Life > March 20, 2003

By Ryan Eanes

Old Gold and Black Reviewer

Once again the Oscars are upon us — the 75th Annual Academy Awards, to be exact — and while film isn’t technically my area of expertise, the whole thing will be on television, as well as preview shows and follow-up shows and so forth.

So let’s take a look at what you can expect to see on the boob tube Oscar night.

The ceremony, scheduled for March 23, is going to happen, war or no war, although the Academy does concede that there may be a news crawl at the bottom of the screen or that the ceremony could be interrupted with news updates; all of that is speculation at this point. But no matter, the Oscars will go on.

As usual, E! has devoted a significant chunk of time to the Oscars; this year, the network (campus channel 72) is starting their Oscars coverage at 7 a.m. From then until 6 p.m., E! will have cameras and crew on site to monitor the progress and capture all of the excitement in the hours leading up to the show.

In addition to expert analysis of the Oscar nominations and fashion critiques, viewers will be able to send questions online to E! Online’s “guru of gossip” Ted Casablanca (whoever that is) who will answer them on air.

From 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., E! will, as always, have Joan Rivers and her daughter Melissa Rivers out on the red carpet speaking to celebrities, and judging from years past, butchering pronunciations of names, getting names entirely wrong, and even completely forgetting who’s in what movie.

Every year E! airs this train-wreck of a program, and it’s so genuinely awful that it’s hard not to watch if only to mock it.

If you just can’t take the Rivers mother-daughter duo — and if you can’t, I certainly don’t blame you — then perhaps Barbara Walters is more your speed.

The well-known ABC News maven is airing an hour-long special on ABC (campus channel 7) at 7 p.m., where she’ll sit down to talk with three of this year’s nominees, Nicolas Cage, Julianne Moore and Renee Zellweger, about their movie roles as well as their breakout roles and so forth.  It’s certainly a nice, classier alternative to the tawdry spectacle that E! will be airing.

As for the ceremony itself, it will be aired on ABC as well. Given the E! network’s enthusiasm for the Oscars, I’m almost surprised that E! isn’t planning to air a graphic instructing viewers to change the channel to ABC.

The proper ceremony will begin at 8:30 p.m., after ABC’s own half-hour “Live from the Red Carpet” program, and will be hosted by Steve Martin, who has filled the position a number of times. 

If you plan to watch the program, allocate yourself three hours, but even that may not be enough; I don’t need to tell you that historically the program runs long, and by the end of that time even the celebrities sitting in the audience are getting visibly bored.

But bored celebrities or no bored celebrities, E! couldn’t possibly pass up the opportunity to air a post-awards analysis show, so if you’re an absolute loon — oops, excuse me, an Oscar fanatic — you’ll want to flip back over to E! once the whole thing is over for their “Live Academy Awards Post Show.” 

Until 11 p.m., E!’s stockpile of generic “celebrity correspondents,” including Todd Newton, Leon Hall, Molly Mayock and Tom O’Neil, among other people that nobody has ever heard of, will shoot the breeze with the night’s big winners, cover post-show parties and generally, be annoying.

So if the Oscars are your thing, then March 23 is your day.  Mark the calendar and set a tape in the VCR, but don’t worry: even if you miss it, there’s no way you’ll be able to miss finding out who the winners were.