizing that seven other history-of-film montages would spring up in its place, not to mention approximately one hundred and fifteen reaction shots of the tuxedo-wearing stick of liver jerky currently masquerading as Jack Nicholson. I liked the opening montage with Billy Crystal digitally inserted into various scenes, and I really liked Crystal’s opening number, especially “The ‘Insider’ Waltz,” but I don’t think we needed both, and I certainly don’t think we needed both the opening montage AND the opening-song sampler AND the “history according to the movies” montage AND the annual montage o’ dead people. Enough with the back-patting already, because you can roll all the hooray-for-Hollywood highlight reels you want, but your organization still gave Marisa Tomei an Oscar, so let’s move it along, please. And we could have lived without the Brady-Bunch-Variety-Hour-esque musical pastiche, too. I like me some Isaac Hayes, don’t get me wrong, but the next time the show’s producers feel obligated to give Garth Brooks something to do, they can maroon him in Watts without his clothes. That’ll keep him busy. And quiet. And I’ve got nothing against the Polish director the Academy honored, but who decided we should see a montage of all forty of his films before Jane Fonda could get around to “preventing” him with his award? Probably the same person who decided we should endure the chemistry-free, humor-free banter of the new Charlie’s Angels, during which we could practically see the ring the bong left around Cameron Diaz’s mouth. Next year, make sure the line in the budget that reads “the guy with the hook” doesn’t get cut, or at least give the orchestra conductor a gong, and knock it off with the lingering cutaways to Peter Coyote, because we saw the guy a thousand times, and not once could we gather enough evidence to settle the No Way Does He Have Pants On Behind The Desk vs. He Has To Have Pants On, It’s The Oscars For God’s Sake debate – just go to commercial so we can send a runner across the street for a box of Vivarin.

Of course, no matter how carefully the producers plan, they can’t control the blathering of the winners, and it’s the speeches that really send the length of the broadcast into Nicholas Nickleby territory. Surprisingly, the speeches didn’t even run that long this year, except for the Thalberg Award segment, which turned into a serious endurance test: first we had to listen to Nicholson ramble on a bit about his good buddy Warren Beatty; then we had to watch an endless reel of Beatty-ana, most of which did little to convince me that he merited a lifetime achievement award (Ishtar much?); then we had to sit through Beatty’s never-ending rambling in receipt of the award, and he repeated himself and repeated what Nicholson had said and repeated the twenty-seventh stupid joke of the night about Annette Bening going into labor during the awards ceremony, and he went on so long that I could have gone out, gotten laid, gotten pregnant, and gone into labor my own self by the time he finally stopped blabbering and hobbled backstage, and I found myself praying that Annette’s water would break already so that the jokes, and Beatty, would finally stop. Most of the other winners confined themselves to a few minutes of thank-yous, and the overall stammering quotient seemed to have gone down this year. I admired John Irving’s forthrightness on the subject of abortion rights. Angelina Jolie’s references to her brother struck me as a bit creepy, but she seemed so happy that I forgave her both the incestuous overtones and the “Goth Talk” attire that she’d selected. Hilary Swank proved yet again that she kicks ass by sweeping over to the microphone, delivering a series of composed and classy remarks without a single “um” or “uh,” thanking everyone in her sincerest tones, and reminding everyone of the debt she and the filmmakers owe to Brandon Teena. They should teach that speech in schools, because it ruled.

I did wonder a few times what goes through the minds of these people as they ascend to the stage. An unprepared victor sincerely may not have expected to win, and thus may not have prepared any remarks, but Beatty must have known he’d get the Thalberg for at least a month – he couldn’t have written something down, rehearsed his speech a couple of times, gone over it while shaving once or twice? Like, thank your mentors, thank your colleagues, thank your family, and get off the stage before too many people remember Dick Tracy. I found Michael Caine’s reaction to his win quite touching, but his speech did veer into wedding-toastmaster territory towards the end there, and he’d done this before. So had Kevin Spacey, and he too seemed genuinely touched by his win, but in the time it took him to haul that big old closet up on stage with him and issue yet another non-denial denial on the subject of his sexual preferences, I could have taken a bathroom break instead of waiting for him to emerge from said closet, which naturally he did not do.

And speaking of closets…I don’t know who dubbed purple the color of the moment, but that person owes Tyra Banks an apology. Tyra Banks in turn owes Barney and Ma Ingalls an apology for forcing them to mate and give birth to her dress. Julianne Moore owes her breasts an apology for jamming them into her Valkyrie outfit from The Big Lebowski. Tom Cruise’s low-flow shower head owes his hair an apology, and Haley Joel Osment’s mom owes Haley and his hair an apology, not to mention Alex P. Keaton, from whom she stole the bear-claw ‘do she inflicted on her son, and then she can turn around and apologize to Nicole Kidman for having an eleven-year-old child taller than Nicole’s husband, and Nicole can pass that apology along to the art director of Flash Gordon for wearing one of his sets as a dress. Arnold Schwarzenegger can skip the apology if he promises to leave Maria Shriver alone for a night or two – you already have four kids, dude. Give the wife a break. And a diaphragm. And the number of a decent stylist, because she needs a hot oil but quick, and tell her to pass it along to Gwyneth Paltrow, along with a quarter so that Gwynnie can buy herself a clue about how to dress for a formal event. On second thought, make it five bucks; she can pick Russell Crowe up a pack of smokes while she’s out. I’ve never seen such dourly convincing evidence of a nic fit in progress, so for god’s sake let the guy out the back door for a cigarette before he kills somebody. Oh, wait, better make it ten bucks, because Harmony Korine needs a bottle of delousing shampoo and a comb, and get a comb for Keanu too, and a handkerchief to absorb the blatant coke-sweat that keeps beading up on his brow and upper lip, and if Gwyneth has any money left over, she can buy a big old ham sandwich and divide it between Lara Flynn Boyle and Aimee Mann, and a box of rat poison to slip into the champagne glasses of the boys from N’Sync, and if Gwyneth happened to find a loose paving stone on the street, and she happened to, say, toss it in the air because she feels, in theory, exuberant about paving stones, and it just happened to land on Meredith Vieira, you know, totally by accident, and Meredith Vieira just happened to get squashed like a bug, thwarting her from perpetrating her oh-hi-Tom-is-this-seat-taken routine on the public ever again, I think we could probably furnish the lovely Miss Paltrow with some sort of monetary compensation for that also, provided she swears up and down to shower before next year’s ceremony.

A year ago today, I had roughly the same complaints.
And two years ago today.
I’ve talked about Hilary and Haley before.
In case you had the good fortune to miss the ceremony…

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