Attention Oscar elders: Emmys make big cuts in telecast awards
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In a move that is certain to put even more pressure on the motion picture academy to drag its Oscar telecast into the 21st century, Variety is reporting that 8 of the 28 honors in the Primetime Emmy Awards will be prerecorded and then time-shifted into the main broadcast this year, according to a proposal presented to the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Wednesday night.
Variety’s Brian Lowry says the categories going under the knife include outstanding movies and miniseries, writing for dramatic series and movies/miniseries, as well as directing for variety, music and comedy and movie/miniseries. Translation: The Emmys are willing to streamline their TV show in the hopes of getting better ratings. It won’t necessarily be a popular move, either with writers and directors of long-form programming or with HBO, which has dominated the nominations for movies and miniseries.
But as Lowry points out -- everybody’s doing it, except for the motion picture academy. Only 14 of the 24 awards at the Tonys are presented live, while the Grammys only aired 11 awards in its past telecast, preferring to concentrate on far more exciting and involving live performances.
As I’ve been arguing for years and years, the Oscars should bite the bullet and do the same thing with the long, boring string of technical awards -- notably sound editing, sound mixing, visual effects and costume design -- which, while representing great examples of filmmaking craft, make for a snoozy 45 minutes of television. They should either be presented off camera or, better still, be incorporated in a separate, more informal show that could run on a cable movie channel during Oscar weekend in a setting where everyone could actually have a good time instead of being stuffed into the back rows of the Kodak Theatre.
The motion picture academy has always treated even the most polite suggestion of revamping its broadcast as horrific heresy, but now that even the tradition-bound TV academy has started to cut-and-paste its show, it will be harder for the Oscar elders to keep their heads buried in the sand.