The Shape of Oscar Night

The 90th Academy Awards on Sunday was, given everything that's happened to Hollywood and the rest of America over the past year, a do-over.  White males were reduced to spectators by women who spent parts of the evening echoing the sentiments of the MeToo and Time's Up campaigns against sexual harassment in the entertainment industry, and by African-Americans and LGTBQs for being mostly ignored on their own merits all these years.

To that end, we got to hear host Jimmy Kimmel tiptoe through a minefield of a monologue, Ryan Seacrest being routinely snubbed on the red carpet due to sexual harassment allegations, the first transgender awards presenter and Jordan Peele becoming the first African-American to win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay ("Get Out").

On the other hand, the Academy chose to reward two men whose time should have been up, but the statute of limitations must have expired:  Kobe Bryant, who won Best Animated Short for "Dear Basketball", was accused of raping a woman back in 2004.  And Gary Oldman, whose impersonation of Winston Churchill in "Darkest Hour" won him a Best Actor nod, allegedly assaulted his wife in 2001.

Frances McDormand, whose role in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" earned her her second Best Actress Oscar (the other was for "Fargo"), inadvertently revealed an inconvenient truth about this year's awards when she asked all the female winners in the audience (including Allison Janney, who won Best Supporting Actress for her role in "I, Tonya") to stand up during her acceptance speech.  In spite of all the love for director Greta Gerwig (whose "Lady Bird" garnered zero Oscars), and for Rachel Morrison as the first female to be nominated for cinematography, there were fewer women Oscar winners than in the previous six years.

McDormand also introduced a new phrase to the entertainment lexicon during her acceptance speech:  inclusive rider.  It's inserted into actors' contracts to promote gender and racial balance in hiring on movie sets.  It may not be as remembered as "plastics", but McDormand deserves credit for taking the time to read the fine print, which is what most actors usually leave to their agents or attorneys.

Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway got another chance to announce this year's Best Picture, which went to "The Shape of Water"--this time without a hitch.  As for the movie itself, its love story between a mute woman and a top-secret sea creature sounds kind of retro in a year of female empowerment, does it not?

The shape of the Oscar telecast was . . . flabby.  Despite a three-hour prime time window with an earlier starting time, and Kimmel's promise of a jet ski to the winner with the shortest acceptance speech, the show still managed to clock in at nearly four hours.   Around 26.5 million of you watched the proceedings live on ABC, which is 6.5 million less than last year's Gaffe Heard Round The World.

That's another challenge in the post-Harvey Weinstein world of the Academy Awards--or any other awards show, for that matter.  How do you change the world without viewers changing the channel?