With the glitz and glam of the awards rollout this year, which saw Irish animated film ‘Song of the Sea’ nominated for an Oscar and Northern Irish short film ‘Boogaloo and Graham’ winning a BAFTA (as well as being Oscar-nominated), IFTN takes a look at some of the less glamorous hard slog behind the scenes of every awards show which is always destined to come under inevitable scrutiny.
Oscars host Neil Patrick Harris, who has previously hosted the Tony Awards four times and the Emmy Awards twice, confirmed this week that he was to have no such dalliance with the Oscars after unflattering reviews of this year’s telecast.
Despite being produced with thanks to a seismic $75m budget from broadcaster NBC, the Oscars were not immune to harsh criticism as publications noted that Harris’s jokes ‘fell flat’ while calling the show ‘predictable and boring’. The ceremony also received its’ lowest viewership figures since 2009 and overran its’ running time by 40 minutes as well as experiencing technical difficulties.
The New York Times described Harris as ‘bland’ and ‘tepid’ whereas Time Magazine stated that Harris seemed ‘off his game’. USA Today were even more scathing in their review as they described the event as ‘mind numbingly boring’. Another denigration of the show even centred on the fact that the awards themselves were too predictable, with the hot-favourites winning across all the major categories.
Speaking this week, Harris stated just how much planning goes into an awards ceremony and seemed impervious to the critics as he says he was expecting an ‘understandable opinionated response’.
Harris said: ‘It’s a beast. It was fun to check off the list, but for the amount of time spent and the understandable opinionated response, I don’t know that it's a delightful balance to do every year or even again.’
He added, ‘It’s so difficult for someone who’s simply watching the show to realize just how much time and concession and compromise and explanation has gone into almost every single thing. Every joke. Wording of joke. Placement of joke. Cancelling of joke. Embellishment for just one line.’
However, there is still no doubt that the Oscars continue to attract the biggest audience worldwide and with that comes the big commercials and sponsors that ultimately fund many aspects of the core Academy educational work programme throughout the year that benefits young upcoming talent.
The Oscars weren’t the only ceremony to receive bad reviews this awards season with the BAFTA Awards also coming under the usual fire. The Telegraph gave the ceremony a negative review stating that a lot of jokes from the host Stephen Fry – who was presenting the show for the 10th time – ‘fell flat’. They also lamented the exclusion of late actors Bob Hoskins and Rik Mayall from the ‘In Memoriam’ segment. The Guardian was similarly critical of the show calling it ‘toothless’.
However, despite local complaints in the UK from year to year, that BAFTA’s focus on international films, ie American titles, presents little exposure for British home industry productions, that trend is certainly changing and this year presented a very positive outcome as the BAFTA Film Awards honoured home-grown British talent, with many nominees and winners in the categories coming from Great Britain, including Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightly and the films ‘The Imitation Game’ and ‘The Theory of Everything’.
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