Canadian Oscars

So it's been another year and the Oscars (or rather, Academy Awards) are on again. This year, for a change, I had to watch the coverage of the red carpet walks, as done by Ben Mulroney and Tanya Kim. It was horrible. Absolutely atrocious. Ben pointed out that two people were just "over there", and they cut to a camera zoom-in view of the back of one person's head. I mean, come on.

What's even sadder (through no fault of Ben's) is that Americans just don't know much (or nearly anything) about Canadians. (I'm not blaming them for this.) And when they're all glitzed up, they're only interested in glamouring with their familiar shows: Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, E Online. So you'll see that half the stars will politely not give CTV the time of day. Another quarter of them will graciously smile and nod or wave to acknowledge that there is a person and a CTV camera there -- but from a safe distance away, and without even stopping.

Then you have the rest of them, who probably happened to be speaking with an adjacent press crew and haplessly wandered too close to our host Mulroney. They get snatched by Ben, who has to introduce himself, after which they still have no clue who he is. They really don't, and you can tell with their plastic oh-of-course-how-are-you-Ben responses.

So what does he do when he's worked so hard for a few seconds of these very few stars? He pesters them about any Canadian connection they have.

"How is it to work with so-and-so-Canadian-star?"
"Oh, you had your premiere at so-and-so-place in so-and-so-Canadian-city. How was that?"
"You look great. What perfume are you wearing?" (He finishes this one off with an I'm-wearing-Prada statement.)

Of course, the stars don't know a thing. So the answers are all vague and generic, without substance. Even from the most eloquent and articulate celebrities. But finally, he pulls the "[enter your Canadian region of choice here] misses you" crap, to which the obvious cookie cutter response is that the star will say they miss [Canadian region] too.

Seriously, Ben? I mean, seriously?

Of course, in the midst of all this, he is constantly cutting them off after half a sentence. Then he's frantically waving his mic between himself and the interviewee so that you can't hear half of the words being said. That's what you get when you send a little boy to the Oscars, and he's completely giddy from meeting the big stars: lousy media coverage that made me watch the last half of The Simpsons instead.

[ Oh wait, the Entertainment Tonight guys are doing the "official" Oscars interviews now, on their own platform. Okay, let's see what that's like. ]