Some Suggestions to Speed Up the Oscars

Even the biggest movie fans have to admit that the annual ceremony celebrating the accomplishments of the previous year tends to run to excess.

We are told every day that the attention span of the average human, a category that makes up the biggest slice of the viewership pie, is diminishing at an accelerating rate, as objects are said to do when they are dropped from the tops of mountains.

An audience that sighs deeply and looks at its watch as it patiently plows through a seven second video of a cat leaping backwards when confronted by a stuffed iguana doesn’t make a good match for people willing to take the stage and in a biblical manner thank the generation that begat him or her, the generation that begat that generation, the generation that begat that generation, and so on for fifty or so iterations.

This is only the beginning for this fellow who received his award for Outstanding Spelling on the credits as they roll, and gives the cautious viewer reason for resignation when he realizes that there are over four hundred awards to go.

Certain stages of the ceremony and the processes centered around each seem set in stone, but this only reflects hidebound traditional ways of thought. Do you want to be bound by hide, if that is what that phrase means, if it means anything at all, or do you want to use your unusual ability to see things in a new way that you are always telling people you have?

The Time It Takes to Seat This Crew

Solution: Musical Chairs

It is estimated that if added together the time it takes for each person to make their way down the red carpet and through the elegant seating and dining area to the tables where they are going to actually eat, it would sum to the expanse of time captured in one of our briefer Geologic Ages, say the Cambrian Age.

How much more rapidly would the attendees scoot to their chairs if they knew that the event staff were, at five second intervals, carrying one more chair out of the gala hall and throwing it in the city dump?

It is not an event that traditionally has a lot of people standing on the sidelines, leaning on the wall as at a high school mixer or at the church service on Christmas Day.

It makes an ingénue or leading man stand out in a manner that they don’t wish when the camera lingers on them trying to cut their salmon while holding the dinner plate between their clenched teeth.

How much swifter will the seating conclude when one and all know that there is not infinite seating, as at a junior high outdoor track meet, but that with every passing second there is less and less seating?

This same effect can be reached by arranging that the walls of the event space close in in a steady and ominous manner in the fashion of that one scene in Star Wars when the heroes are trapped in the trash compactor.

 Walking to the Stage Takes Forever

Solution: Catapults

If you thought that the time it took to seat everyone was expansive, it pales next to the time it takes for people to learn they have won the award, express amazement to the people around them, lean over to kiss fourteen co-diners, stand up and disrupt the plateware in an alarming manner, smooth down their jacket or dress, pick their way through the assembly of tables which looks a little like they have been arrayed to prevent an attack on the podium like pawns on a chessboard protecting a king, trip several times as they navigate the steps up to the stage and then, as in the last quarter mile of  marathon, make their way wearily across the expanse of the stage proper to all but collapse at the podium.

There is a certain amount of time consumed in just catching your breath at this point and dealing with the oxygen depletion that results from any athletic event where endurance is a factor.

Catapults provide an efficient and – just as important – an elegant way out of this quandary.

In today’s inventive world it would be a matter of minutes to equip each seat in the auditorium with a catapult-like device under the seat that, when triggered by the technical crew once the award is announced, launches the happy winner in a graceful arc across the upper atmosphere of the ballroom – whose airspace in clear in a way that the floor can never be – to land with aplomb behind, upon, or at least near the podium.

They will arrive much-freshened by their exciting journey, ready to give that thank you speech.

Yes, About That Thank You Speech

Let us concede that it is awfully hard to keep track of how much time has passed once you get behind that podium and are clutching your Oscar as though ready to beat anyone to death who tries to take it away from you.

You have many people to thanks and more important, many things to say.

As a matter of fact several more have just occurred to you as you stand here. You are an expressive person almost by definition and it is only right that you share your thoughts with these fine people in the audience! Even as you think those thoughts several dozen more occur to you! This is great!

 Solution: A Vat of Boiling Oil

Well, it doesn’t have to be boiling oil, though that’s not completely out of the question, and in the tradition of the event, this set-up pays tribute to a certain style of movie covering the Crusades and what not.

All that is required is that a huge vat of something – and not know exactly what it is is part of the pleasure for the viewing audience – is poised perilously over the speaker’s head, and is tilting ever more towards a critical juncture when it will topple over entirely and spill its contents on the person below, or perhaps deluge or wash away are also words that you can use.

It may be melted cheese as is used in the fondue sets which were given several times over at each wedding that took place in the late 1970s, it may be discarded motor oil shipped in from the local automotive repair shop, it may be chocolate, maple, or honey syrup.

Clearly visible to audience and speaker both is one of those clocks that tick down in an alarming manner, tenths of a second speeding by in a blur, closer and closer to zero.

Everyone knows what will happen at zero, and under such circumstances speakers learn the value of concision and decide to thank their dog and their throw pillows at the after party rather than here in front of all these nice people, and to the side of that ticking clock, and directly under that damnable vat of boiling something that is just about to tip over.

The Music Serves as a Tasteful and Respectful Backdrop to the Ceremony

Solution: Make the Music Loud, Weird, and Constant

The timing is off in these musical cues, this is what a lot of people are saying anyway. It is friendly and supportive and eases the winners both onto and off of the stage

By the opposing point of view the orchestra should instead start playing the second the winner starts to speak, should play loudly, should play badly, and should dash onto the stage and surround, some would say assault, the speaker as he tries to talk.

You know, it is a difficult thing to get a good cloaked piece of braggadocio out to the world when a cornet is sounding in your ear, a clarinet is blowing up your nostrils, and a pair of castanets are sounding on each of your kneecaps.

This has the salutary and summarizing effect that the audience is after and which in fact saves the speaker from saying all sorts of nonsense that will get him in trouble the next day.