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2009 Oscar Broadcast – The Worst Ever?
By PopSavant | February 23, 2009 | 
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Well, “ever” is a long time… but it was certainly the worst in years.
Let’s start with the good: the set was beautiful, and having the audience so close to the stage gave the night an intimate feel. Also, going for classic Hollywood is always a good idea, so let’s acknowledge that.
Kudos, too, for Hugh Jackman. He did a good job, for what he was asked to do. He wasn’t an MC in the style of Johnny Carson or Bob Hope or even Steve Martin, but he wasn’t supposed to be. Loved the dance moves, too.
But the bad: basically everything else about the broadcast.
Particularly grating was the music that played through category introductions. Thankfully someone must have told the orchestra to back off before the night was over.
Queen Latifah’s rendition of I’ll Be Seeing You during the memorial clip was lovely… but the jerky camera work was completely inappropriate. Those of us at home couldn’t make out the screen half the time… whoever directed that segment should be invited to never return. Also, it seemed to me they cut the length this year… we got the big names (RIP Paul Newman) but we didn’t get the usual barrage of screenwriters and sound engineers. If it was just a slow year for the grim reaper, good, but otherwise those folks deserve their ten seconds of screen time.
The salute to Hollywood musicals was likewise hideous, both in design and execution. Baz Luhrmann tried to throw the lyrical kitchen sink into the show, but the result was an exhibition that never settled into a groove. This is the American Songbook, here… all the compositions deserved more than the half-sentence of time they got. The performers were poorly chosen as well… I’d much rather have seen Anne Hathaway reprising her earlier appearance (is there a more beautiful actress working today? Had she been called, Anne might have even channeled a bit of Audrey Hepburn into the number) than Beyonce’s heavy-legged clogging.
And on the subject of music, Peter Gabriel was right. Bring back the full performances of the nominated songs. Medleys are never a good idea.
The presentations themselves were stilted and just plain weird. The whole event suffered terribly from a lack of clips of the performances in question – don’t just talk about how good someone was, films are a visual medium… show us something! It was nice to see a collection of winners, but it also proved how poorly some of Hollywood’s best actors do when reading a teleprompter. Some of them were downright embarrassing.
Fewer presenters (or presentation events, I guess, since some of the categories had as many as five presenters) also didn’t seem to do much… the show ran long again (which is okay! They always worry far too much about that) but it cut down on the anticipation of seeing who would come out next. Half the fun of the Oscars is to watch everyone show off, and the Academy did their stars and their audience a disservice by not giving more of them some time in the spotlight.
The whole show was an experiment that failed. Here’s hoping they put things back the way they were.
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