Set a tiger loose in the theatre

OSCAR NIGHT – like New Year’s Eve and every wedding you’ve ever been to – offers endless evidence of the human animal’s ability to favour hope over experience. Every year, we sit through eight hours of disingenuous backslapping, interspersed with musical numbers by Leni Reifenstahl’s more doctrinaire niece and, after a few minutes sleep, give ourselves a stern talking to.

Every year you tell yourself that this is the last time you will sit through this charade. The €15.99 a month you pay for Sky Indefensible Expense 4 will, henceforth, be handed straight to the home for frail cats.

Well, you know what they say about childbirth. If women could recall the pain that accompanied the arrival of their first child they would never have a second. Yet only children are still in the minority. Winter turns to spring. Oscar movies give way to superhero flicks and, when February comes around, you, once again, break out the popcorn and settle down for a night of award-related entertainment.

Argh! The pain! The pain! Where’s that bleeding epidural? Viewing figures are declining and a recent poll in the US gave some clue as to what has been driving punters away. One-third of respondents objected to the show’s excessive length. A quarter were turned off by those appalling musical numbers and a similar number disliked the scripted celebrity banter.

Quite right too. The American people would, this poll suggests, favour a ceremony in which some sober representative of cinema at its most austere – Max Von Sydow, say – welcomes a small band of casually-dressed professionals to an oak-panelled room and hands out awards to the right sort of film. Best picture to Helmut Sternman's Eight Months of Purgatory. Best actress to Helga Arthaus for her turn in My Sister, My Lover. And so on. Say goodbye to cheesy musical numbers. Say hello to the Norbert Mogadon Memorial Award for least eventful tracking shot.

Read further into the survey, however, and the unhappy truth is revealed. More than half the respondents wanted more coverage – more coverage, mind – of the moronic fashion parade up the stupid red carpet. Somewhere in the region of 80 per cent felt that the ceremony was dominated by obscure films and stated that they would be happier to watch if more mainstream pictures were included. Now, it is true to say that, in the year the unwatched The Readerwas nominated for best picture at the expense of the popular and adored Wall-E, the populists have a point. But no sane person could accuse Oscar voters of tending towards the intellectual. For the past 80 years the Academy – assailed by the popcorn brigade on one wing and the cineastes on the other – has chartered a safe passage through the dreary wastes of Middlebrow Valley.

Last week, a rumour went around that, stung by the public’s objections, the organisers of this year’s event were planning to make some cynical alterations to the usual procedures. Star presenters were, it is said, being urged to sprint rapidly up the red carpet, so that viewers would have to tune in to the main event if they wanted to catch site of the dresses.

"I have heard that some presenters will not walk the red carpet," the extravagantly named Gary Snegaroff, executive producer of E!'s Live From the Red Carpet show, snarled. "But we're not hurting for star power. The nominees are the faces that our viewers care about."

The truth is that the more the organisers attempt to make the ceremony conform to a pattern – either upmarket or downmarket – the less exciting the event will become.

Think about it. What are the great Oscar moments? Sacheen Littlefeather, ersatz Native American, accepting Marlon Brando's Oscar for The Godfather. David Niven observing a streaker and remarking: "Isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?" Vanessa Redgrave getting her red knickers in a twist about "Zionist hoodlums".

In short, successful Oscar ceremonies thrive on the unexpected, the unplanned and – as far as the authorities are concerned – the unwanted. Try too hard to control the event and it will become more, not less, tedious.

Perhaps the Academy should attempt to deliberately generate spontaneity by releasing a tiger into the auditorium or lacing the water-fountains with Angel Dust. Maybe they could plant an incendiary device in the Oscar for best adapted screenplay.

Whatever happens, let’s pray they keep the songs short.