Oscar woos younger viewers
The movies have always been bigger, glossier and more meaningful than TV, so it’s ironic perhaps that the movies’ biggest event of the year is a TV show. The 85th Annual Academy Awards, rebranded simply as The Oscars 2013, will supposedly be younger, hipper and faster than in previous years. That’s why this year’s producers tapped Seth MacFarlane as host, and why they’ve changed the name to reflect the younger generation who flock to the movies today and made MacFarlane’s Ted one of the surprise boxoffice hits of last summer.
The reality, though, is that the Oscar telecast will look, sound and feel like any other Oscar telecast, with musical tributes, homages to the past, a memorial segment to film luminaries who died in the past year, and scattered, hitand-miss jokes from the evening’s host.
The ceremony is expected to last three and a half hours, but it may run longer, depending on how many unscripted distractions there are, or how long-winded the acceptance speeches may be. The commercial breaks will become more frequent during the final hour and the really important awards will be saved for the final 15 minutes. No surprise there.
As a TV show, the Oscars can’t hold a candle to the Grammys, though. The Grammy Awards themselves may be controversial and often favour the popular over the truly groundbreaking, but as a TV show the Grammys are one long performance spectacle. The awards themselves are almost an afterthought, like the commercial breaks.
The Oscars are locked into a more hardwired format, no matter how much the producers claim they’re changing it up this time.
Sunday’s ceremony, for example, already promises a musical tribute to musicals — producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan produce the TV show Smash in their day jobs — performances by Adele, Norah Jones and Barbra Streisand, and a 50th anniversary tribute to James Bond that could feature an onstage reunion of all the actors who have played Bond over the years. (Sunday, CTV, ABC, 8:30 p.m.)
Ripper Street is three-quarters of the way through its first season, and BBC has already picked the costume drama up for a second season. As success stories go, Ripper Street is a modest success, but a success just the same. An ensemble crime drama set in London’s East End in 1889 is unlikely to have the pop-cultural cachet of a CSI or Grey’s Anatomy, no matter how manly the leading men are. Ripper Street has found an audience not only because of its exquisite attention to period detail but because — with the occasional exception — the weekly stories take on big social themes without being preachy or sanctimonious.
Saturday’s episode, Tournament of Shadows, is set during the London Dock Strike of 1889, when the killing of a Jewish anarchist (played by Ferdinand Kingsley, the son of Ben Kingsley and British theatre director Alison Sutcliffe) and the wrecking of a union hall sends Det. Insp. Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) and his H Division cohorts on the trail of a crime ring led by a Russian master spy (Peter Ferdinando). (Saturday, Space, 9 p.m.)