The Academy Awards telecast won’t air for another two months, but on Tuesday night, there was a gala event in which the Academy’s Governors Awards were given to actress Angela Bassett, comedy legend Mel Brooks, film editor Carol Littleton, and Sundance Film Festival executive Michelle Satter for their lifetime achievements.
These awards used to be part of the annual Academy Awards broadcast, but they were cut out fourteen years ago and moved to a non-televised ceremony. That’s too bad, because the recipients are well-deserving giants of the industry. Moreover, it’s hard to believe that in our current multi-platform world the Academy doesn’t choose to air it live on a streaming service like Netflix or Hulu. There would be some synergy with the latter, which is owned by Disney, whose subsidiary ABC has long been the network which telecasts the regular Oscars show.
After all, they’re already capturing everything on video, which is then chopped up and posted in pieces on YouTube, like this clip. It’s Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick saluting the 97-year-old Brooks, first with a couple of minutes of surprisingly lame jokes read awkwardly off a teleprompter, but followed by the duo singing a medley of songs Brooks wrote for his movies (and the Broadway musical they appeared in, “The Producers”).