For an award show that is all about celebrating creative people, why is the Oscar show so bland and predictable? I don't know.
Why do people watch it? This I think I can answer, at least partially. We dull normals want to see what money and celebrity can buy. The red carpet, and the dresses, or 'frocks' as they seem to be called, are the main thing we want to see. (The word 'frock', in my mind, is associated with frumpy British fashion, so I have no idea why the dresses aren't called 'gowns' or even 'dresses'. But I digress.)
We love looking at the women's clothing, especially when someone who is utterly beautiful wears something ugly. We delight in the moments we can point to someone with a perfect face and body and ask, "What was she thinking?" But we also love seeing an beautiful person enhanced by the dress, jewelry, and shoes she has chosen to wear.
Oh the shoes! I have to confess, my main reaction to the shoes is to ask, "How on earth can they walk in such high heels? Even the youngest nominee, who I think is fourteen, wore shoes with heels at least five or six inches high.
Back to the creativity. The TV critic in today's Globe and Mail said that many of the people who watched the show are today wishing they hadn't. I'm not completely sorry that I watched most of it, leaving out some of the middle, because I got some knitting done. But he has a point. The show is incredibly boring. He also mentioned the smugness and self-congratulatory ambience, but I don't have as big a problem with that, since actors make their living from people looking at them, and so it must be difficult to avoid believing the world revolves around them and their work. But why does the show have to be so dull?
It's the same every year. Even the fashion parade blurs into one blurry image of thin tall women wearing weird clothing, and man after man in black. The stage is always overly huge so that distant shots reveal the presenters and winners as incredibly tiny, making them appear insignificant compared to the giant Oscar statue behind them. The hosts engage in jittery banter, that as often comes across as wooden and stupid as it does genuinely funny. You just know they are reading every word from a teleprompter, and despite the fact they are actors, and so could conceivable have memorized the lines and put something of a genuine human personality into them, it always seems as if they are reciting them for the first time, in a cold reading.
Then there are the acceptance speeches. Don't they know how meaningless it is to recite a list of names that are totally unrecognized by everyone who hears them? It probably does mean something to the people who are mentioned, but why waste an opportunity to speak to millions of people in this way? All these people work in an industry that is all about creativity, talent, and dreams coming true. The acceptance speech I want to hear will be aimed at everyone who has a dream of succeeding in any area of the arts. It would be about how dreams can come true, but you have to love what you're doing and be willing to work hard and be open to learning opportunities and challenging yourself. And that for every winner there are several disappointed people who lose, but those people will keep doing what they do because they all have reasons other than winning a statuette for why they work. The rewards come from seeing your contribution to your art, not from a panel of voters.
Why can't the winners speak to the people who provide the often incredibly inflated incomes they receive, the audiences? Let us believe that these people we so adore, the actors, and the people we wouldn't recognize but whose artisty creates the movies we still are willing to pay over ten dollars a pop to see on a big screen, are aware of us and appreciate our participation in their dreams?
Everything they do is meaningless until it is viewed by an audience's eyes, interpreted by our brains, and reacted to by our hearts and souls. If they let us know that we are part of every creative endeavour, and if they want to us believe in what they do even after we leave the theatre or turn off the TV, they would create a show that everyone would want to see.
