Top 5 Things I Wish I’d Seen At The Oscars

Top 5 Things I Wish I’d Seen At The Oscars

Posted on Monday February 23, 2009, 05:30 by Sam Toy in Empire States

Just as what you order on a pizza over the phone will never be what arrives at your door, just as you’ll never remember every item of a big grocery shop without writing a list, so too, no matter how much they prepare the Oscars, how much they fine tune it year on year, it seems they’ll never produce the perfect coverage. Now as they made a good fist of it this year, it seems almost mean to be asking for more, but there’s always room for improvement. I watched keenly, admired the classy bits and suffered through the red carpet coverage, and I’ve come up with a few suggestions for things I would like to have seen this year – nothing radical, just some measured, reasonable, sensible notes for the Academy to observe and consider:

1. Despite my fears that Hugh Jackman’s hosting would be a schmaltzy - even cheesy, backslapping affair, we got a tremendous opening salvo. But it still, I pine for the day that we will have an Academy Awards ceremony hosted by the only true voice of authority that the whole world recognises; his dulcet tones, his impeccable suits and mustache, and for those musical numbers, his skills on jazz flute. Yes, I dream that one day the Oscars will be hosted by Ron Burgundy (and possibly a dance number with the whole Channel 4 news team).

2. Robert Downey Jr come ‘in character’ as Kirk Lazarus, and declare that he’s a dude playin’ a dude, playin’ a dude, disguised as another dude’. In a similar vein, I found myself praying for Michael Shannon to be as free twixt thoughts and mouth as his character in Revolutionary Road whilst being interviewed by Ryan Seacrest on the red carpet.

Now, as a side note, I’ll say I’d normally I’d be a bit more forgiving of the red carpet people generally – God knows, it’s hard standing out on a live red carpet even just for twenty minutes, having to know all about every person who turns up, and be able to fill in the spots where no-one is within talking distance, but a) Ryan Seacrest (whose coverage I was watching) does virtually nothing else, and b) he’s got a voice in his left ear feeding him questions/telling him what to needle out of his subjects, so he’s really got no excuse for being that vacuous. Plus of course, c) he gets paid an astronomical amount of money for doing it.

3. A quick precursor: 1) David Fincher I love all of your work, and I don’t necessarily want to take anything away from Benjamin Button, but as this is my list and I can do whatever I want, I wish that Zodiac (which was beautiful, outstanding, and utterly robbed) could go through some strange, nonsensical Hollywood time paradox and have won all the awards Benjamin Button actually took home.

4. More of Steve Martin and Tina Fey. Both are awesome - is Fey next year’s host(ess)?

5. Real Wall-E on the red carpet, and then for him come home to my house*.

So, sleep deprived as I am as I write this, that’s the best gibberish I can come up with. Doubtless I’ll be kicking myself later this afternoon, when I think of something better on charged batteries, but in the meantime, what did I miss? How would you tweak the biggest night on the movie awards calendar?

*This part of the blog may have been hijacked by Helen