It was, indeed, a "Beauty"-ful Oscar Awards (American Beauty bagged major awards as predicted, including Best Picture and Best Director for Sam Mendes) which ran for exactly four hours and eight minutes Sunday night (March 26) at the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. but stretched up to six hours on the RPN 9 telecast last Monday, starting at 9 a.m. and ending at 3 p.m. In short, the commercial load amounted to more than two hours. Whew! (The replay the same night lasted one hour shorter, from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. I should know: I taped the whole proceedings.)
Again, as usual and as expected, the 72nd Oscars was a great show (yes, the "greatest show on earth" as far as this Oscars-crazy movie addict is concerned), a winner hands down for the Most Entertaining and Most Anticipated Awards Night trophy if there was one.
It was oh-so-long, all right, but it was never boring; never dragging even if the commercials on RPN 9 dragged on and on and on (thanks, anyway, for giving televiewers a chance to empty their bladders of the liquid consumed endlessly while eyes were glued to the TV screen).
Host Billy Crystal was a big show by himself, spicing up the ceremonies with his wit and humor, his wisecracks which were never offensive, his playful digs at colleagues who have recently run afoul of the law. He said, "Driving Miss Daisy will be remade, but not with Morgan Freeman as the driver. It's going to be an action movie with Halle Berry as the driver." (Berry was arrested by an L.A. cop for beating the traffic light a few weeks ago.)
What was an absolute delight was the opening film clips showing Crystal in a huddle with Marlon Brando (scene from The Godfather), as a front-seat passenger of James Dean (Rebel Without a Cause), in a shower scene (Psycho) with American Beauty actor Kevin Spacey (Best Actor winner) and at the receiving end of a greenish vomit from a devil-possessed Linda Blair (The Exorcist). That's the wonders and the magic of computer technology for you!
My favorite Best Supporting Actor bet, Haley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense), didn't bag the trophy (he would have been the youngest winner, at 11, if he did -- sayang!) but he's a big winner as far as I was concerned. The boy was a big hit from the time he arrived at the Shrine Auditorium, waving to the fans and flashing a wide (expectant?) smile to the moment he stood onstage before a star-studded SRO audience, pausing before saying, "I'm glad to see you all here... alive!" (in reference to his role in The Sixth Sense where he was seeing and talking to dead people all the time).
He looked cute in the wide seat his little body hardly filled up, dapper in his formal suit, caught smiling by the camera every once too often and being acknowledged by everybody, from Crystal to Best Supporting Actor winner Michael Caine (The Cider House Rules) who should have won another award for delivering the most sensible speech of the night (eat your heart out, Warren Beatty, for rambling on and on in his own thank-you speech after accepting a special award as a producer).
Unlike in local award-giving bodies which have become "ho-hum-ly" predictable, oftentimes woven around pretentious "themes" (Filipiniana, nationalism, etc.), the Oscars, although admittedly de-kahon, always comes up with something new, something different, something interesting, some big surprises that make it worth your while. Here, you see the same "production numbers" year in and year out -- you know, how many times does Amanda Page have to do her calisthenics at the Urian Awards? Once is enough, or even twice. But thrice... oh, no, it's a crime!
Some of the Oscar winners, carried away as they also are, deliver kilometric thank-you speeches like local actors but local award-giving bodies can surely learn a thing or two from the Oscars (it's not bad to learn and copy good things, is it?) such as:
1. Make the stage as comfortable as possible, one layer if you please, so winners and/or presenters don't run the risk of tripping onstage and, horrors, falling flat on their faces on national television!
2. Inviting twin presenters is an Oscar innovation and local award-giving bodies (paging the forthcoming FAP Awards and the FAMAS!) can perhaps do away with it and, for a change, revert to the old practice of asking last year's winners to hand over the trophies to this year's winners. It's more dramatic and more meaningful, isn't it?
3. Instead of crowding the program with senseless production numbers, entertainment should be limited to the Best Song nominees (if there are enough), just like at the Oscars. The Blame Canada! number (from South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut), led by the versatile Robin Williams, was a show-stopper.
4. The venue should be filled up; stand-ins should be asked to occupy empty seats so that when the cameras pan around, the hall won't look "pot-holed."
5. Hosts should be witty and not monkey around as if they're in a drinking spree, cracking private jokes at the expense of televiewers.
6. And last, but not the least, participating stars should at least rehearse (before the show?) so that they won't be making booboos in front of the cameras -- and making a fool of themselves.
So there. See you, then, at the next Urian, the next Star Awards, the next FAP Awards, the next FAMAS and, of course, the next Oscars.
Same time, next year?