Oscars 2019: The Academy is taking the wrong direction to fix declining ratings

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What do you want from the Oscars? I’ve been asking around, and the answer is consistent: speeches. Real speeches, memorable speeches. Speeches that move people, as film moves people.

This flies in the faces of the folks at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – Academy president John Bailey, along with show producers Donna Gigliotti and Glenn Weiss – who are determined above all else to deliver a three-hour event, 45 minutes shorter than last year’s. They want better ratings among a younger demographic, which they believe means less content.

Huh? Millennials want more sincerity, not less. As do I. I desperately hope Spike Lee wins best director for BlacKkKlansman, for example, because he deserves it – and because I know he’ll give us a barn-burner of a moment. As Marlon Brando did, winning best actor for The Godfather in 1973, by sending Sacheen Littlefeather to the podium to read his statement, first to boos, then to applause: “I cannot accept this award because of the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry.” I’d love to see something similar on Feb. 24.

Globe and Mail Oscars guide: Read the list of nominees and our reviews of the films

I hope that someone is as helplessly revealing as Sally Field, best actress for 1984’s Places in the Heart, was when she copped to the high-school-popularity-contest aspect of Hollywood: “I haven’t had an orthodox career, and I wanted more than anything to have your respect. I can’t deny the fact that you like me! Right now you like me!”

I hope someone is as ballsy as Shirley Maclaine, best actress for 1983’s Terms of Endearment, was when she prefigured The Secret – “I don’t believe there’s any such thing as accident. I think that we all manifest what we want and what we need” – and then concluded with a bang: “God bless that potential that we all have for making anything possible if we think we deserve it. I deserve this.”

I want someone to be as shaken as Halle Berry, best actress for Monster’s Ball in 2002, was when she said, crying uncontrollably, “This moment is so much bigger than me … it’s for every nameless, faceless woman of colour.” I hope someone is as forceful as Patricia Arquette, best supporting actress for Boyhood, 2015, was when she put the crowd and the world on notice: “We have fought for everyone else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women.”

And I hope that someone I never heard of says something I’ll never forget, which happened when Gerda Weissmann Klein, the subject of 1995’s best documentary short, One Survivor Remembers, talked about her time in a Nazi death camp – “I have been in a place for six incredible years where winning meant a crust of bread and to live another day” – and then, with the room absolutely still, paid homage to “those who never lived to see the magic of a boring evening at home.”

Many of my fellow critics agree. The Oscars “have cultural and symbolic value, and when [Kathryn] Bigelow became the first woman to win best director, I wept,” New York Times critic Manohla Dargis recently tweeted. (I cried too, although I stopped short when I realized that orchestra conductor had chosen I Am Woman as her exit song. You gotta love the clunker moments, too.)

Mark Harris, a critic for New York Magazine, tweeted that the Oscars are “an idiosyncratic but earnest attempt to write a new chapter in movie history every year. I’d like to see some winners that reflect how movies are continuing to evolve, in a ceremony that also respects movie history and Oscar tradition … which is why it’s a particularly terrible moment to be pandering and cautious in shaping the actual ceremony.”

You can’t write a new chapter without words. You can’t have cultural value without articulating your thoughts about the culture. You can’t hear how winners see their industry and society if you’re determined to play them off.

Bailey, Gigliotti and Weiss’s focus on show length is the height of absurdity – as if all the people who didn’t tune in when the Oscars ran 225 minutes will tune in now, but just because the show is 180 minutes. In pursuit of this specious goal, they’ve alienated everyone. When they proposed airing only two of the five nominated songs, Lady Gaga smacked them down (she refused to perform unless everyone did). When they proposed awarding four categories during commercial breaks, and then airing edited speeches later in the broadcast, they were met with outrage. Hundreds of filmmakers signed a letter of protest and the academy backed down.

Every awards show is struggling with declining ratings, but the Oscars are going in exactly the wrong direction to fix that. They’re the only awards show to honour the folks behind the curtain, but they’re determined to concentrate on empty spectacle instead of intimate significance. They’re gutting the thing that matters to deliver something that doesn’t. Did Bailey not hear the outcry when the Grammys cut off Drake’s speech, but allowed every minute of Jennifer Lopez’s tone-deaf, Vegas-style Motown tribute? As with all old media (including, ahem, newspapers), the Oscars are eagerly alienating the audience they do have in favour of some mythical one.

They want younger people to watch? Here’s why I did: The Oscars were my film school, where I heard about everything that wasn’t acting, directing or writing. The hair and makeup artists, the sound engineers et al. didn’t bore me – listening to them was my entry point to cinema.

Gigliotti gave a speech of her own at the Feb. 4 Oscar nominees luncheon, to which all 212 nominees from the 24 Oscar categories were invited (171 attended). She told everyone that they would have 90 seconds, total, to speak, and that included the time it took to get on stage. She suggested, I kid you not, that they “sprint.” (Yuck.) She recommended Steven Soderbergh’s speech, when he won best director for 2000’s Traffic, because it clocked in at less than a minute. “It means,” she concluded, “that you can hit the parties by 8:15.”

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That is a thief of an idea. Sticking to 90 seconds would rob us of Jack Palance, best supporting actor for City Slickers in 1992, throwing shade on his co-star and Oscar host – “Billy Crystal, I crap bigger than him” – then doing one-armed push-ups. It would mean that Tom Hanks, best actor for Philadelphia in 1994, wouldn’t have had time to accidentally out his high school acting teacher. We wouldn’t have John Patrick Shanley, best original screenplay winner for Moonstruck in 1988, thanking “everybody who ever punched or kissed me in my life, and everybody who I ever punched or kissed.”

Nor would we have Cuba Gooding Jr., winning best supporting actor for Jerry Maguire in 1997, clicking his heels in the air, shouting out, “Cameron Crowe, I love you! Tom Cruise, I love you! Regina King, I love you!” The louder the orchestra swelled to play him out, the louder he hollered. And the audience rose to its feet.