The Oscars Could Be Cancelled! But, Do You Care?
Word on the internets is that, for the first time in its 80-year history, the Academy Awards could be cancelled because of the ongoing (and going and going) writer’s strike:
Oscar producer Gil Cates insists that isn’t going to happen. â€The show is going on,†he says. â€I’m looking forward to it. We’re on schedule and, hallelujah, I can’t wait until the 24th.†Good news, right? Except that the Globes insisted that the show was going on too, and look how that turned out. â€If this is still not settled in a month, we should boycott the Oscars,†Don Cheadle tells EW. â€We have to be consistent. We can’t go, ‘Well, the Oscars is a bigger show and it is more important so we should go to that one but not the Globes.’ I kinda feel like all shows should be boycotted to drive the point home.â€
As you may (or may not) know, the Golden Globes, Oscar’s red-headed stepchild, was cancelled because of the strike, reduced from a glitz-filled champagne-fueled televised party to an hour-long press conference preceded by a Dateline NBC show featuring the strike. Oh, how fun. I’ll be sure and break out the popcorn and hot cocoa for that one.
If cancelling the Golden Globes and turning it a press conference is akin to cancelling the high school prom and announcing the King and Queen over the PA during first hour announcements, then cancelling the Oscars, to the entertainment world, is like planning all your life for a Cinderella-style wedding at a five-star resort only to show up and be taken to the Justice Of The Peace with your future mother-in-law and her dog.
To make a long story short, if the awards were to go on, host Jon Stewart would be basically left to either write his own jokes or improvise an hours-long telecast shown around the world. (And frankly, I’ve never quite understood comedians’ reluctance to write their own material…when they started out, they surely didn’t have a staff of writers, did they? Aren’t they used to writing their own stuff?) Actors, most of whom are themselves members of unions such as the Screen Actors Guild (and yes, some of them are members of the Writer’s Guild), are refusing en masse to cross the picket lines to attend the ceremony. ABC, who is set to televise the show, is ready to pull the plug if it looks like there will be an empty auditorium, although some reports say that they are willing to wait a while to see if the strike ends in a relatively quick hurry. And studio bigwigs are content to continue golfing and receiving massages, perfectly willing to wait out the strike in relative comfort, while the struggling writer who is burning through what little savings he has is wondering just how to pay the rent this month and still have gas to drive to the picket lines. (Haven’t I been saying that for a few months now? I believe I have.)
Continued on the next page
