Academy Awards

Mickelson? Thank God. I thought it was Peter King.

 

Look, I can be blamed for a lot of things, but I'm not taking the fall for you getting in bed with BYH.

My contract with Webby clearly states: Get people to click around, or else yada yada yada. I have no choice. I should have used an agent.

I am all about bringing people together...if you hadn't watched, you would have missed the togetherness and camaradie of this great thread, plus my advice about good nipple coverage, plus no reach around with BYH.

You should be sending me flowers.

 

We agree on that, for sure. There's no reason that can't happen.

Sorry I don't have more to say about that. I'm almost speechless. Not only did I not expect to win you over with my argument, I was prepared to argue for much longer. You ... stopped ... my ... momentum.

 

Judging by the photos on Yahoo! Most Popular, Leelee Sobieski has grown up nicely.

 

Absolutely agreed. (Particularly the art part, since I happen to be a TV producer.)

It's not entirely an issue of making it shorter, though that wouldn't hurt.

The producers of the Oscar broadcasts consistently cut the wrong things to try to save time. They bloated the hell out of the first few hours with lame comedy bits, lame performance, and lame dance routines. Then to make up the time they cut the acceptance speeches and rush all the big categories.

Good producers have a sense of the big picture throughout the show or event and make time adjustments along the way. Bad producers hack the shit out of the end of the show to get out on time. Also, bad producers hack the shit out of other people's time so they don't have to lose any of their own precious contributions. "Jennifer Hudson's got people to thank? No way - I've got two more Ellen-in-the-audience bits we planned out last week!"

Handing the show to a competent producer would mean a change from the current format, which seems to be 4+ hours of boring awards and overdone filler followed by a half hour of frantically handing out major awards because they're already past their off-time.

It can be tricky to do, since there's no way to precisely predict how long the speeches will go, and you want to allow room to adlib and improvise. But honestly, right now they're not even making an effort.

The Idol people can certainly do a better job. If you've worked in live TV you can tell that the folks at AI are constantly adjusting for time throughout the show, and they hit the ending pretty cleanly each time. If the Oscar producers did "American Idol" the show would run 20 minutes long each night and the last 3 singers would only get 10 seconds apiece.