LOS ANGELES, CA – Hollywood’s biggest night was marred by its own vanity when a 32-minute tribute video put most of its celebrity audience to sleep!
The telecast, Oscars’ 81st, was hosted by a singing, joke-peddling Hugh Jackman featured several video tributes, “Year Books” as they called it, to highlight certain achievements in film over the past year and beyond. The Comedy Year Book, featuring Seth Rogan and James Franco reprising their Pineapple Express roles and guest starring cinematographer Janusz Kaminski was one of the night’s most original and successful tributes.
Others, such as the tribute to supporting actors and animation, were appropriate if not especially memorable.
The final Video Yearbook of the night, coming just before the awards for Best Actor, Actress, Director and Picture, was memorable for all the wrong reasons: length and snooze-factor.
Coming in at a whopping 32 minutes, the Video Yearbook Tribute to Scrolling Credits, nearly doubled the run time of every other tribute combined.
“So many people are a part of making a film,” Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Sid Ganis told reporters following the broadcast, “and in a film, the credits honor those individuals for at least several seconds of screen time.”
“We wanted to take some time in our ceremony this year, to honor the credits that honored so many who contributed to films this year.”
The star-studded audience did not seem to find the tribute amusing. Several A-List stars were caught on camera dozing off, or in the case of 15-time Oscar nominee Meryl Streep, caught with her head slumped to the side, drooling onto her daughter’s designer dress.
Asked why the montage was so much longer than any other, Ganis said, “It was just too difficult to narrow down all the great credits. We’d never honored them before, so we didn’t have repeat clips to immediately discount from the table. We ended up with hundred of options.”
“How do you narrow it down when each scrolling credit honors those individuals in such unique and inspiring ways? Benjamin Button used Helvetica. Milk: Times New Roman. Slumdog: Courier New! One animated short film from Japan featured an entire scrolling credit in Webdings!”
