ARE THE OSCARS TOO LONG? YEAH, SURE. BUT ALSO, NO. IT’S COMPLICATED

A brief history of The Academy Awards and its seemingly eternal runtime Calum Marsh

The Oscars are too long. It’s an axiom that crops up with renewed rancour annually this time of year, as the inane climate of awards season reaches its familiar crescendo of chilling flurries.

Complaint about the length of the ceremony eclipses every other avenue of Oscars criticism. It concentrates the ire of pop- culture pundits in a solitary thrust of intolerable grievance. Like a bullied child, the Oscars are painfully aware of this shortcoming, and have even participated in the ridicule, as if to save face with self-deprecation. Johnny Carson began his introductory monologue as host in 1979 by welcoming the audience to “two hours of sparkling entertainment spread out over a four-hour show.” David Letterman addressed it when he graced the stage in 1995, as the orchestra jammed through the Space Odyssey theme and the audience wouldn’t stop clapping: “Great,” he quipped. “We’re already five minutes behind.” In 2011, brought out from hibernation to pay tribute to Bob Hope, Billy Crystal joked that, because the show was running long, he would skip straight to the nominees for Best Picture.

Everyone knows this ceremony is endless. Even the producers.

You wouldn’t think it would be so time- consuming, dispensing a few dozen statuettes and indulging in some words of thanks from the winners. I mean, most colleges manage to get through graduation ceremonies in about 90 minutes, and they’re obliged to administer diplomas to hundreds of students, handshakes with the dean included. The Academy Awards do include various remarks, sight gags, performances and sideshows that have little to do with the actual awards conferred by the Academy – all those memorial reels and musical numbers, those rim-shot punchlines and lurid parades, that are the stuff of a multimillion dollar primetime production – but that surfeit of squawking lunacy doesn’t seem to be the problem.

When endeavouring to abbreviate the runtime this year – a common and frequently unsuccessful effort – the first suggestion the Academy tendered was to axe a couple of the less prestigious categories from the broadcast. Dish up cinematography and editing to the nobodies who happen to win them while the world has cut to commercial break. That’ ll speed things up, keep things moving – a sensible proposition. They reneged, in the end; they consented to keep the nobody-prizes in the show, after certain parties indignantly protested.

In any case, the point was manifest: The Academy Awards are too long.

A truism this enduring suggests a vast historical reach. We accept they’re bound to be interminable now; it seems certain they must have always been. You imagine the familiar tedious Oscar night in the halcyon days of Hollywood’s golden age: some screwball heroine vying for kudos shoulder to shoulder with a debonair leading man as millions of moviesavvy Americans sit around the radio waiting to hear what won Best Picture, grousing wearily that they wished Irving Berlin or someone would get on with it already. It is hard to picture an Academy Awards ceremony that seemed brisk, at any point in the history of Hollywood cinema. It’s not so much that it couldn’t be done punctually. It’s that we would feel rather odd, not being able to complain.

To understand the state of the ceremony today, it helps to look back to the beginning of it all.

One evening, in the mid-1920s, Louis B. Mayer, co-founder and autocratic ruler of the movie studio Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer, convened a meeting of his fellow luminaries in the motion picture business at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, to propose the foundation of a new organization for “distinguished contributors” to the industry. (He got the idea the way a lot of movie people did in that era, by overhearing it mentioned at a dinner party by somebody else.) There had been talk around town lately of a scarier sort of organizing – talk of labour unions, the last thing a man of Mayer’s wealth and power wishes to hear. So, he and the other studio kingpins elected to get out ahead of this crisis, by forming an inclusive group of their own. It would unite the many thousands of artists and labourers working across Hollywood – and, ideally, make a union seem redundant.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences was founded in 1927. The name didn’t really mean anything, but it sounded good, with an air of seriousness and distinction that accorded with the organization’s ancillary goal of public relations for the biz. It was “genius,” film historian David Thomson writes, “because it made you think the Academy had always been there, arranged by God and Harvard and Albert Einstein.” The Academy extended membership to writers, directors, producers, actors and technicians, and one of the earliest responsibilities they were delegated was to give themselves awards. The artists commended could hardly resist the flattery – and would be too distracted by the glory to mind about much else. “The Academy was about manipulation,” Scott Eyman explains in his biography of Meyer, Lion of Hollywood. The mogul, in his wisdom and chicanery, had “found that the best way to handle moviemakers was to hang medals all over them.”

