The Oscars went Tony with a vengeance this year: It was like a concept musical with a flaccid concept, saved only by a few game performers and emotion-packed awards badly in need of a Parisian riot or an exploding chandelier.
The idea was that the evening would tell the story of the making of a movie from the blank page to post-production. Some of the effects that idea yielded were elegant, especially when Tina Fey and Steve Martin read pages of the nominated screenplays as the words appeared over scenes from the film. But even that effect wasn't as funny or memorable as Martin's crack that a movie sometimes starts with nothing more than the idea for a poster, and Fey and Martin's genuine rapport - Martin got a laugh simply by telling Fey not to fall in love with him - had more entertainment value than all the blood, sweat and tears that went into the ceremony.
Not even the spitfire presence of Penelope Cruz, winner of best supporting actress for Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the emotional posthumous win of Heath Ledger for best supporting actor for The Dark Knight, and the escalating emotion of the multiple wins for Slumdog Millionaire, could bestir the 81st Academy Award ceremonies, which drowned in reverence and camp.
In a year when the most-nominated moviemakers tried to bring some theatrical zest to everything from docudrama to tenement blight, the Oscars, under the direction of Dreamgirls director Bill Condon, tried to do the same for the Oscar ceremonies. The big-winner movies, Slumdog Millionaire and The Curious Case of Benj amin Button, did theatricality a lot better. Slumdog Millionaire, which won eight awards including best picture, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , which won three, were inspired combinations of new technology and time-honored dramatic instincts.
The evening started genial and over the top, with veteran Tony host Hugh Jackman doing a Billy Crystal-like medley that peaked with the Mad Libbed effect of Anne Hathaway warbling Nixon to Jackman's Frost. But when an endless and arbitrary montage of previous best supporting actress winners trooped to the stage in a semicircle looking like the stars of a PBS Celtic song special, or maybe the Delphic oracles, the impact was so heavy and wearying that you feared the rest of the night would succumb to ritual solemnity.
