On a sunny Monday in March 1989, a lovely crane shot of all the celebs arriving at the Shrine Auditorium cuts to... Snow White (an incredibly unfortunate actress named Eileen Bowman). Squeaking out ghastly versions of "I Only Have Eyes for You" and forcing appalled stars like Michelle Pfeiffer to hold her hand, Snow danced her way into infamy with her blind date--Rob Lowe! Lowe (still sporting "St. Elmo's Fire" hair) and Snow pounded out a duet of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Proud Mary" (with new lyrics like "Rolling, rolling, keep the cameras rolling") in an agonizingly long production disaster that ended with the Rockettes singing "Hooray for Hollywood," after which Rob and Co. ran away to hide from the press.

The fallout from the 61st Academy Awards would linger until the next year. Days after the show Disney sued the Academy for the unauthorized and unflattering use of Snow White. The show's producer, Allan Carr (best known as the producer of "Grease") saw his career crash and burn as Academy members everywhere lambasted the show. Seventeen bigwigs, including Oscar winners Billy Wilder, Paul Newman, Gregory Peck and Julie Andrews, wrote a letter to the Academy labeling the show "an embarrassment to both the Academy and the entire motion picture industry." At the 1990 telecast, the first to be hosted by Billy Crystal and produced by perennial favorite Gil Cates, Crystal's opening line set the tone for a "make fun of last year's awards night." Gliding on stage to "It Had to Be You," Crystal acknowledged his applause with: "Is that for me or are you just glad I'm not Snow White?"

The fact that the Oscars rebounded stronger than ever turned out to be a testament to Cates and Crystal, who each did seven of the nineties shows. The profile of the Awards' telecast reached new highs, gaining wide recognition as the Second Biggest Show on Earth, after the Super Bowl, with an estimated worldwide audience of one billion. Unfortunately, over time it seems the Oscars have become their own worst enemy. As the nineties wore on and shows improved, better Academy Awards shows set off a feeding frenzy for coverage, as the appetite, or at least the perceived appetite, for Oscar info increased ten-fold. Sure, ratings were pretty good--the program has shown steady increases since its first TV appearance in 1953--but it's difficult to compare ratings because the number of TV-owning households has skyrocketed; during the nineties the show averaged around 47 million viewers in the United States.

Nearing the 2002 telecast, it seems the Oscars, once the Hollywood event of the year, aren't quite as interesting as they used to be. For those of us who've been hardcore Oscar handicappers for a decade or longer, the shift from main event to just another speech-fest has followed an intriguing track. Ten years ago, entertainment reporting was barely an established field--there was that behemoth of TV schmaltz, "Entertainment Tonight," which pioneered daily, syndicated entertainment news in 1981, and the very new "Entertainment Weekly," which launched its weekly entertainment-only mag in 1990. The Internet hadn't exploded yet and if you were handicapping nominees, you had to dig through various daily newspapers, hoping someone somewhere published a list of all the films from the year, or you'd be sunk just trying to remember what was released.

Fast forward to the middle of the decade and it was a whole new game. The Internet gave rise to an online community where entertainment news was almost too easy to find. On television, E! The Entertainment Channel (and its Website, www.eonline.com) and "Access Hollywood" both launched into more competitive times as regular news, once an entertainment-free zone, began peppering its programming with tidbits once the purview of "ET," pushing that show and its new counterparts to offer a little something extra. In that spirit, in 1997 E! plugged what it saw as a hole. Oscar telecasts, it seemed, had grown so long that there was little time to see what we really wanted to see--the clothes! Recruiting the love-her-or-hate-her Joan Rivers and her talentless daughter, E! launched its own multi-hour pre-awards extravaganza--which became so popular that three years later the Oscars would launch a stodgier version (remember that half-hour of wackiness hosted by Geena Davis?). Magazines like InStyle also hopped on the fashion-focus bandwagon, while EW secured its place with exhaustive coverage. Exhaustive as in, guides not only to nominees but also to possible nominees; guides not only to what the stars wear, but what they might wear; guides not only to the stars' stylists... you get the idea.

