We are almost at the tail end of an excruciatingly long awards season.
As always, the Golden Globes, on Jan. 8, benefited the most from its early-bird scheduling. There, the film-awards season’s presumed winners (Casey Affleck, Viola Davis, Emma Stone) got their first chance to rehearse speeches they might be giving until the end of February. But what seemed fresh at the Globes was familiar by the SAG Awards three weeks later, when — with the exception of surprising wins for “Fences” star Denzel Washington and the cast of “Hidden Figures” — similar victories were announced.
We’ve still got the lone music kudoscast, the Grammys (Feb. 12), and the Oscars (Feb. 26) to go — and that’s not even counting the nontelevised Producers Guild of America, Directors Guild of America, Writers Guild of America, BAFTA and Independent Spirit awards. Clocking in at three-plus hours apiece (excluding the mind-numbing red-carpet coverage, a k a “People in Dresses”), these broadcasts have all the appeal of a forced march.
In the case of the Grammys, so many of the prizes are given out in advance of the telecast, and in most cases the artist with the greatest record sales wins — no-brainer there! With the Oscars, you’ll have heard all the acceptance speeches before by the time Feb. 26 rolls around. Unless the winners continue to air their political views at the podium — a source of concern for a motion-picture academy trying to attract viewers across the country — a dull affair seems guaranteed.
So why, in 2017, couldn’t these award shows be condensed in some way? The once-rigid structure of television shows has changed enough for even the warhorse networks, who adhere to the 20th-century business model of selling huge blocks of ad time that require content to fill it up, to register that less really is more. The triumph of the 10-week miniseries, such as “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” proved that shows with shorter overall running times than a regular 22- to 24-episode series could actually pack more of a punch — and attract all the attendant social-media buzz and ratings.
The trade groups and networks putting on these awards shows would do well to apply the same radical rethink of their age-old format. Here’s a starting proposal: The Grammys, which have essentially become a three-hour concert, could be cut down to 90 minutes by reducing the number of performances. The Oscars could easily be chopped down to one hour, including the often-lengthy “In Memoriam” sequence. The sad fact is that those behind-the-scenes winners of categories like sound editing, production design or original score are unknown to most viewers, and it’s time the Academy accepted it. We know all the respective guilds want their moment in the sun, but they do still get their statuette to take home and dine out on. No one is going to run out and see “Hacksaw Ridge” because of the superior sound mixing.
If the folks who run the Grammys and the Oscars want future generations to watch their big show, they should learn to make them shorter — commercial spots be damned.
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