Night of the Living Dead The horrible and endless 71st Academy Awards. by TOM SHALES e know it’s long,” said Oscar host Whoopi Goldberg at the outset. “Tough.” Four hours later, she was feeling more apologetic: “While you were watching this show, another century has gone by,” she told the crowd in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the audience watching at home. Billed as the last Oscars of the millennium, the 71st Academy Awards, televised live from Los Angeles Sunday night, threatened to go on into the next one. Though starting a half-hour earlier than usual (and moving from Monday to Sunday night for the first time in the TV era), the show wasn’t over until almost midnight, when the last thank-yous had been gushed and the last hugs hugged. Insufferable at such length, the Oscar show did at least contain a few gratifying emotional highlights, as when Gwyneth Paltrow, accepting the Best Actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love (which also won Best Picture), broke down in tears mentioning members of her family. The classiest acceptance speech was probably given by Judi Dench, who won Best Supporting Actress for playing Queen Elizabeth in the same film. “Eight minutes on the screen, I should only get a little bit of him,” she said, clutching the statuette. As for the heavily ballyhooed political protest over giving the Governors’ Award to famous director and stool pigeon Elia Kazan, it was a trivial fizzle. Only a few of those in the hall refused to applaud when Kazan tottered out to accept the honorary prize from Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Far more people not only applauded but also stood up as Kazan took his bows. Kazan kept his career intact during the era of the Hollywood blacklist by naming names of friends and associates with alleged communist ties. The new Hollywood doesn’t have much of an institutional memory, and very few of the celebrities in the audience took the opportunity to register displeasure. Besides, Kazan seemed befuddled and harmless. “I think I can just slip away,” he said, in what seemed to be the conclusion of his remarks. Then he asked Scorsese and De Niro if he should say more. He couldn’t because, thank heaven, the band was playing, so he was ushered off the stage and back into retirement whence he came. The honorary Oscars slowed down the show as usual, though the Irving Thalberg Award seemed richly deserved by director-producer Norman Jewison, who told young filmmakers who might be looking in to ignore the grosses and the demographics and “just tell stories that move us to laughter or tears and perhaps tell us a bit about ourselves.” Goldberg did not distinguish herself as host. She spent a great deal of time laughing at her own jokes, many of which were dirty. Somebody had the not-very-bright idea of parading Goldberg out in costumes from each of the five nominated Best Costume films. One such costume was of a slave woman from Beloved. Thus what had been merely time-consuming also became tasteless. Roy Rogers and Gene Autry made charming Western films in their day, but that day has been over for decades. Surely both could have been included in the necrology of the year along with other filmmaking figures who died. Instead, the two American icons were given a tribute of their own to the tune of “Cowboy Heaven.” There were so many tributes to the departed that it began to seem like the Night of the Living Dead. The show drowns in its pre-taped, pre-planned segments; what people want to see, crave to see, are surprising and unscripted moments. There were far too few of the latter and an uncountable, punishing number of the former. The producers of the Oscar show should realize that after three hours, the show begins to reveal itself as the self-indulgent and provincial banality that it is — the banality of banality. At times, the ponderousness of the telecast was saved by the liveliness of the commercials, some of which really did show good filmmaking at its best. The new Gap khaki ads were certainly stunners, as was a commercial inviting viewers to “see the USA in your Chevrolet” and take a trip back through time in the process. This commercial had more of a sense of the century about it than the Oscar show did, no matter how much looking backward was done during the telecast. Roberto Benigni, the antic Italian filmmaker (Life is Beautiful) who makes Robin Williams look like an introvert, livened up the show by mugging and leaping and even walking on the backs of chairs in the auditorium. But these were short livenings indeed. By the time Goldberg paid a tribute to the late film critic Gene Siskel, weary Oscar viewers may have been wishing they could join him, wherever he is, just to get away from this dreadful, horrible television show.