A New Pre-Show on the Red Carpet

“Thanks for attending Oscar Bowl I. Please ask your limo driver to tune in to the postgame show, with Vin Scully, Uma Thurman and Edy Williams. Arrive home safely!”

The stars who trundled past us, the screaming, snapping, barking entity that is the Oscar media horde, on Sunday night may not have known it, but they may have been participating in the swan song of the event in the fashion we have come to know it.

Never mind the switch to an obligation-free and entertainment-challenged Sunday night. The real news, and perhaps the real warning, of the 71st Annual Academy Awards was that the doors, and the media access, closed half an hour earlier than in the past. The academy was trying out its version of that bane of sports broadcasting: the exclusive pregame show.

Sure it was only 30 minutes. But trust me, as the host of an element of this year’s Super Bowl pregame show that aired a full six hours before kickoff, half an hour will beget an hour, an hour will beget two, and after that they’ll go directly to each day of the week preceding the Oscars being renamed in honor of its own Baldwin brother.

“Why not?” asked “Entertainment Tonight” co-host Mary Hart. “I flipped on my TV at 9 this morning while I was doing my nails, and there was somebody already out here reporting live. They could spend the entire day following one nominee.”

“Oh, I think that’s a good idea,” Warren Beatty said sarcastically, his eyebrow peeking up from behind his sunglasses. Beatty was only briefly distracted as the clot of photographers around us shouted something at Kim Basinger that, taking place anywhere else, would get them arrested or at least slapped. “Kim! We need your dress! Kim, we need your dress!”

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Veterans say stars like Basinger and Beatty were victims of the changes already effected. Sunday’s setup was the traditional one, in which celebrities run a U-shaped gantlet surrounded by steep bleachers full of fans on one side, and reporters and photographers on the other. It reminds the novice instantly of the chariot scene in “Ben-Hur.” This year, however, the personalities/victims were funneled down the course an hour later than usual, and nearly en masse. A celebrity SigAlert was declared at 4:26 p.m. after Brenda Blethyn was literally grabbed by Argentine television, and Geoffrey Rush was collared by Roger Ebert, thus blocking the diamonds-only lane.

All of this, of course, could be going away, destined to become as quaint a part of academy history as the thought that the ceremony was once held at lunchtime, or that the first best actor award went to a gentleman named Buddy. Exclusivity, in football or film, means the sidelines are cleared of everybody but “rights holders” and the purchasing TV network controls access with the impunity of a Roman emperor.

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Thus this ritual of the walk-through could belong entirely to one broadcast outlet. The overnight-camping fans could be banished; the photographers becoming slowly sun-stricken could wind up across the street somewhere, denying eavesdropping reporters their frantic, innocent, delightful attempts to recognize each of perhaps 500 celebrities (“Look, it’s Martha Stewart,” said the gentleman next to me. “Not Martha Stewart, I mean Gloria Swanson! No, you know who I mean! Gloria Stuart!”).

“Me, I watched college basketball all day,” Kevin Costner said as the stars’ backup reached rush-hour proportions and they began chatting with the media. “So as long as we have 57 different channels, they can televise it all week.”

But what would you televise? If the celebrity red carpet shuffle of Liam Neeson chewing gum followed by Steven Tyler looking surprisingly fatherly followed by Sally Kirkland introducing herself to reporters, is the pregame show, the awards presentation is, essentially, the postgame show. Would not the premise of the awards have to change to introduce a little more, well, drama? Steal a page from the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, perhaps, and have all the nominees on stage at once, with the judge circling them as if in some demented game of musical chairs, doubling the suspense with each passing second before he or she finally pointed to the winner?

Or should the modifications be drawn instead from the old Olympic figure-skating format? Should all the nominees be required to recite the Gettysburg Address or at least “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck”?

What about ticket scalping? What about champagne dripping from the impeccable strapless gowns of the best actress winner? If you had watched nine hours of pre-Oscars, wouldn’t you demand that, at least, from Helen Hunt?

“Helen, would you watch all day if they televised it like the Super Bowl?”

“Sure,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Except I’m here. It’d be a two-places-at-once thing for me.”

Thus would be the misfortune of a wall-to-wall Super Oscar Sunday. There, in what to the first-timer is unexpected sweetness and accessibility, are the fans who sat out three days and two rainstorms to reassure Sir Ian McKellen, at the tops of their voices, that he would win, and McKellen in turn waving back as enthusiastically as a 10-year-old.

And if only one network or news organization could be present for the hours before the awards themselves, how could that lane-congesting guy from Argentine TV give Roberto Benigni a miniature Bugs Bunny for good luck, and get a kiss in return?

For that matter, how could Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Tom Hanks drag a barely qualified reporter across the invisible line and nearly invisible hedge that separates the stars from everybody else, pose for a picture with him, and, in the process, break his cummerbund?