Thanks to all this coverage, there's very little we don't know about the Oscars before the show airs--except, of course, who will win and what they'll say. But the newfound popularity of entertainment coverage has nearly taken care of that as well. With the help of cable, the whole host of awards leading up to the Oscars--from the Golden Globes to the Screen Actors Guild--hit our living rooms in full, living color. Consider the 1999 Oscars, which featured a crying Gwyneth Paltrow thanking everyone under the sun for her Best Actress award for "Shakespeare in Love." If you'd seen the Globes or the SAG awards, you'd already seen this twice; the insincerity of the third-time round, coupled with a show that ran agonizingly slowly--at the end of the night it was four hours and eight (or nine, depending on who you believe) minutes--had me reaching for the remote. By the time the show airs, unless there's an interesting upset, well, the Oscars just aren't as vibrant as they once were.

The theory that saturation is killing the Oscars is supported, in part, by the ratings. As the amount of coverage has hit an all-time high the ratings have dipped. Last year's Steve Martin-hosted show (produced by Gil Cates' son, Gil Cates Jr.) saw the lowest U.S. ratings since 1986 (when snoozerific "Out of Africa" won and the show featured hosts Jane Fonda, Alan Alda and Robin Williams). And while low Oscar ratings still mean about 43 million people watched the show (a viewership most TV programs would kill for), these numbers were still down 7 percent from the 2000 show. It was also less than the 45.3 million people who watched the first episode of "Survivor: Australia" following the January 2001 Super Bowl.

Considering that the Oscars posted their highest ratings ever, 55 million-plus, just three years before (during the 1998 show where "Titanic" ran off with everything), this media overkill seems to explain the drop. And while some might argue that last year's big winner, "Gladiator," was no "Titanic" popularity-wise, it still had more overall oomph than the 1998 Best Picture, "Shakespeare in Love." Not only was the 1999 telecast the longest ever, but it featured the painful second outing of Whoopi Goldberg--and it still managed to score 45.6 million viewers. That number would increase for the 2000 show; featuring the return of Billy Crystal and a slew of awards for "American Beauty," that telecast boasted a respectable 46.3 million viewers.

Of course, it's difficult to tell the folks over at E! that saturation coverage is killing the Oscars. On last year's awards day E! claimed the highest viewership in its history, with a 10 percent increase in ratings for the Joan Rivers pre-show. And as long as this coverage bonanza sells there'll be no reason to change. On the other hand, without a "Titanic"-sized blockbuster, and if ratings keep heading south, the Academy may well decide its time to make some drastic program changes, something that seems to occur each decade: The fifties and sixties belonged to Bob Hope, while the seventies abandoned the single host for as few as three and as many as twenty separate stars. The eighties dropped that format (mostly) for the single man show hosted by Johnny Carson. Carson retired late in the decade, and the one telecast with no host at all, the year of that Snow White debacle, ushered in Billy Crystal and the nineties. Nothing Mickey Mouse about that.

Also by Elaine Richardson

POLL POSITION
Do you really care about the March 19 primary election? Of course not, but as tends to happen in our state, if you don't vote now, you may find your choices severely reduced come November. In that spirit, we've given you some of the sober, as well as the fun, facts about ten candidates in two key races.
(2002-03-14)

AD BUSTERS
It's in this atmosphere that a host of funny, unique political ads--those of the mangled Polish and projectile vomiting--continue to run. They've been the hallmarks of the campaign of GOP Attorney General candidate, River Forest lawyer Bob Coleman.
(2002-03-14)

BAD NEWS
At this moment she's waiting for Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of the Washington Post, and Robert Kaiser, Post associate editor, as they make the first stop on a tour touting their new book, "The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril.
(2002-02-28)

HOT AIR
Chalk it up to hyper-reality combined with the best tenets of soap opera (just because you're dead, doesn't mean you're off the show) and a sense of the absurd, but the addictive quality of HBO's "Six Feet Under" only sharpens with the new season.
(2002-02-28)

HAIL TO THE CHIEF
(2002-02-14)

DOMESTIC BLITZ
(2002-02-14)

SLAV TO ART
(2002-01-31)

PUT UP OR SHUT UP
(2002-01-31)

SEEING IS BELIEVING
(2002-01-31)

FIGHT THE POWER
(2002-01-24)

TALLYING TURNSTILES
(2002-01-17)

COSELL & CO.
(2002-01-10)