Word: hollywoodized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...long as the particulars of Academy voting are suppressed, we movie lovers will find Oscar night less exciting as we watch it, less likely to lodge in our collective memory. ("Hey, remember how close that Best Actor race was in 2009?") Hollywood is supposed to be the best at creating drama, suspense, thrills - at putting on a great show. If we knew not only who the winners were but by how much they won, the Oscar show could be the Super Bowl of movies...
...show and filled the remaining airtime with a sports documentary on pistol shooting. Until Nixon's 18-1/2, Lewis's 20 were the minutes that lived in pop-culture infamy. Catastrophe would be one way to describe it. Another would be great live television - the spectacle of tuxedoed Hollywood pratfalling into humiliation, and handing the banana peel of blame to the one man who tried to keep the viewers entertained. But Jer must have done something right: it was the second-highest rated show in Oscar history...
...Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award - an honor recognizing charity work, and given more frequently to producers than to actors. Lewis's commitment as a spokesman for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, notably in the 19-hour MDA telethon he fronts each Labor Day, has certainly earned him a hearty Hollywood thank-you. But it's a minor token, almost an insult, to one of the wildest, most imaginative comic talents in any medium and, without question, the definitive showbiz ego of the mid-20th century. (See pictures of Jerry Lewis...
...measure of his lingering impact that Hollywood is still embarrassed by the very idea of Jerry Lewis, let alone his presence. To the graybeards at the Academy, Jer is not only the demolisher of Oscar's gravitas but the unkillable specter of his first eminence, in the late '40s and '50s, as the goony kid prancing around the cool crooner. (One producer cruelly called Martin and Lewis "the organ grinder and the monkey"). He is the comic whose genius, or even the robust grosses of his movies, nobody in Hollywood took seriously. And because he was championed as an auteur...
...Comedy duos had been a staple of vaudeville (Buck and Bubbles, Gallagher and Shean, Burns and Allen) and movies; in 1942, theater exhibitors voted Bud Abbott and Lou Costello the No. 1 "star" in Hollywood. What Lewis saw in Martin, when they first teamed up in 1946, was something unique: a sexpot straight man, a perfect complement to Jer's goony girly-boy. Dean was Lewis's public enabler; by acting as the imperturbable wall against which the kid's maniacal energy kept bouncing, he translated Jer to the mainstream audience...