A little life, please

YOU may have heard that the Academy Awards are on tonight, and though the winners will be news in all media, what ultimately lends the Oscars their power is that they’re on television. That many viewers of the telecast -- viewers all around this great big world -- will not actually have seen all or any of the films in competition is beside the point, for though the Academy Awards celebrate film, it is the television show itself toward which all the energy bends, and from which it emanates: If they gave these things out in private, or notified the winners by mail, no one outside of Hollywood and Tribeca would care.

Fewer people do care, anyway, ratings demonstrate: Viewership for old-school awards shows is down universally -- the Grammys lost nearly 10 million viewers in two years -- though the Oscars have not fallen domestically below the 40-million mark. Not all this can be blamed on “American Idol.” It may be that the Age of Awards is ending, as the Jurassic did before it, a thing beyond any mere producer’s control. Or it may be that the shows have become so uninteresting -- not only uninteresting, but irritating, I’d maintain -- that TV itself is killing the Oscars.

The ceremony, which dates back to 1929, was first televised in 1953, when television was still a window on the world, rather than a window the world looked into, imagining that it saw something real. In such a time, when the Oscars seemed an event only incidentally performed for public consumption, they were glamorous in a way that something obviously constructed especially for TV can never be.

We approach each year hoping for the best, nevertheless. Tonight’s broadcast will again be the work of old hands -- this is production designer Roy Christopher’s 17th Oscars, the 18th for musical director Bill Conti, the 10th for director Louis J. Horvitz and the 13th for producer Gil Cates -- but Jon Stewart is in the house, a charmingly impolitic outsider. (He has been in movies, but not enough to say that he’s “in the movies.”)

Nominations are dominated by a small group of relatively offbeat and even controversial films -- relative to other Oscar years that is -- and interesting younger actors, as if some sort of generational Rubicon has been crossed. (Among nominated directors only Steven Spielberg could be considered an elder statesman.) Even in the scheduling of presenters there seems to be an intention to “skew young” -- Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin and Tom Hanks are as Old Hollywood as it gets tonight.

Still, youthful high spirits may not be enough to conquer the woeful emphasis on efficiency that has crept into the Oscars, an addiction to watching the clock that makes the broadcast now seem incredibly rushed, but no less long.

And what suffers under such a watchful eye is everything that makes the Oscars worth watching. The streaker behind David Niven, Marlon Brando’s refusal of his “Godfather” Oscar via the buckskinned Sacheen Littlefeather to protest Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans, Jack Palance’s one-armed push-ups, Sally Field’s “You like me!” speech, Roberto Benigni climbing over the furniture, even the infamous Rob Lowe-Snow White “Proud Mary” duet -- these personal, aberrant, human moments are what we remember. (The rest is cleavage.) Consider Charlie Chaplin’s honorary Oscar, awarded in 1972: Today, when seconds are reckoned like ounces of gold, his long, halting walk to the stage would never be allowed, nor would the five-minute ovation that greeted him.

This is a live show, and the more live it is, the more alive it is. Emphasize the musical performances, I say, bring back the fashion-show presentation of the best costume nominees. Mount production numbers. Filmed tributes are all very well -- Robert Altman’s special Oscar presentation tonight will certainly require one -- but it seems to me there’s been a glut in recent years. We may have passed the time when singing and dancing were Hollywood’s second nature, but Kanye West and Jamie Foxx showed on this year’s Grammys, as OutKast did a couple of years before, that the form is not dead and may still be presented without excessive irony.

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Time for their due dialogue

MOST important: Let the people talk! Kill the play-off music! If you are going to give someone an award, to hold them up to the universe as the cream of their particular crop, it behooves you to let them have their say and not humiliate them with Conti and his orchestra, even if they run a little long. Like the clumsy dodge of having “less important” winners accept their awards at their seats or in the aisles, it’s disrespectful, a shameless, shameful economy that speaks above all to making room not for the other winners, but for commercials. Nominees should naturally be encouraged to try to be succinct, but shouldn’t be penalized if they aren’t. It’s in their real excitement that the Oscars come truly alive, that they make you feel something -- can make you love Hollywood.

If it’s impractical to let the show run long (as I seem to remember was once allowed), the only place to find the space needed to let the show breathe is between its scheduled start and scheduled end. And if you’re not going to ax the academy president’s speech, or relegate the awards for editing and sound mixing and makeup to pre-telecast status -- not that I’m suggesting you should -- there’s only one thing left to do: cut commercials.

I feel like Albert Brooks in “Lost in America,” suggesting to casino owner Garry Marshall that he give back the money his wife gambled away: Think of the publicity! If ABC were to sell a few fewer commercials, or give up some of its network promos, and spread that extra time around to the winners for acceptance-speechmaking, well, I mean, it would be revolutionary! And it wouldn’t take much to give each of them, say, an extra 10 seconds -- just five or six 30-second spots out of dozens. I know they go for about $1.7 million a pop, but perhaps the network could recoup some of the lost revenue out of top execs’ Christmas bonuses, or the cappuccino budget on “Desperate Housewives.” The academy could cooperate here too by lowering its licensing fees. I’d even kick in a couple of dollars myself.

Of course, I’ve never produced an awards show or run a network. I don’t even belong to an academy. I’m just a person who watches television and wants to like it.

Barring any of the above, my only other suggestion is to get Bob Hope back. It was always Good Times with Bob hosting, and the technology, I believe, is already available.

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Lloyd is a Times TV critic.