On the list of things I will never voluntarily do in my life,
death comes first. Performance art is second and “Brokeback
Mountain” sex comes in third, not that there’s anything
wrong with it.
The order gets a little fuzzy after that, fluctuating with my
mood, but usually somewhere between numbers six and nine is getting
up to watch the live Oscar nominations announcement on TV. Right
now, it’s number four.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with the way in which the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences releases its beloved
Oscar nominations into the ether, here’s a primer: On a
seemingly random day in late January, the Academy rolls out a
recently forgotten former winner or two to read off the nominees
for the upcoming year’s awards. You’d think the myriad
of TV and flash cameras on the scene were witnessing the
inauguration of a new president. Of course, everyone’s
smiling as the cameras roll, although in Los Angeles, that may just
be the Botox.
Overall, it’s an entirely innocuous and relatively boring
ceremony, especially when it’s much easier (and faster) to
read the list of nominees once they’re available on the
Internet about 0.27 seconds later.
For reasons both practical and theoretical, the problem I have
with the official kickoff to Oscar season, which is scheduled to
take place on Jan. 31 this year, is that the announcement occurs at
5:30 a.m. PST.
The obscenely early start time serves people on the East Coast,
who can see or listen to the nominations live at 8:30 a.m. on their
way to work. By 9 a.m., everyone in the office knows who’s
nominated and the buzz carries straight on through to the awards
ceremony, this year on March 5.
The early announcement used to be a brilliantly devised
publicity tool; stations could re-air the ceremony every hour for
every time zone, and the whole nation found out on its collective
morning commute.
However, the Academy’s plan was only necessary before
every American office worker had access to the Internet while at
work. People can now read the nominees at any time of the day,
making the early announcement just seem like another East Coast
media bias. Los Angeles already has to deal with a three-hour
television tape delay for the Golden Globes so both the East and
West Coasts can watch them during prime time. Only the East Coast
gets to see them live, even though the Globes ceremony is in Los
Angeles.
At this point, there’s no need to release Oscar
nominations so early. The practical use of clockwork as a publicity
stunt has timed out.
Still, there’s another slightly more sinister reason why
the Academy should push back the announcements at least a few hours
into the day. By releasing the nominees so early in the morning,
the Oscars assume a sort of proverbial death grip on that
day’s news.
If the Academy decided it didn’t care about what was
happening in the rest of the country, the early time would be fine.
I’m not saying that the Academy does care, but merely that
the Academy cares about presenting the image of caring ““ look
no further than the 2002 Oscar ceremony for proof. The Academy
didn’t want to call off its lavish awards ceremony in the
wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, but it didn’t want to seem
callous by not responding to the attacks at all.
As a compromise, the Academy merely shortened the red carpet
from its usual length that requires the assistance of Kenyan
long-distance runners to cross to just a few yards.
The idea of caring about the news is more important to the
Academy than actually caring. By the same logic, it has no right to
assume top-news priority so early in the morning. The act also
assumes morning news priority over the previous day’s events,
no matter how important they may be.
It seems obvious to me at least that the Academy could solve all
the problems surrounding the 5:30 a.m. announcement by simply
pushing the time back three hours.
Let the people on the East Coast find out during their lunch
breaks. And let the people of Los Angeles, who are arguably the
only people in the country who really care about who gets
nominated, watch it live.
This is the first of Tracer’s two-part series on Oscar
nominations. Next week he will analyze the nominations themselves.
E-mail him suggestions at jtracer@media.ucla.edu.