Oscars affair once again disappoints

On the day before Michael Keaton lost the 87th Academy Awards best-actor prize (boo!), the Birdman star was holding a winged trophy aloft at the Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, across town from Hollywood. Accepting his "best male lead" win in front of many of the same glammy peers he'd be sitting with Sunday night, Keaton jokingly saved his last thank-you for Narcissus, the creature of Greek mythology who fell in love with his own reflection and whose name begat the term narcissism.

Narcissism, as everyone knows, is the motor that runs the movie biz - especially the self-congratulatory affair that is the Oscars.

Year after year, the hype mounts for the Academy Awards - new hosts, new producers, new concepts - and mostly, year after year, the show, as a show, disappoints. Bound by decades of tradition and a sense of institutional import, the folks at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have forgotten how to be nimble and nuanced, instead hitting their worldwide audience over the head with a wobbly mix of earnestness, levity, and shameless backslapping. (Not quite the worldwide audience of last year: Overnight ratings for Sunday's Oscarcast were down 10 percent.)

Hosted for the first time by Neil Patrick Harris, who resorted to magic shtick and stripping to his undies (a Birdman homage), and who began the evening with a song-and-dance number full of forced merriment, the 3-hour-42-minute ceremony (enough time to fly from Philadelphia to Denver) brought the 2014-2015 awards season to a close. Finally!

By this time next week, people will be hard-pressed to remember that Eddie Redmayne won the Oscar for best actor for playing renowned ALS-stricken physicist Stephen Hawking, or that Julianne Moore received the best actress statuette for the understated and all-the-more-powerful-because-of-it Alzheimer's drama Still Alice.

Yes, Lou Gehrig's disease and dementia - two of the fun themes running through the night. Richard Glatzer, Still Alice's co-writer/co-director, was hospitalized the week leading up to the Oscars from complications of ALS, and Moore paid tribute in her acceptance speech.

Suicidal ideation was a big winner, too: Both the Oscar-nabbing live action short, "The Phone Call," and the documentary short, "Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1," are about folks who staff suicide hotlines, counseling the traumatized and the desperate at the other end of the phone. Keaton's character in Birdman, a fading Hollywood star who talks to himself in the mirror, aims a gun to his head. Alan Turing, the British cryptanalyst portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in the best picture/best actor-nominated The Imitation Game, ate a cyanide-laced apple and died, a suicide at 41.

American Sniper, nominated in six categories (including best picture) but winning only for sound editing, is no picnic in the park, either. Far and away the biggest box-office success of any of the films up for an award Sunday night, Sniper stars Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle, the real-life Navy SEAL who squared up the crosshairs on his telescopic sight, targeting women and children in war-torn Iraq. He returns from his tours of duty a haunted man.

There's often something antithetical and jarring about the Oscar ceremonies, where serious dramas tend to win over deft comedies, where social issues and a sense of self-righteousness prevail, and where everyone seems in awe of an English accent. Harris even did a bit about it with the British actor David Oyelowo, who portrays Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, and whose absence from the list of best actor nominees brought protests from black activists. As Jimmy Kimmel pointed out in his special post-Oscar show, this was the whitest Academy Awards since 1998 - not a single person of color among the 20 acting nominees.

As a television event, the 87th Academy Awards seemed to drag on into eternity. Pawel Pawlikowski, the Polish filmmaker presented with the foreign language Oscar for Ida, gabbed on long past his wrap-it-up-Bud music cue - amusing in his defiance, but no help whatsoever in the cause of brevity.

Julie Andrews was brought to tears by Lady Gaga's musical tribute to The Sound of Music, honored for its 50th anniversary, but I'll wager millions more, watching from home or the bar or on smartphones, were brought to tears by jaunty emcee Harris' stop-while-I-do-this-Oscars-prediction comedy sketch right before the best picture winner was to be announced.

The Golden Globes telecast, way more fun. Looser crowd, they can drink, mingle. The Independent Spirit Awards, way more fun. Looser crowd, they can drink, mingle. Heck, doing your taxes - way more fun. Drink, mingle.

In Birdman, which, by the way, won best picture and three other Oscars (tying with Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel as the top award-takers of the night), the theater critic played by Lindsay Duncan lashes into Keaton's washed-up movie star character and his ilk.

It's a venomous speech aimed at the egocentric film bizzers who don their tuxes and gowns and roll up to the red carpet in Escalades, ready to salute one another.

"I hate you and everyone you represent," she says. "Entitled, selfish, spoiled children. Blissfully untrained, unversed, and unprepared to even attempt real art. Handing each other awards for cartoons and pornography. Measuring your worth in weekends."

Hey, I love the movies, but when it comes to sitting down to watch the Academy Awards - and watch, and watch, as Sunday night bleeds into Monday morning - you have to think that maybe she has a point.