At three hours and 38 minutes, the 2015 Academy Awards didn't come close to the record for the longest Oscar telecast, which is still held by the 2002 ceremony, which ran an absurd four hours and 23 minutes. Still, there were moments throughout tonight's show where it felt like not only hours were passing, but days, weeks and possibly epochs.
The thing dragged in so many spots, and was so badly time-managed, that we made it to 11:15 p.m. Eastern — 15 minutes before the show was scheduled to end — with the introduction of a completely unnecessary Lady Gaga tribute to "The Sound of Music, " even though there were still seven awards to present.
It ran on and on and on and on so much that when host Neil Patrick Harris finally got around to paying off a running gag about his Oscar predictions being locked in a box on stage left, he had to stop to explain the bit to us all over again, because it had been so damn long since the concept was introduced. Had the payoff been intentionally funny — as opposed to NPH accidentally mangling the pronunciation of Chiwetel Ejiofor's name while making a joke apologizing for the earlier mispronunciation of Chiwetel Ejiofor's name — maybe it would have redeemed the amount of time devoted to the idea, or at least to bothering with it so late in the show, but the final jokes fizzled just as much as all the ones that came before them.
This was the third turn at the helm for producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, whose priorities in Oscar-casting have tended to go in the following order: 1)Paying homage to movie musicals, even though it's a mostly dormant genre; 2)Paying homage to the works of Craig Zadan and Neil Meron (like the year they worked in two different homages to their "Chicago"); and 3)Paying homage to the nominated films of the year. So we opened with a musical number by NPH, with cameos from Anna Kendrick and Jack Black, plus performances of all the nominated songs, plus the "Sound of Music" medley, plus Jennifer Hudson capping the In Memoriam sequence with... the performance of a song from Zadan and Meron's canceled NBC series "Smash."
The best song performances were actually terrific, from the exuberant all-star performance of "Everything Is Awesome" to the stirring recreation of the Selma march during John Legend and Common's rendition of the winning song, "Glory." (It brought tears to the eyes of both "Selma" star David Oyelowo — whose name Harris also repeatedly mispronounced — and musical theater lover Chris Pine.) And the opening number is both a frequent device of Oscar hosts and the kind of thing NPH has made his stock in trade while hosting the Emmys and the Tonys; this one just didn't register at all. But on the whole, it again felt like Zadan and Meron were producing a show paying tribute to some version of the movie business that hasn't existed for a very long time.
Jeffrey Jacob "J. J." Abrams (born June 27, 1966) is an American film and television producer, screenwriter, director, actor, and composer.
