"Live from the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California, the 73rd Annual Academy Awards." Brought to you by the cars famous people don't drive, the beer famous people don't drink, the lower-middle-class retail outlets famous people's personal shoppers have never been inside of, two nightmare-inducing references to Bob Dole's "boy" and his inability to keep said boy "easy" when confronted with The Pepsi Girl All Grown Up, and a special grant from the My Sore Ass Foundation, which generously dedicated twelve consecutive hours of its considerably expanding surface area to E! pre-show coverage for the greater (well, in a manner of speaking) part of my Sunday afternoon.
The year's Oscar telecast proper went off with surprisingly little drama. Conventional speeches, an inoffensive host, a manageable length, a few (gasp!) actually deserved awards, and a perfectly normal famous-people-to-puffy-wrap-around-the-neck-swan-costume-dress ratio (okay, so maybe we're one over par in that department). Maybe it was the numbing pre-coverage that made the actual event seem so benign. It was sometime around 4:30 P.M., when one of E!'s "pundits" referred to the best movie I saw last year, You Can Count on Me, as "sappy and sentimental," that I started to wonder if all you need to land a spot as a correspondent on that network is three extra sets of furiously white teeth and proof that you own your own tuxedo. Back on ABC, Barbara Walters tells Ben Stiller he's not funny (Mr. Stiller's inability to volley back with something of the "Thanks. And I believe the majority of your r's to be 'eminently pronounceable,' you officious little shrew" variety didn't help his attempts to counter that argument) and the overly-scripted pre-show reminds us that a half-hour of dead air punctuated only by the sound of animals being slaughtered would have yielded the same "at least there was no Geena Davis" set of indifferent reviews. Because, really, you know E! will be a warmed-over rehash of clips involving Joan Rivers unhinging her jaw and devouring an A-lister looking every way but hers in an attempt to avoid the inevitable confrontation. You know Barbara Walters will resort to maudlin tactics and just start poking Faith Hill with a pointy stick should she be unable to induce teary repartee by more conventional methods. You know the night will be long and painful in so many ways. But you watch and give the event its rightful due. The Gay Man's Superbowl deserves no such less consideration.
