sophia loren

Academy Awards call the wrong number

I guess reinventing the Oscars is harder than it looks. The academy gave the gig this year to producers Laurence Mark and Bill Condon, two classy industry veterans who've been involved with all sorts of admirable films over the years. But after watching this year's Hugh Jackman-hosted awards, which were undermined by a pair of lackluster musical numbers, nearly three hours of earnestly dull, emotion-free acceptance speeches (of course excepting Kate Winslet, who's apparently been overflowing with emotion for the entire award season) and hardly any surprises, I'm beginning to believe that saving the Oscars is a job for Iron Man or Hancock, a kick-ass superhero with the kind of unassailable powers that would allow him to radically overhaul what has become the year's stodgiest awardsfest.

From Jackman's strangely self-conscious, low-rent opening musical number to Ben Stiller's very inside-the-Beltway spoof of Joaquin Phoenix's recent appearance on David Letterman's late-night show, the awards had a tone problem -- they tried to be something for everyone, coming off like a movie script that had its edginess and guts airbrushed out by too many studio notes.
All over the place:

It was hard to find any focused narrative for the awards, which were busy veering wildly from making fun of serious movies (mocking "The Reader," for example) to being entirely too reverential about the past, treating a banal montage of supporting actress thank-you speeches as if they were lost outtakes from "Citizen Kane.

"It's hard to blame the producers for some of the problems. It certainly wasn't their fault that "Slumdog Millionaire" swept the evening, robbing the proceedings of any real suspense -- you know you've got a drama deficit when the biggest upset of the night came in the foreign-language film category. New ideas were attempted but not always executed with success. It was a treat to see Queen Latifah crooning and Sophia Loren paying tribute to Meryl Streep.

My 10-year-old son was especially impressed that all his favorite movies were represented in a nicely edited action-film montage, although it reminded us only of how cloistered the Oscars have become, since virtually none of the films in the montage was nominated for any major award (and the visual effects Oscar went to "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the one non-action film in the bunch). It also wasn't the producer's fault that the much-anticipated Judd Apatow comedy sketch, which featured his "Pineapple Express" costars, was so hit and miss that the best line in the whole bit came from Polish cinematographer Janus Kaminski, who waved his Oscars and, with perfect timing, apologized by saying, "They made me do it, Mr. Spielberg, [work is] really slow in town."But you'd have to say that Jackman was a bust. The idea of having a song-and-dance man instead of a traditional comedian seemed like a step in the right direction. But Jackman never radiated any real heat.

shortcomings were especially obvious when Will Smith, someone with real star power, showed up to give out a bunch of technical awards. You wanted Will to stick around -- he had real presence. Jackman disappeared for so many big chunks of the evening that I found myself shouting at the TV: "Who kidnapped Hugh Jackman?" (Of course, I also found myself shouting: "What does Philip Seymour Hoffman have on his head?