With the Oscars less than a month away, and the broadcast taking shape behind the scenes, here is the No. 1 thing I would like the producers not to do on March 15.
Please don’t put an aging Hollywood legend in an uncomfortable and humiliating situation in front of millions of people around the world and make us all feel miserable.
Again.
That would seem like a simple enough ask: Let a star who’s beloved by generations of audiences look good and feel confident. Avoid them becoming the target of social media mockery or pity. Have a heart. Easy.
Au contraire! Award shows, with the competancy of a toddler piloting a 737, often screw it up in cataclysmic fashion.
Look at what they did to poor Liza Minnelli, who presented Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 2022 with Lady Gaga.
The “Cabaret” icon, then 76, came out in a wheelchair with flimsy notecards and was shaky with her words, at one point muttering, “What am I… I don’t understand.”
Gaga, kinda patronizing the whole time, leaned in and said, “I got you.”
But in Liza’s new memoir “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This,” the stage and screen performer says with fury that the fumble was all the Oscars’ fault.
“I was inexplicably ordered — not even asked — to sit in a wheelchair or not appear at all,” the Best Actress winner writes.
Sounds like a harmonious start!
Liza wanted to begin seated in a tall, fabric director’s chair, which is more elegant and screams Hollywood.
“I was told it was because of my age, and for safety reasons, because I might slip out of the director’s chair, which was bulls–t. I will not be treated this way, I said.
“My co-presenter [Gaga, gulp] insisted she would not go on stage with me unless I was in a wheelchair. I was heartbroken.”
Liza, caught in a bad romance, claims she was seated too low to clearly see the teleprompter, leading her to appear mentally worse than she really was.
Whatever happened, you’d think the geniuses backstage would’ve figured out every minute detail of this moment well in advance. It’s Liza Minnelli, for God’s sake, and she wasn’t introducing Best International Short.
No, that would be too much hard work for the same boneheaded event that egregiously gave Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway the wrong envelope in 2017.
Those bozos robbed the stars of “Bonnie and Clyde” of dignity by letting them announce the incorrect Best Picture winner on live TV.
Like Liza, they were set up to fail.
Off in the wings beforehand, a rep from the accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers handed Beatty, then 79, the card for Best Actress instead of the one for the category he was presenting — Picture. The big kuhana.
When Beatty tore it open, the rightly confused pair saw “Emma Stone — “La La Land.” So Dunaway, then 76, said — what else? — “La La Land.”
Whoops. “Moonlight” actually won the top honor, and it took minutes for the error to be corrected on air.
It’s one of the most infamous moments in Oscars history. Like “Dewey Defeats Truman,” except no one really cared who won the Academy Award. What viewers remember is that epic mistake.
And when people talk about it now, you never hear anybody blaming PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
The music industry is just as moronic. Earlier this month, the Grammys made more chaos with Cher.
My colleague Andrea Peyser called the treatment of the “Believe” singer “elder abuse.” Too right.
Cher — fun-loving, cares-to-the-wind Cher — went out onstage to receive a lifetime achievement award. Yet strangely she didn’t get a glowing intro from another musician, or any preamble at all. We didn’t see an inspiring video of her through the decades.
Host Trevor Noah just nonchalantly handed her the prize, like she was celebrating her fifth office anniversary at, well, PriceWaterhouseCoopers! Inexcusable.
Next, Cher was supposed to announce Record of the Year, but she walked off only to be awkwardly beckoned back by Noah.
And the winner is? “Luther Vandross!,” she hollered. That’s an impressive feat, as Luther Vandross died in 2005. Sure, the victor was Kendrick Lamar’s song “Luther,” which is named after Vandross. But the entire display was a steaming pile of “huh?”.
The Grammys producers were probably shaking their heads saying, “If I could turn back time…”
Lucky for the Oscars, they still have 22 days to not mess it all up.
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