Cheap Oscars 2021

[Terry Monohan]

The ABC Oscar® show this year was not very good I thought. They tried to do the best but It failed in so many ways.

To start they had way too many fake plants and lamps hanging outside in the Union Station courtyard. The area has some nice tile waterfall fountains but you never saw them on live TV. After the city of LA kicked out all the homeless people a few weeks ago the area looked so fake and plastic.

Another disturbing thing was the live dj playing records and pre recorded music. I know they had to cut back with the full Dolby® Theatre pit orchestra this year but please at least have some music playing from the movie soundtrack that won a award when the stars came up to get their trophy. It was mostly fast rock.

The memorial clip section was edited so fast you hardly had time to see or read most of the departed. ABC needed time to run more car ads I guess?


Did any of you guys notice the sync shake glitch problems sometimes during camera changes?

I noticed the little table deco nightclub lamps were set to bright, they caused a slight glare. With all the stage and rise level table/seats they built just for a 3 1/2 hour live show It must have cost ABC and the Academy a ton of money. They need to leave the whole set up in the former ticket window Union Train Station area and turn It into the Union Station Nightclub Restaurant. The street people and commuters can grab a quick sandwich/drink and see what they missed on TV.

We will wait till they return to the Dolby® Hollywood Theatre in 2022 when movies can be seen on the big screen in a true movie cinema not on TV. Maybe they will cut way back and do few more of these reduced Oscar® shows on the cheap at some other LA deco building.

[Mark Ogden]

This year’s Oscar show will be next year’s memorial reel.

[Bobby Henderson]

I skipped the Oscars broadcast. The last umpteen months have been terrible for the movie industry. So many completed or near-complete projects were left on the shelf with release dates severely or indefinitely postponed. That made for a much smaller eligible pool of movies for awards consideration. IMHO, they should have just cancelled the affair.

Even in a good year the Oscars telecast is a chore to watch. I don't get "triggered" by the political statements (although virtue signaling from "woke" rich people doesn't really go over well). But I cringe at a lot of the self-congratulatory, self-important posturing combined with an overt layer of cronyism. It's off putting. A bunch of rich douchebags are kissing each others' asses and us commoners are supposed to find it entertaining or inspiring.

The only thing I needed to see was the final list of winners in various categories. Some winners were good choices and others, well, not so much.

I've been a Nine Inch Nails fan for about 30 years. So I think it's pretty cool Trent Reznor won another Best Original Score Oscar for Pixar's Soul along with his longtime scoring partner Atticus Ross and new collaborator Jon Batiste, the music director for the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Reznor & Ross have been prolific at scoring movies and TV shows in recent years. Hell, they were nominated twice this year, one nomination for Soul and another for Mank. It usually takes someone with a legendary name like John Williams to do that.

Given the small venue I guess it's not surprising to see a DJ spinning records as the musical entertainment for the show. But they probably could have fit a regular band into the same space. The style choice of a DJ seems like the producers of the show are trying a little too hard to get past the Oscars So White controversy. But they still find ways to show they're very out of touch. Kicking homeless people out of a train station to make room for a TV broadcast doesn't generate very "woke" optics.

And it doesn't really look too cool for the last award of the evening not going to the overwhelming favorite. They re-shuffled the deck so to speak to place Best Actor as the final award of the night. The late Chadwick Boseman won the SAG Best Actor award posthumously. Most expected him to win the Oscar. Nope. And the guy who won (oldest Best Actor winner in Oscar history apparently) was not even in the building to accept the award. Oh yeah, Viola Davis, the SAG Best Actress winner didn't win the Oscar either.

I'm pretty much of the opinion the AMPAS needs to drop the In Memoriam segment from the show. They're in a no-win situation with that feature of the show. They need to come up with a more effective way to remember actors, performers and various behind the scenes industry people who died. A rushed segment on ABC is not the way to do it. I think a more permanent solution online would be better for the general public.

[Martin McCaffery]

The most surprising thing about the Oscars this year was waking up to the top of the hour news on NPR and no mention of Best Picture or any other awards. Then I checked the CNN front page, and no Oscar winners there. I don't think that has ever happened in my lifetime.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Imagine living in 2021 and "Love and Monsters" actually gets nominated for "Best Visual Effects"... I nominate A Sound of Thunder for 2022, that movie seemingly didn't get the credits for their special effects it deserved... If the rest wasn't already a sign of how irrelevant the Oscars have become, this one is the nail in the coffin...

As for the homeless situation... L.A. doesn't have any other locations to stage such an event that doesn't involve a working train-station? Don't they have like a zillion of unused sound stages right now?

