an open letter to the academy of motion picture arts and sciences

Dear Academy,

Last night I have attempted to watch the 78th Academy Awards, aka the Oscars. And though I lead a relatively idle life (as I’m sure you presume by expecting me to watch for 3 hours people I don’t know thank people I don’t know for things I couldn’t care less about), I found it a little difficult to fit your program into my limited attention span. Nevertheless, the parts that I have watched were stimulating enough to make me write down a few humble suggestions for next year.

The suggestions:

• Please include a mandatory modification to the ladies’ dress-code. They should be required to wear prominent labels on their foreheads listing their dress/shoes/make-up/and hair designers. That should spare the “who are you wearing” questions of the pre-show, and allow us to focus squarely on how on earth are those dresses supported (crazy glue?).

• When such characters as giant apes and emperor penguins are featured in nominated films, it is only fitting to pit them up against each other in the “best non-human actor category.” I am sure that the category would be of no less vital importance to the viewer then the “best sound-mixing” one. And I am sure Chicken Little can find sufficiently festive pants to present the award. If not, there is always Puss-in-Boots, or other equally well dressed animal celebrities, eager to grab the spotlight.

• We know they’re reading the teleprompt. You know they are reading the teleprompt. Could you please scroll the damn speech at the bottom of the screen, so that if it stalls we don’t have to wonder if the presenters started partying few hours too early?

• Name the winners, skip the speeches. Please, why pretend anyone cares? You obviously don’t. Or else, after three hours of build up, you wouldn’t cut off the acceptance speech by the best picture award recipients.

• Those short animation films are short. We’ve never seen them and probably never will. So why not just run them by us instead of black and white pictures of your glory days? You know, most of us have colour TVs now.

• Perhaps you should consider keeping Jon Stewart, and removing the parts in between. This could be easily accomplished by running “The Daily Show”. That way he won’t have to worry about keeping the jokes politically correct. And we won’t have to worry that you’ve got to him.

• I have no comments about the song numbers. In fact that is the one part of the show you should be pimping to the Grammys.
  

If these suggestions are too difficult to implement, please consider a change in the marketing strategy of the show. If you run it on the Discovery-Health channel, you could effectively promoted it as a reliable insomnia remedy.