World on the outside, looking in at in-jokes

03/27/2000

By Manuel Mendoza / The Dallas Morning News

Though it didn't rate an Oscar, a new achievement was reached at this year's Academy Awards: Longest Telecast Ever. The show ran four hours and nine minutes - four minutes longer than 1999's record-setting show.

"I've been told this is the shortest Oscar show of the century," returning host Billy Crystal joked when it was finally over.

Despite promises that new producers Lili and Richard Zanuck would streamline the Oscars and add zip and spark, you could've watched The Green Mile and the first third of The Insider in less time - and with more entertaining results.

Anticipating what might happen and then did, Mr. Crystal prepared us for the worst, in advance.

In one scene from a montage that inserted him into a plethora of movies, he asked The Godfather's Don Corleone whether he should play master-of-ceremonies once again.

"The show's on a Sunday," Mr. Crystal said. "It'll end on a Monday." On the East Coast, that turned out to be true.

Even Pedro Almodovar, who won the best foreign-film Oscar for All About My Mother, got in on the clock-watching act. Referring to his native Spain, he said, "In that country, it's now six years in the morning" - a possible slip of the tongue that was fitting nonetheless.

Even the supposedly excised production number showed up when Garth Brooks, Isaac Hayes and others performed a medley of movie songs as scantily clad dancers cavorted on a scaffolding.

With the statuette itself making as much news as the nominees this year, Mr. Crystal had even more self-referential material at his disposal.

Too bad he threw most of it away.

Carried out on the stage by what appeared to be a Los Angeles policeman, Mr. Crystal cracked: "I just wanted to make sure I got here."

Lots more jokes about the stolen Academy Awards were trotted out, some better than others.

"Welcome back to the Oscars," Mr. Crystal offered after an early commercial break, "where the races are tight and security isn't."

Later, he emerged with a bag of oranges, which supposedly held the three statuettes still missing. "Somebody bought these coming off the Santa Monica Freeway," he said. "$3.99."

The molasses-slow telecast opened with a montage that inserted Mr. Crystal into a plethora of movies, one of his trademark Oscar bits. It was technologically dazzling but only occasionally diverting.

Gently prodding humor dominated Mr. Crystal's schtick Sunday night in a ceremony that seems to set a new standard for sleepiness each year.

The pointed stuff was saved for easy targets such as conservative radio talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger, currently under fire by gay organizations. Mr. Crystal said she wasn't there because she couldn't find anyone in Hollywood to do her hair and makeup.

If anything, it was his throwaway asides that tickled the most.

"A lot of new faces," he said about the high number of neophyte nominees. "Some new eyes, too." And he coined a new category for one of them, Hillary Swank, who played a woman posing as a man in Boys Don't Cry: "Leading Actress With a Supporting Part."

Mr. Crystal's only sustained bit of effective comedy came when, in the style of The Sixth Sense, he read the minds of audience members.

Among the zingers:

For Arnold Schwarzenegger - "I can't believe there's no party at Planet Hollywood. I can't believe there's no Planet Hollywood"

For a pregnant Annette Bening - "I hope the baby doesn't look like David Crosby."

For supporting-actor nominee Michael Clarke Duncan of The Green Mile - "I see white people."

What else did we learn at Oscar 2000?

That Robin Williams is as subtle a singer as he is an actor. That indie-rock cult figure Aimee Mann can put across a nominated tune as badly as Phil Collins. That having a smooth-voiced actor (Peter Coyote) introduce the presenters (a duty formerly performed by the host) doesn't make the broadcast move any faster.