[Leo Enticknap]

The ironic thing about the homeless angle is that the best picture award went to a movie about a homeless lady, yet they forcibly evicted all the homeless from the vicinity of Union Station in order to hold the ceremony.

I'm guessing that they held the show in the original booking hall of Union Station, which is not open to the public and frequently rented out for location shoots and other private events. I'm further guessing that anyone actually arriving or departing on a train yesterday would have been required to use the entrance in the Patsaouras Transit Plaza, a 1990s addition to the station on the opposite side of the tracks from the original 1939 mission-style building. They likely also closed the block of Cesar Chavez between the entrance to the plaza and Alameda. Either that, or they simply closed Union Station to trains for the day.

Union Station is a beautiful building, and I can understand why the city wanted to showcase it. The problem is, as many have pointed out, that the surrounding blocks are a pretty gnarly part of town.

[Mike Blakesley]

I haven't watch the Oscars "live" in many, many years, although some years I have clicked into the website from time to time to see how my favorites are doing.

"My favorites," there is the key phrase. Those people are all over in Hollywood wringing their hands about why the Oscar (and every other awards shows) ratings are down..... it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know the answers.

1. Nobody gives a shit about the movies that were nominated this year. Hardly anybody SAW the movies that were nominated this year. For two reasons: A lot of them were straight to video, so they don't feel like "real movies" and they got lost in the slag-heap of the thousands of other straight-to-video titles that flood the TV screens of the world. The other reason, of course, is they weren't mainstream stories. Hollywood seems to have forgotten that it's possible to do award-winning work with a mainstream story, it happens all the time, but those movies never even get nominated anymore. They have forgotten who their audience is. So, if nobody has any "favorites" in the lineup, nobody is going to watch the show. DUH, it's not hard, folks.

2. At least half of the moviegoing audience does not want to hear celebrity politics. (Probably more than half, actually.) I am mystified as to why these people would engage in an activity that THEY KNOW is going to piss off and "turn off" at least half, and maybe more, of their audience. When we played The War With Grandpa (not an Oscar contender), I didn't put Robert DeNiro on the marquee -- it would have hurt business, not helped. I'll do the same thing when we play the new Space Jam flick (also, probably not destined to be a contender). LeBron James and the rest of them are costing all of us ticket sales with his rantings. I can't believe that the Oscar producers don't beg and plead with the celebs to PLEASE stick to talking about the movies, and enough with the woke culture anti-everything rhetoric already. Save it for the talk shows.

[Leo Enticknap]

Couldn't agree more. The kinda get away with it when they build the political stuff more subtly, beneath the surface, into shows that do have mainstream appeal value on the surface (e.g. feminist propaganda that runs through the script of both Wonder Woman pics, which I found annoying, bordering on offensive, but others I've discussed the movies with didn't even notice), but if you look at the list of best picture winners over the last few years, it's a list of movies that were only ever going to attract a significant audience in arthouses in college towns. And as you point out, add to that the fact that so many prominent entertainment personalities spend most of their time off the set making political speeches that are guaranteed to alienate around half the population, the Oscars ratings falling by over half in a year is the inevitable end result.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I actually thought this is how all future Oscar shows should be. It was short, sweet and to the point. I actually watched most of it for the first time since the 1980's.

[Leo Enticknap]

One potentially worrying aspect of this is the effect of the loss of ratings-related ad and licensing revenue on AMPAS. They are just finishing up a big new museum, which is unlikely to generate any significant revenue for at least a few months, and there is also their film archive and libraries, which must be major cost centers, with, I would speculate, budgeting behind them that relies on Oscars-related revenue that in turn relies on ratings figures at 1990s and '00s levels. The ratings decline from last year to this was the most dramatic, but it cannot be laid totally at the door of C19: it's an acceleration of a process that started 3-4 years ago, not a complete anomaly.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I suspect that the museum will do fine, once the tourist numbers will go somewhat back to normal. The AMPAS name gives credibility to a film museum and L.A. is still the movie town of the world and will be, for the foreseeable future, even if you can still smell the rotting corpse of Hollywood's former soul.

I don't know if the bad numbers are to blame on the political b.s. either. I consider it somewhat like sports, because sports for a large parts, is fueled by drama, even if that drama is often overblown and fake. People like to rant about stuff and those Hollywood stars are just the right fuel.

I suspect that the main problem has been identified many times before: Nobody besides a very select audience and Hollywood themselves gives a rat's ass about the movies that are being represented there. Like Mike indicated, in this last pandemic year, even that select audience couldn't care less about those movies, because they didn't see them. The same is true for me, I've seen a handful of those movies nominated this year, so I couldn't give a damn...

