03/25/2001
By Tom Maurstad / The Dallas Morning News
The Academy Awards telecast is the Super Bowl of show business. And just as that sporting event on steroids is about much more than just a football game, the Academy Awards viewing experience is puffed up with hours of preshow programming.
The difference is that with the Academy Awards, most of that programming is provided not by the host network ABC, but by cable channels looking to cash in.
But as the 73rd Academy Awards reminded viewers, there is only one network to turn to for the red-carpet treatment. And that is E! Entertainment Network, the home of Joan Rivers and her daughter Melissa.
After a countdown that began at noon, E! went to live coverage of Oscar arrivals at 5 p.m. – two and a half hours before the actual ceremonies began. That proved to be a bit premature, since at that point, about the only celebrity making his way down the red carpet was Karl Malden.
Other than celebrity-gawking, the chief entertainment provided by arrivals coverage is watching entertainment journalism at its absolute frothiest. For the stars' part, the arrivals scene is a symphony of expensive sunglasses; for the journalists, it is a slam-bang theater of assembly-line interviewing. For hardcore Hollywood hobbyists or compulsive channel-flippers, the results can be silly and surreal.
Once the big-name stars started coming down the carpet (around 6 p.m.), there was a lot fun to be had flipping back and forth between E! and The WB network. Since The WB's pair of questioners (L.A. news team Sam Rubin and Mindy Burbano) were located right next to E!, as soon as a star was done with Joan, it was on to the Sam and Mindy show. Would you be surprised at how often the same questions (almost verbatim) were asked and the same answers (ditto) were given? I didn't think so.
In such circumstances, it's unreasonable to expect anything like a genuinely human exchange. Instead, the big payoffs are in the levels of preposterousness reached by the stars and their questioners. Award presenter Julia Stiles delivered one of the arrivals' most memorably nonsensical sound bites when she exclaimed, "The excitement is thrilling."
Meanwhile, Joan Rivers gave a workshop in celebrity apple-polishing as she told seemingly every nominee she spoke to that she hoped he or she would win. At one point she said that to Geoffrey Rush and then turned around and said the same thing to Ed Harris. Both are up for best actor.
With 30 minutes until show time, ABC began the official pregame coverage, just in time for the biggest stars – Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks.
And yet, strangely, with all that star power, there were no incendiary moments – it was all light and no heat.
