Author: Tom Shales

The 80th Annual Academy Awards ceremony, televised live on ABC Sunday night from Los Angeles, went clip-clip-clipping along. This is not a good thing. The show was so overstocked with clips from movies — from this year’s nominees and from Oscar winners going back to 1929 — that it was like a TV show with the hiccups.

There were hardly any emotional moments from winners on the stage, and there was little in the way of drama for viewers who watched, especially those who stayed with the tedious drag all the way past 11:45 p.m. (Eastern time), when it finally drew to a close. Javier Bardem, who won for Best Supporting Actor, in No Country for Old Men, did move the crowd when he concluded his speech with a message to his mother in his native tongue, Spanish. She was sitting in the audience, surrounded by the usual suspects and celebrities.

No acting prizes were given out until the second half-hour of the show, a poor piece of showmanship — as was hiding kids’ favorite Miley Cyrus, star of TV’s Hannah Montana, backstage until 9:50 p.m., when many of her biggest and youngest fans had gone to bed and didn’t get to see her.

Jon Stewart, the cable TV comic brought in to host, did only a fair-to-middling job, mostly middling, and in fact threatened to ruin the poignancy of Bardem’s speech by later informing the audience, “That was a moment,” in case we were all too dumb to have figured that out for ourselves. Stewart made only a few political jokes, at one point observing that usually when an African American and a woman are both seeking the presidency, it means “an asteroid is about to hit the Statue of Liberty” — i.e., it’s part of a disaster film set in the future.

The highly praised Michael Clayton, starring George Clooney, won just one major award (Best Supporting Actress for Tilda Swinton), while Marion Cotillard’s victory as Best Actress for playing legendary singer Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose was an upset over newcomer Ellen Page as a pregnant teenager in Juno. The closest any movie came to a sweep was No Country for Old Men, which won for Best Adapted Screenplay from another medium as well as Best Director (Joel and Ethan Coen) and Best Picture.

There were several references to the recent strike by the Writers Guild of America, which, if it had continued, might have meant canceling the 80th Oscars altogether or putting on a much reduced and postponed show later in the year. Actually, that might have been a pleasant change and a blessed relief from the bloated show and the effusive windbags making speeches that Americans endure annually, even as the number of other awards shows on television has grown exponentially.

Accepting the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (Juno), Diablo Cody held up the statuette and said, “This is for the writers.” The sentiment didn’t exactly bring the house down, however. As for Cody, one admirer hailed her as having written “the best book ever about strippers” — no relation to the movie for which she won the Oscar, of course.

Influential Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke, writing in advance of the Oscar show, noted that “few in America or the world have seen the nominated pictures and performances” and predicted that “all in all, everybody should expect the Worst Oscars Ever in the History of Hollywood.”

Was she far from wrong?

Tom Shales is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group.

Every year a dozen or more new horror movies are made. When they complete their theatrical runs, they go into the stockpile — home video, cable, and syndication to local stations. Thus the number of available horror titles keeps expanding, and the TV screen overflows with blood.

There’s blood money to be made too. Some parents, understandably, are upset to find the airwaves clogged with stabbings, shootings, decapitations, and stranglings — and those are just in the CSI and Law & Order shows that air year-round. In October, TV’s regular weekly killings are supplemented by “festivals” of theatrical horror films choked with spectacularly grisly goop.

Starz, a pay-cable network, has come up with a handy-dandy way to see a couple dozen horror movies in one sitting — and has thoughtfully reduced each of them to just the gory parts, so you don’t even have to sit through their pale excuses for plots. Going to Pieces, which premiered on Starz on Friday the 13th (naturally), is a look at what it calls “The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film,” though basically every fall is followed by yet another rise.

In other words, now that Hollywood makeup and special-effects artists have the technology to slice and dice people on-screen, slasher films will be around for the foreseeable future. Just when you think they’ve gone away, a new one will be a huge smash, the way Scream was in 1996. When that happens, two things are inevitable: Producers of the original movie will do as many sequels as possible, and imitators will crank out copycat versions as quickly and cheaply as they can.