Regarding the "Ticket Concourse" of Union Station... Interesting, I remember the thing being actually used for selling tickets, like... 25 or so years ago or is my memory getting foggy? But I guess L.A. isn't a train town. But yes, it's up for rental as venue space.

[Jim Cassedy]

I didn't watch it. I didn't miss it.

[Leo Enticknap]

Veering a little off topic; sorry in advance.

LA was a train town: the construction of Union Station in 1937-39 was an attempt to bring order to the chaos of a myriad of local, regional, and long-haul railroad arteries serving the city. Then came the Eisenhower administration and the interstate freeway system in the 1950s, the demise of Pacific Electric, and the resulting car culture of Southern California, which persists to today. There has been an effort to revive rail transportation in the last two decades, and for cargo, it has been very successful. The container trains snaking their way through San Timoteo Canyon, half a mile from my home, have gotten longer and longer over the last few years. For passenger transportation, much less so.

When I worked at the Egyptian from 2014-17, there was almost never a show in the evening on Tuesdays, but a staff meeting in the early afternoon. So I could do that day by train, parking at San Bernardino, taking the Metrolink to Union Station, then the Red Line subway to Hollywood & Vine. The total journey time was no shorter than driving it - both were about three hours in each direction, door to door. But it did mean that for one day a week, I was let off the stress of six hours behind the wheel. The early morning nonstop commuter train from SB to Union Station, and its early evening counterpart, were always quite full when I rode them, and the fare was an absolute bargain - $26 for the 129-mile round trip. If you believe the federal government's figure of $0.55 per mile as being what it costs to use your car (that's what you can claim as tax-deductible mileage), then the train fare was around a third of that. Furthermore, sitting in the leather club chairs and doing an email check or reading the paper in the "departure lounge" at Union Station if I got there a few minutes early for the return trip was an added bonus - it's a lovely space.

That came to an end when my car was stolen from the parking garage at San Bernardino. The time and money fallout from that deterred me from using the train again.

This was in 2016, and I've heard from various people since that the Metrolink and LA subway trains have basically become mobile homeless shelters. Further comment on that would necessitate getting political: all I'll write is that this issue will need to be addressed, along with others, if LA, and its suburbia and exurbia, is ever to become a train town again. But as Pacific Electric demonstrated, it can be done, even over a very extended exurbia.

[Terry Monohan]

I was just thinking about this years awards show, I kind of liked the after show in the courtyard than the regular main show inside this year for some odd reason.

I think the way too many hanging lamps looked better lit up at night and the fake plants did not look as bad at night. The after show was not rushed as they did not run as many commercials I thought. The ABC outside two hosts did a great job and were very polished.

They needed to have both of them on the live reduced Oscar® show this year inside not outside in the cold Union Train Station courtyard after the event ended.

Looks like the Oscars® did not have help like a page or ushers to assist some of the people up on the thin stage or get them off. Brad helped a little off the side of the stage. The show almost started with a fall on stage.

What the performance needed was some excitement like the 'Silver Streak' with full horn blowing in surround sound coming into the staged night club train lobby space! Special effects on live TV, how many of the seated guests would have got up and ran in panic and left their Oscars on the table thinking It was for real?

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I haven't watch the Oscars "live" in many, many years, although some years I have clicked into the website from time to time to see how my favorites are doing.

"My favorites," there is the key phrase. Those people are all over in Hollywood wringing their hands about why the Oscar (and every other awards shows) ratings are down..... it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know the answers.

1. Nobody gives a shit about the movies that were nominated this year. Hardly anybody SAW the movies that were nominated this year. For two reasons: A lot of them were straight to video, so they don't feel like "real movies" and they got lost in the slag-heap of the thousands of other straight-to-video titles that flood the TV screens of the world. The other reason, of course, is they weren't mainstream stories. Hollywood seems to have forgotten that it's possible to do award-winning work with a mainstream story, it happens all the time, but those movies never even get nominated anymore. They have forgotten who their audience is. So, if nobody has any "favorites" in the lineup, nobody is going to watch the show. DUH, it's not hard, folks.

2. At least half of the moviegoing audience does not want to hear celebrity politics. (Probably more than half, actually.) I am mystified as to why these people would engage in an activity that THEY KNOW is going to piss off and "turn off" at least half, and maybe more, of their audience. When we played The War With Grandpa (not an Oscar contender), I didn't put Robert DeNiro on the marquee -- it would have hurt business, not helped. I'll do the same thing when we play the new Space Jam flick (also, probably not destined to be a contender). LeBron James and the rest of them are costing all of us ticket sales with his rantings. I can't believe that the Oscar producers don't beg and plead with the celebs to PLEASE stick to talking about the movies, and enough with the woke culture anti-everything rhetoric already. Save it for the talk shows.

Spot on Mike!