Oscar's statue of limitations

After much soul-searching, producers have apparently discovered the root problem of award shows: an inconvenient surplus of awards.

With the exception of the Oscars, which is trying a new-look approach under producer Laurence Mark and exec producer Bill Condon, the major academy-backed showcases have all removed some honors from their primary telecasts. The Emmys became the latest to join this trend, with the board voting this month to relegate a half-dozen of the 27 featured primetime categories to a half-hour pre-show, seeking to give the three-hour event what one source called "more breathing room."

Among the venerable kudocasts, nobody has been more aggressive than the Grammys, which televised a mere 11 awards during the most recent ceremony in order to emphasize live performances. The Tonys, similarly, present a number of statuettes in advance after experimenting with a pre-show that shifted 10 categories to PBS.

Whether these changes yield appreciable benefits remains to be seen -- and could be difficult to measure concretely. Notably, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences held firm to its central mandate -- handing out those 24 Oscars -- which was said to be the one non-negotiable aspect of whatever upgrades Condon and Mark bring to the show.

The award-show conundrum possesses so many moving parts that it's difficult to provide simple cures; still, there is something inherently counterintuitive about the assumption that people have tuned out mostly because award shows are overly polluted by awards.

Admittedly, several other variables are beyond a producer's control, which might explain why shedding categories sounds like an artful response -- the advantage of doing something, as opposed to nothing at all.

That said, purists have every reason to fret about whether the academy-backed awards will be diminished in what might be a fruitless quest to make them more viewer-friendly, especially to a younger audience that doesn't necessarily hold the Oscars and Emmys in the same regard their parents did.

The drain on Oscar and Emmy viewership can't be divorced from the nature of the movies and series that receive nominations, which in a fragmented marketplace increasingly tend to be more of the arthouse variety. In recent Emmy balloting, relatively low-rated cable programs like "Mad Men," "Damages" and "Dexter" gained recognition from voters despite a low public profile, deflating rooting interest among the mass of viewers.

After 2008's nearly all-indie edition, the Oscar draw has improved somewhat thanks to "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and "Slumdog Millionaire." Nevertheless, with "Milk," "Frost/Nixon" and "The Reader" rounding out the best picture category, the five nominees together will have generated about $280 million in U.S. box office by awards time, roughly equivalent to the average for a "Harry Potter" movie.

Given that dynamic, perhaps Condon and Mark's savviest move would have been to try stuffing the ballot box for "The Dark Knight," a genuine blockbuster.

Yet even questions of the field's commercial appeal (or lack thereof) might be overrated, potentially having less to do with ratings erosion than the gnawing glut of award shows. Between New Year's and the Academy Awards there are now a plethora of awards, televised by an alphabet soup of networks. In this context, Kate Winslet's first Oscar would actually mark the actress' fourth televised acceptance speech during a six-week span.

Condon told the Associated Press that giving out awards is "a big chunk of the show," while hoping to "freshen them up and surprise people again with the way these awards are given." Such innovations have been tried before, but the Oscars have resisted the diagnosis that awards must be excised -- dismissed as being the drag bringing these variety-music spectaculars to a screeching standstill -- at least for now.

That's assuming, of course, that there is a legitimate fix. Gil Cates, a 14-time producer of the Oscars, has stated that, in an endeavor where carefully choreographed magic and spontaneity are the ever-elusive goal, producers can only do so much. Eventually, the moments that people remember -- Jack Palance's push-ups, Sally Field's "You like me!" speech, Adrien Brody snogging Halle Berry -- leave such telecasts, he's said, at "the mercy of the award-show gods."

A decade ago, then-Emmy producer Don Mischer described the balancing act that producing a major awards show entails. In addition to serving the academy's needs, he said, "If the network had it their way -- and I don't care which network it is -- you would not be presenting four writing awards and four directing awards on the Emmys. That's eight awards given out to people that the audience at home doesn't really know much about or care about."

At the time, it felt like Mischer deserved an award for his honesty. Just don't dare waste time by trying to give him one on-air.(variety)