The Oscars Should Be 30 Minutes Long
Last year, the Academy Awards did away with their host altogether for the first time since 1989, resulting in a far more enjoyable and slightly more streamlined viewing experience. This year’s ceremony will also be hostless, but why are we stopping there? We need a radical upheaval of the whole system. We need a future we can believe in. We need to make the Oscars 30 minutes long.
Awards season has been going on for so long now that I feel like a withered husk of myself. I look like de-aged Robert DeNiro in The Irishman. But the real insult comes on Sunday night, when the telecast begins at 8:00 p.m. on the East Coast and won’t end until close to midnight. According to the Los Angeles Times, the average length of the Oscars from 2010 to 2018—when ABC reported an all-time low of 26.5 million viewers—was three hours and 32 minutes. That is 12 minutes longer than 2004 Best Picture winner The Return of the King. Think of everything else you could be doing with your precious Sunday night instead, like rewatching The Return of the King.
Anyway, here’s how my airtight and entirely feasible plan to condense the ceremony to 30 minutes—or one hour, if we must have commercials—will work. First, structure the evening like the nominations announcement, with two announcers onstage. I’ll leave that decision to the producers, but here are a handful of suggestions I thought of in the last five seconds alone: Rihanna, Stanley Tucci, Michael Stuhlbarg, Al Pacino’s scarf, the depressed child from Marriage Story. The announcers alternate each category, reading all the nominees, followed by the winner. The camera briefly pans to the winner just long enough to capture joy, surprise, Adam Driver resting face, whatever. The "In Memoriam" segment can still take place halfway through. No speeches. No performances. No banter between presenters. The winners can pick up their statuettes from a folding table in the back on their way out. (The E! red carpet show and whatnot would still take place beforehand, because I’m not trying to fight Giuliana Rancic.)
The last attempt to make the telecast shorter, which involved presenting a handful of awards during the commercial breaks, backfired spectacularly when it was rightfully pointed out that the cinematographers and editors should be recognized for their work. But under the 30-minute plan, everyone will be highlighted and everyone will benefit. Internet writers can get their Oscars looks slideshows together and publish their takes and tweets about Joker winning Best Picture without being kept awake well into Monday morning. You can still host your Oscars party and win or lose your Oscars bracket. The celebrities themselves will be off the hook to go straight to their after-parties, and Brad Pitt will be free to eat his first refined carb in two years.
And once it’s been implemented, we can move on to part two of my plan: making the Grammys 15 minutes long.
We venture into the peculiar alternate reality of Larry David and begin to wonder: Is the world's most infamously neurotic man actually its most self-actualized?
Originally Appeared on GQ
