Academy Awards ceremony bores critics

By CLAIRE TREVETT

Media critics have panned the Academy Awards as being boring, blaming everything from New Zealand accents and Peter Jackson's missing top button to Janet Jackson's nipple ring.

"The 76th Academy Awards put the Ring in boring," a Guardian critic said, adding that although the awards might have been deserved, the inevitability of the Ring's success made the Oscars "little more than a gruelling four-hour redundancy".

Andrew Gumbel, writing in the Independent, was more brutal.

"The atmosphere was so passionless one could have been forgiven for thinking Hollywood had replaced its annual orgy of self-congratulation with a meeting of the New Zealand Chamber of Commerce."

A five-second coverage delay, imposed after Janet Jackson's breast was exposed in a televised gig at the Superbowl, was blamed for taking spontaneity away from the night.

Other media blamed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts for allowing the clean sweep. Awards expert Tom O'Neil said: "It may signal the end of the Oscars as we know it - a fun, suspenseful race when jaw-droppers can happen and usually do."

A Times Online article conceded that the nominations were warranted, but not the clean sweep.

Many also made digs at Peter Jackson's renowned inherent wardrobe neglect - rumour has it he cut off his top button to stop people nagging him to do it up.

One Guardian critic, after listing the virtues of the trilogy, said: "It's impossible to dislike the down-to-earth Jackson, a pot-bellied antidote to all those sculpted, perma-tanned freaks filling up rows A through Z. So I'm glad that Lord of the Rings won."

Others were more charitable in their praise, seeing the awards as just recompense for all three movies in the trilogy.

Another Guardian columnist acknowledged the ceremony's predictability.

"Lord of the Rings could have been a damp squib, like the Wachowskis' Matrix films or George Lucas' Star Wars prequels, but Jackson's Rings-cycle simply grew in Wagnerian volume and intensity. And the best was saved until last. It is a project that has consumed seven years of the director's life, and for his energy and sheer originality Jackson deserves his armful of Oscars."