I’d like to thank the Academy

For Fun Friday, your fave award show moments —cringe, cute, whatever

Before we get Fun Friday started, let me remind you that I have completed my review of all ten Academy Award Best Picture nominees! And not only are these linked here, they are now unpaywalled so you can send them to your non-subscriber friends for delectation: Bugonia, F1, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Sinners, and Train Dreams.

Also because this is a thing for me, I will be predicting the winners this weekend on alicublog and I will send you a note when I do so you can go look. Sunday night is the show, and after my Monday morning post you will be shut of me talking about the subject for another ten months.

Whew! Just talking about all the work I did on those Oscar movies has got me all tuckered out — far too tuckered to do a long post today. But one of the great things about Fun Friday (at least for me) is that you good people do much of the work. And so, as befits the occasion, I’m going to pitch it to you: What’s your favorite moment from an awards show?

Along with everything else the big awards shows are follies — they’re live, egos are at fever pitch, mistakes are made. I remember John Lennon being an absolute dick announcing the nominees and winner of the Record of the Year award at the 1975 Grammys with Andy Williams and Paul Simon. And I am stunned to find there is no video on the internet of something I absolutely saw: Paul Lynde, stoned out of his mind, heckling from the Golden Globes audience when he lost the 1972 Best Actor in a Comedy Series award to Redd Foxx (“WHAT ABOUT PAUL LYNDE?”) and getting told off by presenter Burt Reynolds (!).

One of the more charming moments I recall is from the 1991 Tony Awards when Daisy Eagan, then 11 years old, accepted the Best Supporting Actress in a Musical prize for The Secret Garden; in the midst of a very sweet, girlish, breathless speech she thanked “my wonderful agent Francis Del Duca” and then made a little grimace like, yeah, I’m a cute widdle kid but business is business. The crowd reaction is nice too.

Oh, speaking of the Tonys, have I told you about the time they ran a nine-minute passage from Melvin Van Peebles’ Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death on national TV? With funky vignettes of poverty, sexual violence, police murder, and a street preacher bag lady cursing the white folks in the audience, “May your young daughters gives rich old dudes head in limousines too”? That you should see.

I recall also in 1969, the first year I watched the Oscars (and this too is missing from internet video), John Huston announcing to applause (for some reason that has never been explained to me) that the awards “were not bought and paid for.” Maybe some arts historian can hip me here. A happier moment that I did not see contemporaneous but which you can watch up top here is Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas doing a number called “It’s Great Not To Be Nominated” in 1959. At first it seems awfully arch — like something out of For Your Consideration — but then they dance. Now that’s entertainment.

An even more passive-aggressive, but to my mind still charming, moment came at the 1994 Emmys, when Tony Randall finally won Best Actor in a Comedy Series — right after The Odd Couple got cancelled. (This isn’t on YouTube either. Come on, guys, you’re making it look like I make stuff up here!) Randall came to the podium slowly, as if to the gallows, and, accepting the statuette, somberly announced, “I sure am glad I won. Now if I only had a job,” and slowly walked off.

Then there’s Steve Martin’s gag from the 1995 Oscars. How you feel about it depends on what you think is going on there. I think Martin knew exactly what he was doing and so did the audience.

Also, there have been terrific live performances on some of these shows. If we count the Kennedy Center Honors, and why wouldn’t we, Aretha Franklin doing Carole King tribute in 2015 is world class. I might be the only person in the world who loves Stephen Bishop singing “It Might Be You” at the 1983 Oscars but you know what, I was a punk rock bum back then and he still hit me right where I lived, speckled suit and all. And if you ever find a tape of the 25th Anniversary of the Tony Awards, grab it. Look at the lineup. Zero Mostel doing Tevye and Pseudolus!

And look, you can say what you want about Woody Allen and maudlin, post-9/11 New York fetishism but I am never not going to love this.

I know you guys are all sober intellectuals who only watch PBS but you must have brushed up against tinsel and glamour at some point. Please pitch in!