There was something unsettling when Tom Hanks hurriedly announced the Oscar winner for Best Picture at Sunday’s show.Maybe it was because the buildup for Best Picture was unevenly spread throughout the show, with 10 people introducing the 10 nominated films at random times.

Or maybe, when "The Hurt Locker" won the night’s biggest award, the audience at the show and across the country was burned out on the nearly three and a half hour event.The Oscars should be the best awards show on the planet. It’s Hollywood’s night to shine, and nobody enjoys indulging their egos more than actors, actresses and directors.

However, this year’s show was a bore. The Oscars can get better and more fun to watch with only a few simple changes.Good screenplays speak for themselves, and the Oscars nominate 10 of the best screenplays of the past year.There is no reason actors need to read sections of each nominated screen play in the Best Original and Best Adapted screenplay categories before announcing the winner.

The producers should simply play the best bits of dialogue or the best scenes from each film instead of having someone read everything from a scene, including what the actors are instructed to do.Listening to people on stage read a script verbatim is like sitting in on auditions for a community theater group.At least those people are acting and not just reading.


I love Neil Patrick Harris. He seems like a genuinely nice, funny guy and one of the most talented actors on TV. However, why did he do a song and dance at an awards show he wasn’t hosting?The Oscars had two perfectly good hosts in Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin. There was no need for Harris to take up time at the start of the show.

It took more than 20 minutes to announce the first award. Maybe, if Harris wasn’t there, it would have taken just as long, but there’s a chance the show could have started at a quicker pace without him.Specifically, no more actors and actresses getting on stage to say something about each person nominated for Best Actress and Best Actor.It was like being in high school and seeing people give speeches before everyone voted for class president.

Then, to make the show even longer, after the five speakers finished, the person presenting the award went through and announced who was nominated and for which movie.The show could have shaved at least 10 to 15 minutes off its runtime by getting down to business instead of stroking the nominated actors’ and actresses’ ego.Why did two people from "Twilight" present a horror montage?

Horror films have been criminally ignored by the Academy, but so have noirs and sci-fi flicks, but there was no montage for those genres.If you’re going to bring attention to an ignored genre, you should probably use more examples from the past two or three years instead of ignoring modern horror films.There were scenes from "Jaws," "The Shining," "The Blair Witch Project" and "Scream," but I didn’t see many scenes from recent horror films.

Some newer scary flicks may be terrible, but there have been plenty of gems the producers could have included.
Also, it might be a good idea to not associate cast members from a tween movie series like "Twilight" with horror film classics.I doubt the Academy Awards producers will heed my warnings, but these things had to be said.

The Oscars weren’t over until almost midnight on the East Coast, and while there have been longer shows in the awards’ history, this year’s lumbering behemoth seemed to last days.Still, I’ll probably watch next year and hope for the best while seeing the worst.After all, if audiences start expecting too much from Hollywood and demanding the status quo changes, the movie industry as we know might cease to exist.