All ready for your Oscars gilt trip?

Sunday's Oscars will try to be both jazzed up and glammed down. Will it work? Guy Adams in Los Angeles gears up for the big night.

• You’ve got to feel sorry for Peter Gabriel. The laid-back king of prog rock was looking forward to the gig of a lifetime this Sunday: performing his Oscar-nominated song “Down to Earth” to a star-studded crowd of 3,500 at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles.
• Then the show’s producers, Bill Condon and Laurence Mark, called with bad news. In a break with tradition, they’d decided that Gabriel’s critically acclaimed track, from the film Wall-E, would be cobbled into a three-minute “medley” with the other two contenders for the Best Original Song prize. The former lead singer of Genesis would have a paltry 65 seconds to strut his stuff in the limelight at the Kodak Theatre. Unwilling to butcher his masterpiece, and with his professional ego badly dented, Gabriel unceremoniously cancelled the performance.
• “I do think it’s a bit unfortunate,” he explained in a video statement last week. “The songwriters, even though they’re a small part of the whole film-making process, still work bloody hard and deserve a place in the ceremony. I’m an old fart so it’s not going to do me any harm to make this little protest.”
• Old fart or not, the comments turned Gabriel into the most prominent public critic of a decision by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to revamp their 81-year-old shindig. Depending on how Sunday’s event goes, his “little protest” could be the start of a minor revolution.
• The Oscars, launched on the cusp of Hollywood’s golden era in 1927, have always resisted change. As the biggest, classiest event in the showbiz calendar – and in spite of their standing as the showcase for a city and an industry built on innovation – they’ve remained doggedly conservative.
• Today, the Academy Awards represent a gold standard: a means by which the movie business keeps score and film-makers recognise their industry’s greatest talent. Yet, while they retain their pulling power (anyone who’s anyone will saunter down the Kodak’s red carpet this weekend), the event has started to feel outmoded.
• At three-and-a-half hours, recent ceremonies have become a hefty commitment for viewers. While rivals have jazzed up their shows – the Grammys are now an extended music concert in which just 11 trophies are handed out – Oscar night sees TV viewers forced to sit through the presentation of 24 gongs, many in technical categories.
• The Academy Awards also face mounting competition: from the Golden Globes, and countless Guild events, together with Emmys, Baftas, MTV bashes, and critics’ choice and people’s choice events.
• “By the time Oscar night comes along, you’ve seen 20 or 30 other ones,” says Brian Lowry, a columnist for the Hollywood newspaper Variety. “Then, on the night, there’s not just a lot of categories, but in the technical areas there’s a lot of people who the public may not recognise.”
• Little surprise, then, that there’s been a worrying decline in Oscar-night TV audiences. The event, which in the 1990s attracted between 40 and 50 million US viewers, managed 32 million last year, its smallest audience ever, and audience share also a record low of 29 per cent.
• “All network TV audiences are getting smaller,” Lowry adds. “The industry is fragmenting. Even American Idol is declining. Advertisers used to think of the Oscars as the Superbowl for women, and would throw serious money at it. But people are getting so much more spread around.”
• Against this backdrop, Condon and Mark, both highly rated film directors, were brought in to bring a bit of the old pizzazz back to proceedings. And, as their dealings with Gabriel suggest, they haven’t been afraid to slay a few sacred cows.
• In recent days, it has emerged that the teen heart-throb Robert Pattinson, star of the Twilight film (and very little else) has been asked to present a gong. Organisers have allegedly begged the singer M.I.A., who’s up for a musical gong but gave birth just days ago, to perform live, via video link from her bed if necessary.
• The attempt to “sex up” the event reflects an anxiety about the Oscar viewing demographic, which has a median age of 49.5. This year, projected ad revenue for broadcaster ABC is down to $68m from $81.8m. Major firms like L’Oréal have dropped out, and the academy has lifted a ban on running film trailers in the show’s ad breaks.
• In a bid to create suspense, Mark and Condon have maintained an extraordinary secrecy. Most of the stars who’ll read out the winners of 24 awards have been kept strictly under wraps.
• Reports suggest that presenters have been banned from the pre-show red carpet, in order to make TV viewers wait until the gongs are presented to see what their idols are wearing. To traditionalists, such overt recognition of the role of fashion in what is supposedly a film industry event represents wanton dumbing-down. So, too, does an apparent decision to tweak the order in which awards are presented. Even the manner in which the statuettes are presented may change. And Mark and Condon sent eyebrows skywards when they failed to brief the 112 contenders for prizes about the show during the nominees’ lunch earlier this month.
• For all the changes, there will, of course, be all the staple attractions of Oscar weekend. Los Angeles will grind to a halt; four blocks of central Hollywood will be closed to traffic and adorned with a football-pitch-sized red carpet; the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills will be booked out.
