It’s time for Oscar, Oscar, Oscar! Sorry, did we just lose most of you? This year, following the departure of wild-card new host Eddie Murphy and the appointment of hoary old host Billy Crystal, the upcoming Academy Awards broadcast Feb. 26 looks to be possibly more boring than ever. And that’s saying something — particularly after last year’s disaster of Anne Hathaway and James Franco. Or maybe you spiked that from your memory.
Surely, on an evening with this much money and talent in one ballroom, there are solutions to Oscar’s terminal case of the blahs. We asked people in the entertainment industry how they’d make it fun again. Here are their lucky-13 ways to do it!
1. Hire Sarah Silverman!
Have a truly edgy comedian run the show. “Sarah Silverman would make a great hostess, but it would be a bold, risky move,” says Michael Levine, founder of Hollywood p.r. firm Levine Communications.
2. Ply the celebs with booze — and Us Weeklys!
Drinks lead to a good time and happy stars. “It’s frightfully boring in that room. After the first three hours, most people just want to drink,” says New Zealander Taika Waititi, director of the upcoming film “Boy.” “It might be nice to have ushers handing out books or magazines. Definitely drinks.”
3. Drink to the dead people!
Cap off the obituary montage with a toast. “There should be mandatory tequila shots at the end of that sad dead-people video,” says Waititi.
4. Have Michael Bay direct!
“Maybe they need to have the Transformers onstage, levitating the audience and spilling them onto Hollywood Boulevard,” says “Entertainment Tonight” film critic and historian Leonard Maltin. “Maybe then some people will be happy. But I’m sure at least one of my colleagues will say, ‘Oh, it’s so boring!’ ”
5. Run the show like the Miss America contest!
Reveal the runner-up in each category before revealing the winner, suggests producer Bob Bain (Kid’s Choice Awards, American Country Awards), “making the races more dramatic.” Roses and tiaras might help, too.
6. Interview the nominees before the show!
Then use their voice-overs during the ceremony. “Reality shows rely on those precious interview bites where the audience is offered insight into what a character is thinking,” says reality TV producer Daniel Blau Rogge (“The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” “Mob Wives,” “Wipeout”). “This would be a helpful device to get inside the minds of Oscar nominees — as Brad Pitt looks on at Jean Dujardin, he claps and smiles while his interview plays: ‘He didn’t even have to say any words in that movie. Do you know how hard it is to make the line “I just realized something incredible about baseball statistics” sound interesting?’ ” Or have the stars do off-stage confessionals à la “The Office.”
7. Play up the funny!
Give comedies their own categories. “The Oscars are totally missing out on a huge part of the film industry — the comedies,” says producer Paul Flattery (Kids Choice Awards, Teen Choice Awards). “Simply by adding Oscars for Comedy Film, Actor, Actress and maybe even Supporting Actor/Actress they would be adding comedic talent to the show.”
Adds Bain, “Why is comedy acting not considered an art form like dramatic acting? It makes no sense, and the absence of comedy awards substantially reduces the potential for spontaneous fun (and comedy) on the show.”
8. Bring on a super-unlikely co-host!
“Billy Crystal should form a rap duo with Method Man,” says actor and writer Erik Weiner, who has written for the Emmys and the MTV Movie Awards, “and they could rap the opening number together. ‘Ladies and gentlemen . . . please welcome Crystal Meth!’ ”
9. Keep it shorter!
“The key today is the pacing,” says p.r. honcho Levine. “The metabolism rate of our world has unalterably changed. The show is far too long. I feel halfway through it like I’m swimming in Jell-O.”
“I watched the first televised Oscars once, and they didn’t allow anybody to give speeches, except — how do I put this diplomatically? — people in the most significant categories,” says Maltin of “Entertainment Tonight.” “And that might be the answer.
“One year, [the Academy] awarded a state-of-the-art flat-screen TV to the person who would give the shortest speech,” Maltin adds. “Someone won it, but it didn’t inspire anyone else to be brief.”
10. Losers carry winners to the stage!
Get participation from non-winner attendees. “It would be great if there was a rule where everyone has to get out of their seats and dance and make a big deal out of every single award,” says Waititi. “I would also make a rule that the losers of each category have to carry the winner onto the stage and worship them during their speech.”
11. Make the presenters work!
“The presenters must all perform the excerpts from the films.”
12. Everyone goes home a winner!
Give awards of excellence to all. “It’s not like a horse race or a sprint. It’s people who probably were all excellent competing in this completely artificial way,” says Tony-winning Broadway producer Manny Azenberg. “For everyone who wins there’s several people who have to sit there and think they’re losers. And they are not. And then the camera always goes to them and they’re sitting there smiling, but they’ve sat there for five hours for what is a disappointing moment. I would start my own awards and give everybody an excellence award.”
13. Treat it like reality TV!
Don’t air it in real time — have editors liven it up in post-production. “Reality shows are, to a certain extent, created in the edit bay, where producers and editors sift through hundreds (or thousands) of hours of footage to make the final product watchable. That hilarious cutaway, that tense music cue — all of it amps up the drama and lets the audience know just how to feel about a given situation,” says TV producer Rogge. “Producers should let an editor take some time to generate some thrills.”