I don't think I'm saying anything particularly shocking or counterintuitive when I write that the Academy Awards broadcast was quite bad this year. I have a hard time blaming that on Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, both of whom I adore, even though their initial monologue was of such uneven quality and such manifest awkwardness that it seems entirely possible they were drunk and improvising the whole thing, in which case it was reasonably impressive.
Rather, it seemed like Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic, who produced the hsow couldn't agree on a concept. The multi-patterned sets (the ones in the backdrop were different from the ones on the front of the steps) clashed with the hideous tinsel hanging from the ceiling. Neil Patrick Harris is uniformly charming, and it's a nice sop to the fanboys and fangirls who loved him in Dr. Horrible and singing in How I Met Your Mother to have him sing. But there's nothing remotely witty about singing "You can't take Julia Child from her pie / You can't take James Cameron from his CGI" and the song felt like an extremely deliberate attempt to capitalize on Hugh Jackman's great, antic performance, which was wonderful because the anticness was something of a surprise. After Martin and Baldwin's only somewhat successful opening dialogue (the two of them shaking hands in a congratulatory fashion after referencing a threesome with Meryl Streep, and Martin's fabulous "In our first movies, we were both born a poor black child" in reference to both Gabby Sidibe and The Jerk were marvelous, but lost in a sea of mediocrity), it seemed as if they were banished from the stage in punishment.
And in their absence, what mediocrity. The Steve Carrell-Cameron Diaz bit was so poorly written and poorly delivered, it wasn't clear to me if they were ad-libbing to cover Diaz's flub, or if the jokes had been written that way. Miley Cyrus botched her lines, too. When Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr. got up on stage, their competence was so refreshing that the somewhat weak jokes seemed like a miracle. Carey Mulligan and Zoe Saldana are lovely, lovely ladies, but it breaks up the flow of things when you've got to smooth out your dress and joke about how it makes you immobile. The long salutes to the best actor and actress nominees were, once again, embarrassing, stilted and a momentum killer (though Michael Sheen talking about how hot Helen Mirren is further endeared him to me).
I don't really know what else to say. The Academy Awards are a significant television event. To do honor to the art they are about, they ought to be well-designed, well-executed, and well-performed. This year, they were not.