The first Academy Awards took place at the Blossom Ballroom downstairs at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on May 16th, 1929 – a Thursday. It lasted 15 minutes from beginning to end. It wasn’t broadcast in any form, and the list of attendees was limited to fewer than 300 guests. The 12 prizes, including such eminent honours as Best Engineering Effects and Best Title Writing, were distributed without much fuss, as those present dined on consomme celestine and broiled chicken on toast. Yet, despite the concise programme, the inaugural ceremony included most of what we associate with the Oscars: imperious speeches, controversial upsets, even heated discussion about what had been snubbed, such as several esteemed films by Buster Keaton. The winners had been informed of their victories months before the ceremony, ruling out any risk of suspense. This practice would soon be amended, though perhaps it accounts for the expeditious night.

Within five years, the awards ceremony had been reimagined as something closer to the familiar present-day spectacle of music and chatter. Beginning with the second show, in 1930, it was to be broadcast live on public radio: air time begets opportunities for advertising, which incentivizes more time on air, a cycle of interest and reward that inevitably prolonged the proceedings. It was early in the history of the Awards that the Academy began to curb the show’s rapid inflation. At the 15th Oscars, in 1953, the actress Greer Garson delivered a sixminute acceptance speech after she won the award for Best Actress for her work in Best Picture winner Mrs. Miniver. Fearing an infinite multiplication of such voluble sermons, the Academy at once instituted a 45-second limit on acceptance speeches. Anyone caught running over this allotment would be tactfully played off by the orchestra. The rule remains. Award- winners are still played off all night.

It was in 1953 that the Academy Awards were first broadcast on television. The show was divided between the coasts, with two ceremonies happening simultaneously in Los Angeles and New York City. It ran an hour and a half, from 10:30 p.m. to midnight – the late start was meant to give the actors on the east coast time to finish their obligations on Broadway. This schedule seems to have had the effect of persuading the Academy’s producers that people don’t mind staying up late to see who won the top prizes. Because while the show slinked back to an early 8 p.m. time-slot as soon as New York was out of the picture, it continued to end at midnight, stretching out mercilessly from that initial slender 90 minutes to the four-hour-plus behemoth we have today. It’s true that the Academy has tried to tighten the show for nearly as long as it’s been staging one, but after this first gasp in the early '50s it would never pursue the pipe dream of an hour and a half again.

In 2002, the Oscars were longer than they’d ever been in history, and longer than they’ve ever been since. The show proper started in earnest at 8:30 p.m. – after at least 90 minutes of official red carpet pre-show festivities – and didn’t roll credits until six minutes to one, nearly fourand-a-half hours later. What was it? Some blame logistics: this was the show’s first time at the newly constructed Kodak Theatre, which led to unforeseen kinks; it took place six months after 9/11, which led to a massive influx of military-grade security, creating unpredictable delays. Entertainment Weekly’s critic bemoaned the show’s “marathon length.” Others decried its “hours of boredom,” slamming it as “unrelievedly dull.”

The strange thing is, I remember watching the Oscars in 2002, and I remember liking them. Woody Allen, famous for spurning the Academy, made a rare appearance on behalf of his beloved New York City, still recuperating after the attacks. Paul McCartney sang his theme song from Vanilla Sky. Errol Morris did a series of short interviews with celebrities on the subject of their favourite movies, including an immortal one in which Donald Trump extols what he believes are the virtues of Citizen Kane. Both major acting awards went to black actors, a first. Cirque du Soleil did a number, for some reason. Was it ludicrous and self-serving and extremely narcissistic? It’s an awards show. That’s unavoidable. But if you consent to watch the Oscars – if you are interested enough in these things to tune in to begin with – how can you object to its inescapable sprawl?

The Oscars are too long. Life – unfortunately – is too short. The absurd indulgence, the ludicrous ramble of the show, is not something that needs to be fixed. The length isn’t the problem with the Oscars. It’s part of what we like about them.