• Gaining access to the Kodak Theatre will be marginally harder than walking into Fort Knox. Visitors will be required to pass through airport-style metal detectors (celebrities get their own dedicated one) and crowds of onlookers will scream maniacally.
• But some things will be subtly different. Hugh Jackman has been hired as the night’s main presenter – a shift from the recent array of New York “rent-a-comics”. In a preview interview with the event’s UK broadcaster, Sky Movies HD, he made a point of emphasising that he’s been asked to keep proceedings under three hours.
• “I feel like I’m part of something new,” Jackman said this week. “I’m part of a new era, hopefully, and history will tell us if we went the right way… they’re guiding me in a way that is going to make the show fun and, between you and me, a little quicker.”
• Yet efforts to create an air of snowballing suspense aren’t being helped by the state of the Oscar races. Many of the major categories look like foregone conclusions. The Hollywood Reporter this week declared 2009 “a ho-hum awards season”. Variety noted that most contenders were struggling at the box office.
• Back in January, the Best Picture race looked like it could develop into an enthralling David vs Goliath battle between Slumdog Millionaire and The Dark Knight. However, the 6,000 voting members of the Academy neglected to include the Batman film, the second-highest-grossing title of all time, on their shortlist.
• A second potential showdown, between Slumdog and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, has failed to develop, as Danny Boyle’s low-budget hit began hoovering up almost every round of awards. Button, which has the classic profile for an Oscar-winning film – pedigree stars, old Hollywood style, a director who’s due a win – failed to mount a coherent campaign.
• There’s an element of certainty about the outcome of most other major categories. Heath Ledger will, of course, win Best Supporting Actor for his role in the Batman film. The Best Actor gong is a straight fight between Mickey Rourke and Sean Penn. Kate Winslet or Meryl Street will take Best Actress.
• The films being honoured will hardly strike a chord with middle America, either. Many had not yet been screened in cinemas outside New York and Los Angeles when the nominations were announced last month. Only one, Button, has grossed more than $100m.
• Worryingly for a film industry feeling the effects of a steep decline in DVD sales, victory in the Best Picture category is no longer a guarantee of future success. No Country for Old Men, 2008’s Best Picture, made a total of just $74m at the US box-office. Crash, the (somewhat controversial) 2005 winner, grossed just $54m. Even The Departed, 2006’s seemingly commercial victor, managed just $130m.
• All of which makes the $200m award season “campaigns” – the rounds of parties, screenings and adverts financed by studios to promote films fancied to win one of the gold-dipped statues (which cost just $500 to make) – seem superfluous, if not downright reckless.
• If the films don’t excite, the organisers of Sunday night’s event are hoping to create an element of drama around an elusive Oscar “moment”. David Rockwell, the architect hired to design the staging of the event, says his brief has been to shake up the old order of things. The orchestra, which traditionally forms a breakwater between the stage and audience, has been moved. A large Swarovski crystal curtain will hang over the stage.
• “Our over-arching idea is that it’s a party, a celebration,” Rockwell says. “We’re getting away from gold lamé and fixed heroic ornaments, and have changed the colour of the set from red to deep blue, which is a much more spatial colour that will make it harder to tell where the boundaries are.
• “The best moments, every year, are when something happens that’s spontaneous, and I wanted to design in a way that makes that happen. We’ve brought the orchestra onstage, so the audience is closer. The LED screen on stage will fly around in multiple pieces. I want the TV audience to feel that they’re part of a live event.”
• Rockwell hopes his design won’t offend an audience reeling from hard economic times. It is deliberately un-ostentatious, he says, in keeping with the tone of the wider event, where parties have been toned down, and fashions are to be understated.
• Cheryl Cecchetto, the organiser of the Governor’s Ball that immediately follows the show, has also created a demure occasion. The inspiration for her decoration is a tea-house in Beijing. “It feels elegant and simple,” she says. “I feel that with what’s going on in the economy it wouldn’t be appropriate for things to be opulent. An East-meets-West design is elegant, sophisticated, and streamlined.”
• What the event could really use, of course, is a decent celebrity meltdown. But the Academy doesn’t look kindly on lengthy, indulgent victory speeches, and Oscar winners get just 45 seconds to offer their thanks before being played off. If they’re really famous, they might get slightly longer. But in an era where, say, Kate Winslet’s tearful speech at the Golden Globes grabbed the news agenda, that’s not clever showmanship.
• “The one thing people really want to see is the one thing they’re adamant on cutting down on, and that’s the victory speeches,” says Jay Fernandez, a film writer at the Hollywood Reporter.
• “Every year, the producers will sit down and tell nominees that they’ve only got 45 seconds. But the more time you give people to speak, the longer they will have to say weird stuff. And that’s what people really remember.”
• Or, to put it another way, the Academy awards – like the industry they serve – are all about a bit of drama.