The Oscars are in a fix

I read with great interest Patrick Goldstein’s article about modernizing and streamlining the Oscar telecast [“Note to Oscars: Get Real,” Feb. 27], but frankly, I don’t think the conservative academy will go along with a separate award show for the technical nominations. It would come across like a crass snub, pandering to the mass audience. Moreover, many of these technicians are vital to the commercial success of a film.

There is an alternative: Give the short-film categories their own award ceremony apart from the main Oscar telecast. That could easily shave off half an hour from the bloated telecast.

I think this is a more equitable solution, because outside of the 6,000 academy members, no one from the mass moviegoing public has seen these films -- short subjects never play in neighborhood movie theaters.

Steve Finkelstein

Las Vegas

THE solutions to fix the Oscars have been debated for years: Eliminate the “small category awards,” make the show hip, make it relevant, make it shorter. Nothing seems to work. You want to know why? The Oscars were the creation of the Hollywood studio system of the 1920s and ‘30s. They reached their peak in the 1950s. Today the show and the awards are just relics of a bygone age.

How about just replacing the Oscars with a red-carpet fashion show? At least that part of the proceedings seems still to have some bounce.

Oliver Cutshaw

La Habra

NO -- the Oscars don’t need a face-lift. One couldn’t have asked for a better Oscar show than was aired Sunday evening. It accomplished what it was meant to accomplish: Give awards to worthy recipients. Period.

Sylvia Lewis Gunning

Thousand Oaks

THERE is no mystery in deducing the decline in viewership of the Academy Awards show. The U.S. today is divided, half socialist and half conservative, as witness the past two U.S. presidential elections.

Hollywood has overtly embraced the socialist half and turned off the conservative half, thus the latter group has begun to turn off Hollywood.

Jack V. Fogarty

Los Angeles

NOW that the Oscar ratings have hit rock bottom, maybe the Calendar section should be a bit less Hollywood-centric.

Jeff Prescott

La Jolla