Word: oscars
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...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...
...Tonight, after a mere five decades in the doghouse, after some 50 movies as a star and 13 as a writer-director, Lewis, 82, is being allowed back onstage. He's getting an Oscar, and, wouldn't you know, it's the wrong one. The Motion Picture Academy is giving him the 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...
...surely merits one of those Life Achievement Awards the Academy passes out to distinguished film folk who never won a competitive Oscar and might die soon. (Recent honorary Oscars have gone to Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet and composer Ennio Moricone.) The slur stings any Jerry Lewis fan - especially Jerry Lewis. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lewis explained the hurt: "Because they didn't think enough of my work. Because what I did didn't command consideration because it's slapstick, because it's lowbrow, because the Academy's always been cautious about comedy...
...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...
...finest pieces written on Lewis, and who may have seen the movie - described it as "the Holocaust on black velvet." In what must be another painful twist for Lewis, Roberto Benigni did the same shtick in 1998, starring in and directing Life Is Beautiful and won a Best Actor Oscar...