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Show Utaliaafesmanl THE YEAR NOBODY WATCHED With one of the lowest box office showings in recent history, will people care about awards for movies they've never seen? BY ROGER MOORE KRT Suppose they gave away Oscars, and nobody watched? The year of movies that nobody went to is about to become an Oscar show that nobody watches. The Academy Awards are about to become the priciest "niche audience" telecast in history. They are, a Los Angeles Times headline put it, movies with "depth" but not "breadth." Seriously The slide in ratings for the big telecast has been pronounced for years, and the number of viewers is very much connected to people sitting down to watch their favorite stars compete on something that isn't a skating rink or dance floor. What do you get when the acting nominees are all character players, and the movies are all "sleeper hits," code for profitable cheapies that few people saw? When the producers of "Brokeback Mountain" feel compelled to let us know that they just became the top box office draw of the nominated films, passing "Crash," which has been out on DVD forever, and only after two solid months of being the only movie to generate any publicity at all, well, there's trouble in River City. More people saw "Fahrenheit 9/11," a documentary, than saw any of the nominated films or performances. More people saw the penguin documentary. That's pathetic. Granted, the major studios didn't exactly fill the multiplex with movies the award-oriented could get behind. And some of the very best work of the year was recognized. But teeny tiny movies from "Junebug" to "Hustle & Flow," "Capote" to "Syriana," produced the nominees. There's no "big movie" vs. "underdog small movie" competition when they're all small movies. And the subject matter - pimps and pregnant Southern ninnies, chubby spies and TV anchors generations don't remember, gay writers, gay cowboys, a transvestite, race and racism, big oil and big Pharmaceuticals. ALL important. But history has proven Americans don't want to think that much about their entertainment. Tom Hanks can lead us onto the streets of "Philadelphia," but he can't make us stay for a double, triple or quadruple feature. USA Today went after that idealistic notion that where Hollywood leads, audiences will follow. It probably won't happen. Yes, everybody's talking "Brokeback." It's in the lexicon, and it's still doing modestly well. But will we "quit" on the spit by March 5? Or will it reach $100 million and become, at least, an "English Patient" for the new millennium? That desert-love bore proved that the Oscars aren't a universal conversation starter when most moviegoers haven't seen your most honored movie. If the movies are to remain a part of the national/international dialogue, then the Oscars are going to have to be more representative than this. It's enough to make one long for the bad old days, when Miramax was so adept at working the Oscars, rallying support for its chic films in the face of Hollywood's biggest and most bloated. Urge the mainstream to get better, yes. But it's not chic when everybody nominated has "indie" cachet and esoteric subject matter. With all the surprises drained from this awards season and its relentless Hoffman/"Brokeback"/ Ang Lee/Witherspoon wins in the pre-Oscars, that leaves us with an opening non-movie person Jon Stewart monologue (how very 2004), and hopefully Robin Williams or Celine Dion singing all three Oscar nominated songs - "In the Deep," from "Crash," "It's Hard out Here for a Pimp" from "Hustle & Flow," and "Travellin* Thru," from "Transamerica." I'm keeping my fingers crossed for Celine. The guy who nicknamed the Oscars "the gay super bowl" was more right than he could have known. But who tunes in when its Charlotte vs. San Diego, worse yet, when San Diego's favored by five touchdowns?. -rmoore@orlandosentinel.com i < -..-'T , r-1 |