Going to Pieces begins and ends with montages that show in the usual graphic detail the slashing of throats, the lopping off of heads, a girl hung on a meathook (or two), and the old reliable hatchet-in-the-face trick, among many other murders and maimings. There’s also a clip of the late Gene Siskel, summarizing the slasher trend in one word: “disgusting.”

But most of the “experts” assembled for the documentary work in the horror business and find that work to be artful and even pro-social. “There’s a bloodlust in all of us,” says director John Carpenter, whose movies have included Halloween, one of the landmarks of the genre. Cheaply produced — Carpenter says they could only afford to pay big-time actor Donald Pleasence for three days’ work — the 1978 film was relatively low on explicit gore, but it had a point of reference with which the audience could identify: the imperiled babysitter threatened by an unseen menace and unable to leave the house. It was a gigantic hit, and the sequels dribbled on for years.

More influential, really, was the next big movie in the horror mode, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th in 1980. Cunningham had seen George Romero’s tremendously gory epic Dawn of the Dead (part of a trilogy that began with the now-classic Night of the Living Dead) and admired the hideous makeup effects engineered for the film by Tom Savini. So he hired Savini to create very believable ghastly illusions for his film.

Going to Pieces is filled to the brim — in fact, over the brim — with hideous examples. It is, as the saying goes, not for the squeamish and certainly not for children, though if you’ve seen any of these films with teenage audiences, you know that they tend to laugh at the gore effects as often as they scream in terror. Incredibly, the documentary tries to blame the horror-film boom of the 1980s on the Reagan administration, which is absurd to the point of idiocy, while failing to examine the negative effects such films have on those who see them and on society in general.

Perhaps the horror in horror movies is so grotesque that it still serves as escapism from the real horrors in the news — murder and torture by terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, for example, or the unspeakable horror of innocent children killed at school by maniacs. No matter how horrifying horror films get, it seems, the real world will always come up with the stuff that the ghastliest nightmares are made of.

Here’s an offer you may well find the strength to refuse: eight hours of clips from the old Merv Griffin Show. They’re on a new DVD set called The Merv Griffin Show: 40 of the Most Interesting People of Our Time, but you may feel less inclined to run to your video store than to run for your life.

Many in today’s TV audience haven’t even heard of Merv except as producer and creator of Jeopardy, the long-running quiz show. But back in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, Merv hosted his own talk shows, syndicated desk-and-couch interview sessions that did, in fact, attract a wide range of guests. Merv was a lighthearted, sometimes lightheaded interviewer who, like Jack Paar before him (though hardly as clever or innovative), mixed guests from show business with figures from politics and the real world.

Guests on the DVDs run the proverbial gamut — from John Wayne to Richard Pryor (very early in his career), from Roy Rogers to Jerry Seinfeld (in 1986, five years before Seinfeld exploded), from Walter Cronkite to Donald Duck (or at least Clarence “Ducky” Nash, the voice of Donald in the Disney cartoons).

One of the best things about the collection — which follows similar DVD sets from Paar and Dick Cavett — is that the clips are not just radically truncated little peeps at people. Jack Benny is on for almost an hour, a treat for those of us old enough to remember one of the greatest comedians in broadcasting. All kinds of comedy are represented, including Jay Leno looking fresh and eager in 1982 and telling jokes about the Falkland Islands (remember them?); the late Totie Fields, who will be familiar only to the oldest viewers; and Jackie Mason, who in 1965 was just beginning to be hilarious and still is today.

Ronald and Nancy Reagan are the most luminous visitors on the third disc, called “Extraordinary Guests.” Merv visits them on the second floor of the White House. The interview was taped only a few months after President Reagan recovered from an attempt on his life.

Other “extraordinary guests” include Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Jimmy Carter. Sometimes, Merv showed surprising moxie. He had the nerve to ask Richard Nixon how it felt to be thought of as “such a loser.” Nixon brandished a frigid smile.

Merv was so busy leaning in toward the guests — apparently his idea of putting them at ease — that he didn’t always hear what they said. Denzel Washington, a guest when his career was young, tells Merv that he and his wife have named their son John David. Only a minute or two later Merv brings up the son again and asks Washington, “What did you name him?”

Others passing by include Tom Cruise, just having his first success with Risky Business in 1983; Jane Fonda; Sammy Davis Jr. interviewed in 1966 and predicting that in a few years Sony would be selling videotape recorders for use in the home (imagine that); and Orson Welles, who died, Merv says, only hours after taping the interview.

