The Oscars: Diversity Rules, to a Point

The 91st Academy Awards had no host, ran over three hours, and had another controversial finish.  But you can't say it was boring.

This was the year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences went out of its way to honor contributions from persons of color (if there's a better term, we'd like to hear it), in stark contrast to the criticism they got a couple of years ago for the mostly white list of nominees.  Among those who took home Oscars: 

• Alfonso Cuaron for directing "Roma", which also won for Foreign Language film.
• Rami Malek for his Best Actor performance, channeling Queen's lead singer Freddie Mercury in "Bohemian Rhapsody".
• Regina King for her Supporting Actress performance in "If Beale Street Could Talk".
• Mahershala Ali for his Supporting Actor performance in "Green Book".

They and other winners of color were undercut when the Academy chose "Green Book" as Best Picture.  It was the tale of a white man navigating the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s with a black musician, which must have reminded the voters of "Driving Miss Daisy", which won for Best Picture in 1989.  Some things never change.

Spike Lee, who with three other guys won his first Oscar for Adaptive Screenplay with "BlacKKKlansman", was among those who weren't thrilled with "Green Book"'s win.  Lee used his podium time earlier as a call to arms for the 2020 presidential election to reject hate.  President Donald Trump, who's becoming pretty good at figuring out thinly veiled insults aimed at him indirectly, tweeted one of his own at Lee.

Another highlight of the evening was Lady Gaga's duet with Bradley Cooper on "Shallow", a song from the fourth version of "A Star Is Born".  It was so intimate that you'd think there's something going on between them.  Or was it just a convincing performance?  Anyhoo, Gaga got her Oscar for Best Original Song, and would have added a Best Actress trophy if it hadn't been for Olivia Colman playing Queen Anne in "The Favourite".

The telecast ran for three hours and twenty minutes, which is the typical length of an NFL football game, and was shorter than either a New York Yankees-Boston Red Sox baseball game or some of the Best Picture winners over the last half century.   In spite of the Academy's and ABC's best efforts to get folks to bed at a reasonable hour, there was no host (Kevin Hart quit after past homophobic posts on social media came back to bite him), no Most Popular Movie category, and every award was shown live instead of moving some of them to commercial breaks (behold the power of unions in Hollywood).

Whether it was the lack of a host or the possibility of the Oscars turning into a gawker slowdown, CNN reports that the ratings for the ABC telecast were up from last year by 12 percent.  Maybe less is more after all.