Oscar's need to lighten up to attract viewers

By: Nathan Mattise

Posted: 2/26/08

I didn't plan on this; the TV gods just hate me because I never got into "Lost." But Sunday night was a wasteland of entirely unwatchable television. I couldn't even get TNT to give me "What Women Want," as an option. So reluctantly…I watched the Academy Awards again.

It was three hours of my life I'd like back. I could've picked up the paper Monday morning, read the winners and experienced the same level of frustration.

In light of that, I'm writing to help. I have a few suggestions for next year to make the Academy Awards a better watch. And by "watch" I mean it won't be the lowest-rated Oscars ever - kind of like this year's was.

1.) Quit being so pretentious.

I'm not saying the Oscars are about attracting viewers, but that highlights the problem. Movies lots of people watch simply don't win Oscars. The top box office films of 2007 were "Transformers" and then "Spider-Man," "Pirates," "Shrek" and "Harry Potter" sequels. None of those films were nominated in any categories except "Transformers," and that didn't even win Best Visual Effects. "The Golden Compass" did. Are you kidding me?

I'm not saying you need to drop the whole aura of superiority, but throw us a bone here. The only best actress performance 90 percent of us heard of, let alone saw, was Ellen Page in "Juno." All the experts gave her a snowball's chance in…make that a sunny day's chance at Syracuse University. It's OK she didn't win, but maybe in the future give us more nominees to recognize and root for. I would've settled for Amy Adams in "Enchanted" getting a nod at this point.

2.) Add more categories people care about.

"The Bourne Ultimatum" won for Best Sound Editing. This made sense to me because the first thought I had when I saw it was "Boy, that movie really sounded great. You know what? The sound was really mixed well too. I hope it wins an Oscar for Best Sound Mixing. Couldn't categories like those be announced before the show similar to how the Grammy's announce things like Best Spoken Word Performance before the cameras get rolling?

Speaking of the Grammy's, I'd never call them pretentious because regardless of whether I like rap, country, rock or pop there are nominees I've heard of and experienced. They are smart enough to create categories that account for the diversity in the music industry. If you push some of the Oscars announcements to before the show, you can fill your three hours by taking a note from them and doing the same. A film like "Juno" shouldn't be penalized because it's a comedy. Let it win the Oscar for Best Comedy, and then you can mention "Hot Fuzz" and "Superbad" once within the night too. Take the same course of action with romances, horror, action and drama and then have the best five films from those categories become Best Picture nominees. Simple. (And I mean, if you're going to throw in some hilarious categories like Worst Performance by a Former Oscar Winner I won't argue. Cuba Gooding Jr. did deserve some type of recognition last night for "Daddy Day Camp.")

3.) Ditch the musical acts.

Unfortunately, for every Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova performance in Oscar history, there are 50 Celine Dion "Titanic" performances that can really bring down an evening (no pun intended). Every other major award show on the face of the Earth has musical performances.

If you pride yourselves on being the Oscars, being better than and different, it's time to find other avenues of live entertainment. Coincidently, you do have a house full of the year's best actors and actresses

Look to the Tony's and the small scenes they perform live before musical numbers. Find a way to get all of the actors at your disposal on stage and entertain us. Maybe each Best Actor nominee can get paired with a Best Actress nominee and they can perform famous scenes from previous Best Picture winners (or even just recreate each other's roles in Mary Katherine Gallagher type monologues since we haven't seen most of those performances anyway).

What if the main three to five cast members from each of the Best Picture nominees got together and made parody skits of the other films nominated in the category? It sounds like watchable television to me. Jack Black is making an entire film out of five minute scene recreations for crying out loud.

The point is I could go on and on with suggestions, but first, the show has to want to change. If you're reading this, Academy, you can start with any of these ideas and don't even need to credit me, it's cool. I just want the ability to watch and enjoy this show in the future. (Actually, I also want the ability to have live user comments scrolling on the bottom of the screen all night like it's TRL. Wouldn't it be hysterical if they were announcing Best Short Form Documentary and a comment like "Hey, remember when Jon Stewart said 'Titler'?" came across the screen? That's good television.)

Nathan Mattise is the pop culture columnist for The Daily Orange where his columns appear every Tuesday. He can be reached at nzmattis@syr.edu. The last non-TV movie he watched was the 10th Anniversary Edition of "Pocahontas."