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Here are five things we’d like to see change on the Oscar broadcast:
- Here’s hoping Ellen comes up with something new, not a rerun of her Emmy hosting gig. So, no sitting in the audience, running around backstage, interviewing technicians. Make us laugh like Billy Crystal.
- Enough with the Chuck Workman montages. We love film clips. We crave tributes. But try a contest in film schools; enlist the talents of YouTubers to create cheeky but loving reels; pay some film geek to juice them. Our pick: Quentin Tarantino.
- Oscar has come a long way since Rob Lowe and Snow White, but we still want more ambitious musical surprises. Or just Prince. Tonight, Al Gore should do a duet with Melissa Etheridge on the nominated “I Need to Wake Up” from “An Inconvenient Truth,” complete with a PowerPoint presentation.
- Reading may be fundamental, but when presenters are glued to the teleprompter, it’s fundamentally awful. How hard is it to get your guests comfy with a script that last mere seconds?
- After Mary J. Blige read the phone book at the Grammys, we’re glad to hear Oscar honchos are trying to ban thank yous and send honorees to a backstage “thank-you cam.” Will it work? Doubt it, but it’s worth trying.
