The magic of show business

Press, 4 April 1989, Page 11

The magic of show business

A.K. Grant on television

There were a number of unusual aspects to “The Academy Awards 1989” (Two, last Thursday evening).

Perhaps the most unusual was that there were very few embarrassing acceptance speeches. Kevin Kline and Jodie Foster accepted their awards with grace, and although Dustin Hoffman got a bit sentimental he was not embarrassing or egocentric: nor could one, in view of the many splendid performances he has achieved over the years, deny him the standing ovation he received from the audience.

The embarrassment came in with the efforts of the people who announced the awards. Robin Williams, a gifted comic actor, died on his feet, and also on a betterfleshed part of his anatomy, with a routine that was so awful that only a lousy scriptwriter of genius could have come up with it. There was some dialogue between Sean Connery and Michael Caine (both actors I admire), which was so artificial and laboured that it must have been con-

structed by an obsolete British machine for the extrusion of polyester resin. This year Cher wore a dress which was more or less opaque — I don't understand the vogue for Cher, who hit her high point with Sonny Bono 25 years ago — and it was Goldie Hawn’s turn to wear the one that you thought you could see through. Next year, no doubt, Goldie Hawn will

wear an ankle-length cloak and Cher will be dressed in moonbeams, gossamer and a G-string. Patrick Swayze told us more about himself than we would want to know unless we were his proud parents, in which case we would know it all already, and Melanie Griffiths and Don Johnson told us more about the physical side of their relationship than good taste demanded. But the low point of the evening, or high point if you are a connoisseur of schlock, was the opening number which for some extraordinary reason combined a girl dressed up as Snow White, the current teen-age heartthrob Rob Lowe, and a number of only fairly average dancers doing what for want of a better word I suppose one must term a “version” of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song “Proud Mary.” The man or woman who thought this one up is a lateral thinker of gargantuan, but, alas, catastrophic dimensions. I trust the academy have preserved it on video (although I wouldn’t blame them if they didn’t), because it must surely oc-

cupy a special place in American history as the worst entertainment break ever seen on the Academy Awards. I won’t try to describe it, because if you saw it you will never forget it, and if you didn’t see it there is no point in my trying to inflict on you a vision which combines the horror with the incoherence of nightmare. But it was rather reassuring. I have been to a number of Feltex and Gofta award ceremonies and watched even more, and never seen anything as bad as the “Proud Mary” routine.

Even the famous occasion when Peter Sinclair was entirely swallowed up by dry ice had a religious dimension to it, since trouper that he is, he kept on talking and so sounded like God speaking out of the cloud.

It is, as I say, reassuring to think that all the talent and money available in the entertainment capital of the world does not prevent them, from time to time and on their night of nights, coming up with an absolute bummer. That’s the magic of show business.