Sunday’s Oscar telecast was a little bit like a State of the Union address given by a president in the final year of a failing administration.
As fires rage and the world counts the minutes until they can be rid of the guy, the president mounts the podium to try, for one last time, to shroud himself in the ancient vestiges of his office and summon some nostalgia for when we all loved him. He ticks off the laundry list of plans (though they’re now shrunk to repainting the Postal Center and encouraging kids to save their allowances) but mostly, the sad spectacle is a lot of “Remember how we all came together back during the great flood!”
And the audience struggles to play along, knowing that this charade should have ended long ago.
Which was pretty much what happened at this year’s Academy Awards.
In the long, long, looong build-up to Oscar night, there were so many elephants pressing for tickets into the room that one wondered whether there’d still be room for the statuettes.
First, there has been Hollywood’s long march through the #MeToo revelations, kicking off with the news that Harvey Weinstein, the industry’s most famous working producer—and the inventor of the modern Oscar race—has all-but-openly been a psychotic serial predator in the industry for 30 years. This was followed with a flood of stories revealing that in Hollywood forms of abuse that were rooted out of other industries decades ago remain commonplace.
Then there are the ongoing racial/representational battles—carried over from the #OscarsSoWhite campaign—about who gets to be a Hollywood star and what kind of stories get made.
Then there’s the possibility that there might not even be a film industry a couple years from now. In this past year audiences—particularly young audiences—melted away from the ticket-buying habit and Hollywood saw the assault of the streaming-centric tech giants increase to the point where, for the first time in half a century, one of Hollywood’s great studios will soon cease to exist.
And to top it all off, the Academy decided that this was the moment to take a sharp turn away from Hollywood’s historically populist, middlebrow roots and devote Oscar’s big stage to a celebration of the sort of obscure, niche films that were once the province of the Independent Spirit Awards.
Things are so bad that the network carrying the show chose to build its promotional campaign not around the glories of cinema but around last year’s epic flub. The ads for the 90th Academy Awards didn’t shine a light on the greatness of this year’s movies so much as beg people to rubberneck because ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN at the Oscars.
And the show couldn’t even keep that promise. During the six month campaign season, the division of spoils between these mostly-unseen movies had been predetermined and the awards played out almost entirely to form.
Which meant that the remaining tension came from how the show would dance around the various controversies. Would they address the Weinstein question head on? Would stars on the red carpet talk to Ryan Seacrest, who was accused of harassment by a former employee just this last week?
In the end, Oscar danced around it all just fine. Jimmy Kimmel made some jokes that strode the line between too pious and too disrespectful. Most of the stars avoided Seacrest, which was embarrassing for the E! Network, but not a complete disaster. The winners made nods to the various intersectional contretemps, but stopped short of leading a charge on the Disney gates.
What the show lacked then, was any clear reason for being there. The big Dream Factory standard bearers, shown in the montages and salutes to film, were all in the past, and mostly in the distant past. Hollywood still makes hits every year (although not enough of them), but it no longer creates the spectacles that define people’s lives and gets kids across the world dreaming of movies.
The Shape of Water now joins Moonlight, Spotlight, Birdman, 12 Years a Slave, Argo and The Artist in the stretch of Oscar winners whose sole legacy will be serving as the answers to trivia questions.
Throughout the night, ABC aired promos for its upcoming resuscitation of the Roseanne show, which next week will join ABC’s resuscitation of American Idol on the network’s senior-friendly lineup. And in truth, this year’s Oscars reminded me of one of these Frankenstein affairs: A project stripped of any ideas or inspiration; a production cobbled together with pieces of other shows that people used to like.
Richard Rushfield is editor of The Ankler, a daily newsletter about the entertainment industry. Subscribe to The Ankler here.