Barely acknowledged by Merv is Arthur Treacher, the venerable British character actor who served as Merv’s amusingly grumpy announcer during the first years of the show. Off-camera, Treacher would refer to Griffin as “that wretched little man.”

Later, after Treacher’s death, Merv saved money by being his own announcer (“And now, here I come!”) and taping the show from his own theater. According to the credits, he has even managed to copyright the word “Merv.” He’s a ham and sometimes a buffoon, but pop one of these DVDs into your machine and you’ll zoom down memory lane so fast it might make your head spin.

Memory lane is a one-way street, however, and it’s best not to spend too much time there. It’s hard to imagine that even Merv could tolerate eight hours of Merv in one sitting, but then that’s why DVD players have “eject” buttons.

In Merv’s immortal mantra — run together as if it were one long word — “We’ll be right back.”

What about What About Brian? Yours truly was screening the show last summer as part of the onslaught of new fall series, chuckling and chortling and having a pretty good time — until he came to a grim realization: What About Brian wasn’t even on the fall schedule.

At the second-to-the-last minute, ABC had dropped the show from the lineup and put it on the shelf, waiting for just the right moment to bring it forth. Unfortunately, ABC wasn’t aware of a new rule of network television: Don’t introduce any new programs while American Idol is on the air. Brian doesn’t even air opposite Idol, but that almost doesn’t matter because Idol soaks up the oxygen for miles around and makes it hard for viewers to get excited about anything else. Since it’s a smart, sprightly, unassuming little show, What About Brian may escape the Idol curse.

As for Brian, its eponymous hero, played with tender sheepishness by Barry Watson, is a noncommittal guy in his 30s, not really a slacker (with a creepy friend, he runs a video game company) but someone living a life that hasn’t quite jelled.

Brian’s friends, the flippant way they exchange half-witticisms, and a general sense that their problems are half-baked or cooked-up — all these factors suggest we are watching an updated version of thirtysomething. But at least the updating is handled intelligently by series creator Dana Stevens and executive producer J.J. Abrams, whose credits include ABC’s powerhouse Lost.

Poor Brian is kind of lost too, as the premiere quickly makes clear. It aired in a special time slot on Sunday, April 16th, at 9 p.m. and then moved to its regular home the following night at 9. Brian’s friends are his extended family, a group of like-minded professional people who feel comfortable with one another and don’t seem terribly involved in the traumatic calamities of the world.

At times, they become too superficial for words — even too superficial for gestures — and might as well be the stars of those beer and SUV commercials that plague sports events on TV. You know — the comely comic crowds who hang around the beach or the mountains and just laugh and laugh and laugh at how funny life is.

The friends on Brian are never quite that irritating, but the writers will have to take care and watch their steps.

Brian faces a dilemma on the premiere. His friends are all paired off in couples, and though he has a great older sister (Rosanna Arquette, making a welcome return), he resents that his pals wrangle over such matters as who’ll give Brian a ride to the movies. So he drives himself. Sad to say, there’s a bit of fender-bending on the way, and Brian ends up dating the very driver (Amy Jo Johnson) he rear-ended, nicknamed “Car Girl” by his friends.

Car Girl is a trifle unstable, referring to Brian as “Ted Bundy” and throwing him out of his own apartment. Meanwhile Brian realizes a painful truth: He is thoroughly in love with his friend Adam’s girl Marjorie (the lovable indeed Sarah Lancaster). As luck would have it, Adam says it’s time he and Marjorie broke up and proposes a pact: He will call it quits with Marjorie on the same day Brian ditches Car Girl.

But then luck has it another way. Adam changes his mind and instead of breaking up with Marjorie — well, you’ll see. He leaves Brian dangling from the horns of a moral dilemma. Through it all, most of the actors make their characters zesty and likable, if on occasion too glib for their — and our — own good.

What About Brian doesn’t seem likely to take the country by storm and may not last past its initial six episodes. But after all the racket made by American Idol, the easygoing charm of Brian is brisk, cool, and refreshing — like drinking a beer on a mountaintop with your SUV parked nearby.