Oscar’s joke man
Vilanch knows how to work the room
LOS ANGELES — Put comedy writer Bruce Vilanch on the spot by asking if he has a political gag suitable for the Oscars, and he makes a game try.
“There’s probably a joke in Trump buying three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri,” Vilanch said, “because that’s all he does is publicize himself. So it seems to me you have a nice, clean shot on the ninth hole.”
He doesn’t have to sweat polishing the riff on best-picture nominee Three Billboards. While he’s crafted one-liners for hosts and presenters for 23 Oscar shows, this year he’ll be watching comfortably at home with Koosh balls at the ready.
“So you can throw them at the screen when people you don’t like win,” Vilanch said. The ceremony airs March 4 on ABC.
He isn’t playing at being a critic: He used to write film reviews and celebrity profiles for the Chicago Tribune. He and rising star Bette Midler clicked during an interview, and he helped shape her comic stage persona on his way to becoming an in-demand writer for TV shows and big-ticket events including the Tonys, Grammys and Comic Relief, and for stars including Billy Crystal and Robin Williams.
Admirers sang his praises in the 1999 documentary Get Bruce! about his life and work.
“Part of the way people view me is because of how Bruce has written for me,” Whoopi Goldberg says in the film. “And I’m very grateful for that, because it makes me actually look much smarter than I am.”
Viewers got acquainted with the mop-topped, bespectacled man himself in a late 1980s revival of Hollywood Squares, in which he and Goldberg traded quips from adjacent squares.
After writing for a quarter of all Oscar ceremonies and winning two Emmys along the way, Vilanch is uniquely positioned to size up the grande dame of Hollywood awards shows, and how it and repeat host Jimmy Kimmel can serve TV viewers and the anxious stars who fill the theatre. One hint: The jawdropping best-picture envelope mix-up of last year is pretty much a gift to Kimmel.
Social media is routinely incorporated now in awards shows — think of Ellen DeGeneres’ starfilled selfie at the 2014 Oscars that went viral — but Vilanch says the Academy Awards are in a league of their own.
“The thing about the Oscars is it’s the biggest one. I would love to see them do more to own the past and the history of the movies,” he said, acknowledging that the passing years stand in the way.
“As you get farther and farther from the Golden Age, fewer and fewer people of the audience, outside of the theatre, are getting who you’re referring to. There will be a component of the audience saying, ‘Audrey Hepburn? Was she the one in the boat with the guy? Oh, she was Tiffany,’ ” he said, adding, unhappily, “It’s real.”
A host who plays it “too inside or too snarky” is courting trouble, according to Vilanch. That includes even being mildly insulting to actors and filmmakers who are on hand to be celebrated, as 1995 host David Letterman found when he turned Uma Thurman and Oprah Winfrey’s given names into silly singsong.
For an industry in the midst of confronting alleged misconduct by major figures, how can Kimmel acknowledge the crisis yet keep it from overshadowing the show?
Golden Globes host Seth Meyers handled the issue deftly with quips about Harvey Weinstein and others facing accusations, Vilanch said. But a broad-brush approach may be smarter at the Oscars.
Calling out individuals who are under a cloud and are past Oscar winners is an intersection that could prove embarrassing to the movie academy, Vilanch said.
“The more general, the better. Now that I’ve said that, who knows what Jimmy Kimmel will do,” he said. He lauded the ABC latenight host for “brilliantly” handling last year’s best-picture disaster and suggests Kimmel “can spend time on that, which kind of deflects everything else. It’s almost like a gift.”