MAUREEN CALLAHAN: The Oscar for Most Out of Touch Awards Ceremony goes to… the Oscars!

The Academy continues to perform CPR on a dead patient. Like in the movies, someone has to melodramatically grab them by the shoulders, shake them, and yell: The Oscars are dead, you idiot! They are dead and they will never come back!

If you want to know when exactly the Oscars drew their last breath, look back one year this weekend: After slapping Chris Rock onstage, Will Smith accepted his Best Actor Oscar to a standing ovation.

A standing O! That still amazes me, but then I remind myself: This is an industry that turned a blind eye to Harvey Weinstein for decades. A crowd that gave child rapist Roman Polanski a Best Director Oscar in 2003 and a standing ovation in absentia. A town that considered Woody Allen a misunderstood genius until that was no longer tenable.

But the slap in the face and its aftermath—it’s no coincidence that Chris Rock’s Netflix special premiered a week before this year’s Oscars—live from Jada Pinkett Smith’s hometown—marks the end.

It’s not just about hypocrisy. Movie stars have been miniaturized. We are more likely to see them on our phones than in a movie theater. Take Alec Baldwin for example: Before Instagram, he was sold as a great actor with an anger management problem: the East Coast version of Sean Penn.

Now, thanks to social media, we know: Alec Baldwin is a monster. He is irredeemable, just like his fake baby-hoarding Spanish wife. If anything, Baldwin seems worse for being famous, not better. He’s arrogant, he’s entitled, and most of all, he doesn’t feel it. And this attitude is more common than not among the Hollywood elite.

It’s no wonder that the theme of so much film and television this year, from ‘The White Lotus’ to ‘Triangle of Sadness’, ‘The Menu’, ‘You’ and ‘Crystal Onion’ can be summed up in three words: Eat yourself. to the rich. .

Not that the Academy gets it. They’re in a never-ending cycle of ‘Bernie’s Weekend’, raising a sad corpse and looking forward to the next ceremony, which they promise, each year, will be better than the last. Like an abusive ex-boyfriend, they always say they’ve learned their lesson. They will change this time, for real. Things will be better, I promise.

It was this thought that led Rob Lowe to sing ‘Proud Mary’ with Snow White in 1989. It was the equivalent of Hiroshima at the awards show. Oral histories have been written about it.

But that’s how long the Oscars have been broken. And the Academy must have PTSD, because since the Lowe debacle, the changes they make are small. Infinitesimal. Like going from one host to a year with no host to a year with three hosts.

Or take less electrifying categories out of the stream to fine tune the show, like they did in 2022, and then put those categories back in, like this year, adding a handy QR code for those of us who don’t care which anonymous nerd wins for the sound mix. can study.

What fun.

The other big solution this year? Not red carpet. Instead, a champagne-colored one. How daring.

This brainstorm comes courtesy of Anna Wintour’s Met Gala team, called in to help appeal to younger viewers. Because who better than relics from the Paleolithic magazine era (this idea comes, in part, courtesy of Vogue director Lisa Love, 68) to make the Oscars relevant again?

Forget #OscarsSoWhite, now it’s #OscarsSoSlight.

The awakening has destroyed Hollywood. We are in a sad era of setting quotas. Just look at the new requirements announced in 2020: Any movie that wants to qualify for Best Picture must meet one of these three:

— At least one racial or ethnic minority in a significant role

— A story revolving around women, the disabled, a minority group of members of the LGBTQ community

— A cast made up of 30% actors from two of the four categories above

Because nothing stimulates creativity like checking boxes.

And now there are reports that the Academy may scrap the Best Male and Best Female categories in favor of genderless awards, even though that has been tried elsewhere and failed.

Non-binary British pop star Sam Smith haughtily called for the BRIT Awards to do this in 2021. “I look forward to,” she said, “a time when the awards can reflect the society we live in.”

Well, Sam, the society we live in is still against women. Guess who was left out of the shortlist for the BRIT ‘Artist of the Year’ award last month?

Yes woman. Not a single nominee.

Smith quickly returned that wish. “There’s a lot of incredible female talent in the UK,” she told the Sunday Times. They should be on that list.

Indeed. If only the powers that be had thought it through. Isn’t it clear by now that waking up is a buzz? That by trying to do what’s right for everyone, you could actually do harm?

As a famous actor anonymously told Entertainment Weekly yesterday: Hollywood “is so out of control with the awakening.” I am an ardent liberal, but the awakening, I think we can all agree, has taken over.

This actor also criticized the ceremony: “All of Hollywood patted me on the back, ‘get me.’ . . seems to be getting worse and worse’ and accusations of racism within the Academy itself.

“When they get in trouble for not giving Viola Davis an award,” he said, “it’s like, ‘No, honey, you didn’t deserve it.’ We voted, and we voted for the five (actresses) that we thought were the best.’

How refreshing. For your consideration, Academy: Sincerity. honest talk. The call comes from inside the house.

The problem is not with us. Audiences understand the complicated characters and storytelling. We love it. But we also want to be entertained. The success of ‘The Sopranos’, ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Game of Thrones’ is proof that you can do both.

The Academy can’t face the truth: their product is terrible, their self-presentation is off the mark.

That they treated the nomination of ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ for Best Picture as a concession, for saving movie theaters and the industry in general, after the pandemic! — says everything.

A recent YouGov poll showed the divide between the public and the Academy: Of all the films nominated for Best Picture, the most Americans have seen ‘Top Gun’ (45%), followed by ‘Elvis’ (30%) and Avatar: The Way of Water’ (27%) than any of the acclaimed indie nominees.

The People’s Choice for Best Picture is ‘Top Gun’, though to read and watch the awards coverage is to listen to endless hubbub about Tár, a nearly three hour long arthouse film watched by the 10% of Americans, or ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ (viewed by 19%), or Steven Spielberg’s origin story ‘Let-me-tell-you-how-I-got-so-big’ ‘The Fablemans’ (12 %).

The latter’s self-esteem, and his multiple nominations, exemplify the problem: Hollywood is increasingly focused on the inside. We have non-glamorous superhero or indie films: 2020 Best Actress Frances McDormand pooping in a bucket in that year’s Best Picture ‘Nomadland’, a year into lockdown, oh joy! – without intermediates.

Yes, even a global pandemic hasn’t changed the perspective of the Academy. If anything, Hollywood takes itself more seriously than ever. Seeing a campaign by a star like Michelle Yeoh about her career, reposting a complaint on her now-deleted Instagram account that Cate Blanchett already has two Oscars and doesn’t need a third, he feels desperate and coward.

Besides, no one cares who wins anymore. It’s hard to invest in movies we haven’t seen and celebrities acting on top of it all (‘Oh, I was asleep when they announced my nomination’) as they rush like Dickensians for a golden statuette. To quote Ricky Gervais at the 2020 Golden Globes: “Accept your little prize, thank your agent and your God, and fuck off.”

How to save the Oscars?

It can not be done.

If you have any doubts, consider HBO’s decision to air the season finale of one of its newest, most animated and most acclaimed series right against the prize money. The appropriate title of that show? ‘The last of us.’