There's No Business Like Show Business

Technically, I only listened to most of the Academy Awards telecast last night -- it was on in the other room while I was online and did some other computer work. Which is OK, because "The Oscars" are more about show business these days than awarding actual moviemaking craft and excellence.

In fact, that's one of the of the things that still intrigues me about the show of "The Oscars" as opposed to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' awarding of the best work done in the previous year -- which awards are featured. The technical awards, few of which are noted in the telecast and many of which are given on another night entirely, are actually the ones where an observer could apply some objective criteria and measure success and excellence. But the acting, directing and writing awards, where measurements of quality incorporate a huge subjective factor, get all the play.

Oscar winners -- and this year, for the first time since 1988, Oscar presenters actually said "The winner is" instead of "The Oscar goes to," omitting that silly attempt to hide from the idea this is a competition -- get their awards because more Academy members vote for them. In other words, what we call "Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role" is actually "The Actor in a Supporting Role who Got A Plurality of Votes Of the 5,835 AMPAS Members Who Voted."

What Christoph Waltz won was an opinion poll among a specific set of people. Was his performance better than Christopher Plummer's, Stanley Tucci's, Woody Harrelson's or Matt Damon's? Not to mention men who weren't nominated? Eh, who knows? Some people thought yes, some thought no, and enough Academy members liked it to send Mr. Waltz home with the gold. Why they liked it instead of the others is as up in the air as what you or I thought about it. Some, maybe many, cast their vote based on what they knew as professionals in the craft of acting and what they saw when Waltz played a nasty Nazi in Inglourious Basterds, but even there, I'm pretty sure other factors played a role.

Some Oscar odds and ends:

-- Sean Penn lived up to his image as an odious egotist -- as last year's Oscar winner for Best Actor, he presented the award for Best Actress. He was dunned for omitting his wife (actress Robin Wright Penn) from his thank-you speech, so he said he was going to show appreciation for actresses this evening. Shut up and read your lines, twerp.

-- A movie critic who forgot he writes for The Tulsa World said in his Oscar preview that a win by Sandra Bullock would represent the Academy honoring the "least deserving and least demanding role in history." To be fair, he wasn't the only person to hold this view. I'm not sure what he meant, except that perhaps Bullock should have been overlooked because she was playing a strong woman who was a wife and mom instead of a hooker, addict, nut or a poor, uneducated woman who might wind up as a combination of all three for some reason. Over the last dozen years or so, that's been the kind of role that wins women their statues.

-- Much ado was made because two of the competitors for Best Director, The Hurt Locker's Kathryn Bigelow and Avatar's James Cameron, are ex-wife and husband, respectively. Would there be animosity? Would there be conflict? Would anyone asking those questions remember that they were married for just more than two years and that it was almost 20 years ago, or that Bigelow was Cameron's third wife and he's with No. 5 these days?

-- Best Supporting Actress winner Mo'Nique thanked the Academy for recognizing that "it can be about the performance and not the politics." Unless she was referring to the absence of Cause of the Year ribbons pinned to the dresses and tuxes of presenters and attendees, I think she's got the wrong group of people in mind. For the Academy, it's always about the politics.

-- The morning shows offer more proof that whatever else is done on Oscar night, the movies themselves are usually overlooked. Did they feature movie writers or film professors discussing the different performances? Nah. Let's get some fashion writers -- whatever the heck that means -- in here to talk about dresses.