Common, left, and John Legend accept the Best Original Song Award for Glory from Selma during the 87th Annual Academy Awards at Dolby Theatre on Feb. 22, 2015 in Hollywood, California.Kevin Winter/Getty Images
Looking back on Sunday's typically awkward 87th Oscars broadcast, there was at least one thing that worked: The winners' acceptance speeches.
No "you really like me" or "thank God for making me famous" moments this year. Nearly all of Sunday night's Oscar winners deflected their personal glory onto significant social and medical issues. The highlights of the night were the speeches made by rapper Common and singer John Legend after winning Best Original Song for Glory from the film Selma, in which they spoke passionately about the repeal of the Voting Rights Act and the incarceration rate of black men in the United States.
In a moving personal moment, The Imitation Game writer Graham Moore referred to his own suicide attempt at the age of 16 and told misfit teens to embrace their differences. Patricia Arquette, winner of Best Supporting Actress, spoke of equal pay for women, an issue that affects Hollywood movie-sets as well as the factory line: Last year's Sony hack revealed that even Oscar-winning stars Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence were paid less than their male co-stars in American Hustle.
Eddie Redmayne dedicated his Best Actor award, for playing physicist Stephen Hawking in the drama The Theory of Everything, to those who struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Julianne Moore, winner of Best Actress for the drama Still Alice, used her award to call for greater visibility and research of Alzheimer's disease. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the winner of Best Director for the Best Picture, Birdman (Or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), made a plea for his fellow Mexicans who are fighting government corruption at home and discrimination in the United States.
Most critics would maintain the Academy did not pick the best movie of 2014, which was Richard Linklater's conceptually audacious Boyhood, however the Academy's preferred voting system assures only that the movie that is least disliked, not most loved, will win. But a dubious voting system was the least of problems. In a broadcast that was odd even by Oscar standards, Lady Gaga's unironic rendering of a medley from The Sound of Music at the three-hour mark seemed like an emblematic cry for help: How do you solve a problem as complex as the Oscars?
The more mundane explanation for the presence of a Sound of Music medley was that returning producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron were responsible for the Sound of Music Live! broadcast on NBC last year and are dedicated to the idea of commemorative music numbers featuring contemporary pop stars. (Last year it was P!nk singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow). Though the presence of Julie Andrews did provide a spoonful of sugar, the Gaga segment felt like a particularly "white" moment directly following John Legend and Common's rousing performance of the Oscar-winning Glory in a production that simulated the march in Selma in 1965.
The Glory number was even good enough to forgive the producers for the cluttered Everything Is Awesome number, in which performers Tegan and Sara were upstaged by a mass army of dancing Lego characters.
The idea behind the Glory and Sound of Music segments, presumably, was to remind us that the Academy is about movie history (even if Joan Rivers was missed in the In Memoriam reel). The Awards, originally designed to confer dignity on the disreputable film industry back in the 1920s, have evolved into television's most uncomfortably long live broadcast, this year just narrowly beating out Saturday Night Live's 40th Anniversary Special or the Katy Perry Super Bowl half-time show.
Again the Oscars is also something of a black hole for talented hosts, so remorseless it would perplex Stephen Hawking. When it was originally announced that Neil Patrick Harris was selected as emcee after Ellen DeGeneres passed on the opportunity, it seemed like encouraging news. The versatile and engaging Harris did terrific work as host of the Tonys. He started well with a promising quip about the Oscars representing "the best and the whitest" (quickly amended to "the best and the brightest"), referring to the most Caucasian list of Oscar nominees in 15 years.
His opening quip was followed by a fairly clever Billy Crystal-style irreverent song-and-dance salute to "moving pictures," mock interrupted by Anna Kendrick and Jack Black. After that, Harris rapidly withered in the spotlight, gaining perspiration and losing his comic rhythm. When Harris walked onstage wearing white brief underwear in the show's second half, the intended big comedy moment felt more like a desperate bid for the audience's waning attention.
The most obvious weakness was the writing. The staff of 12 (including Harris) often allowed quips barely worthy of a junior-high revue with bad puns on names, including the hand-off to The Hunger Games' Josh Hutcherson with "Here's a Peeta who won't throw paint on you," (as in the animal rights group, PETA) and a suggestion that Reese Witherspoon was so sweet you wanted to eat her "with her spoon."
Harris' wittiest adlib – and biggest gaffe – was his crack about the eccentric pom-pom bedecked dress worn by Ellen Goosenberg Kent, the director of the short documentary Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1. The problem was Harris' fashion diss came right after the film's producer, Dana Perry, spoke about the suicide of her son in 2005.
Like several of the winners, Perry was obliged to speak through the orchestra which was trying to play her off, presumably to leave more room for the Gaga medley at the end. (After the Crisis Hotline interruption, someone must have issued a gag-order: The interruptions stopped). One of the first refreshing moments of the night came when foreign-language film Ida director Pawel Pawlikowski ignored the music to thank his Polish family, alive and dead.
Neil Patrick Harris wasn't the worst host in Oscar history (that might be co-host Donald Duck back in 1958) and Oscars 2015 wasn't the worst broadcast in the last decade – 2013 with host Seth McFarland and 2011 with James Franco and Anne Hathaway share that dishonour. Rather, the show was another familiar disappointment, unworthy of the movies the broadcast celebrates. The Golden Globes are now regularly providing a more entertaining evening, and we know the Globes are about very little except an opportunity to put a lot of celebrities on television together to sell products.