Wake Us When It’s Over

Presenting your 2001 Oscar-watching essentials checklist:

* Ballots.

* Miniature Oscar statuettes.

* “Chocolat” confections.

* “Crouching Tiger” eggrolls.

* “Gladiator”-kill pate.

* Chips and dip served in “Brockovich” brassieres.

And most crucial of all:

* Plenty of No Doz.

No matter how many raunchy Judi Dench jokes Steve Martin may toss out tonight as host of the 73rd annual Academy Awards, you won’t be able to enjoy them if you’ve nodded off somewhere during that Saharan wasteland separating the opening of the show and the concluding categories.

Let’s face it: With our deepest apologies to the mothers of this year’s nominated sound editors, we don’t care to hear your sons and daughters thank you for your support. This is why we have Hallmark.

Still, most of us, as always, will weather the visual effects and documentary short categories, not to mention clips of films we purposely avoided at the art houses, acceptance speeches delivered in foreign tongues, and that downer obit montage, in anticipation of (odds-on fave) Julia Roberts’ charming, respectful, yet appropriately witty 30-second bedtime story.

But should you find yourself jerking awake during the post-show Barbara Walters weep-fest (this year’s victims: John Travolta and wife Kelly Preston, Ben Stiller, and Faith Hill), don’t blame Oscar producer Gil Cates, producer of 10 of the last 12 ceremonies, or joke writer Bruce Vilanch, the “Hollywood Squares” staple who has written for the Tonys, the Grammys, the Emmys and always the Oscars. The two pros actually have very little to do with the show’s running time.

As dictated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the evening must present a total of 23 standard Oscars, plus the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, the always riveting Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award and two honorary Oscars. Only four of the statuettes figure to go to folks we actually recognize: the lead and supporting actors and actresses. Possibly one additional familiar face, should Sting or Bob Dylan win for original song.

The academy’s executive director, Bruce Davis, acknowledges that ratings for the broadcast would most certainly jump if his organization did away with 80% of the on-air presentations, but Davis maintains that the Oscars are a television show only secondarily.

“Primarily, they’re the big annual shindig of a particular organization,” says Davis, noting that the awards were handed out long before there was a TV in every home. “We have no interest in nudging the production designers or the animators or anyone else off the broadcast because there are people in the television audience who are hazy about what those people do. If TV loses interest one day, we’ll go back to doing them in a banquet hall.”

In other words, if you’re looking to blame a Bruce, blame Davis, not Vilanch, who says that after Richard D. Zanuck and Lili Fini Zanuck announced their intention last year to produce the shortest Oscars ever, they added up all the Academy-dictated elements that could not be tampered with and found the running time was already just under three hours. Equally futile was the Zanucks’ vow to avoid flashy dance numbers. Robin Williams’ show-stopping “Blame Canada” was the grandest song-and-dance routine in recent Oscar memory.

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Because of the guaranteed high ratings, the Academy Awards remain the only awards show that runs without a set cutoff time. Don Mischer, producer of seven of the last eight prime-time Emmy Awards telecasts, says, “With the Emmys, we have to get off the air on time. We’re not given an option. I’m often envious of Gil, who can take a little more time with things. [Running over] has become sort of a tradition.”

Grammy icon Pierre Cossette, producer of all 31 live Grammy shows as well as last year’s inaugural Latin Grammys, says if he were given the Oscar assignment (which, by the way, he’d enthusiastically accept), he would make the show less structured, replace the more obscure awards with musical numbers culled from the vast motion picture library and move the whole gig to New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

“With the Grammys, we never let a moment go by where we’re not going to get big applause,” he says. “That’s hard to apply to the motion-picture thing, which is more an ambience show.”

To that end, Cates promises a light, airy set reflective of the new millennium, an “innovative technology” to segue into commercials, diversity in presenters and some unannounced faces.

“People will watch essentially for the horse race,” says Cates, “then they watch for Steve Martin, oodles of all the biggest stars and finally the entertainment we use to cement it all together.”

But Cossette says variety is not Cates’ forte. “They hardly ever have someone produce the show whose expertise is the kind of rhythm and pacing necessary to produce a television special,” he says, adding that before Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg hosted the Oscars, he had hired them to emcee the Grammys. “Gil’s now a theater person, a professor, not a variety producer. He was when he was much, much younger, but he’s still the answer for the academy.”

As the man who has helped Crystal, Goldberg and now Martin seem more improvisationally brilliant, Vilanch refuses to believe that all awards shows are doomed to Dullsville. Even with the overwhelming majority of awards going to unknowns, he reminds, “The Oscars is still wall-to-wall stars. Everyone presenting is a star, and the whole evening is a star, really.”

The mood and humor of the evening are greatly set by which films are nominated for best picture. It is no coincidence, Vilanch believes, that Crystal opted not to host the Oscars during the years the somber-themed “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan” were feted. “Billy knew that you weren’t going to be able to go near those two movies,” says Vilanch, “so those were both Whoopi years, which she is very fond of pointing out.”

This year’s crop of best picture nominees, Vilanch assures, is ripe for ribbing. Expect jokes targeting the sword-wielding warriors of “Gladiator” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” and the eroticism and gluttony of “Chocolat.” And putting his own spin on the significance of director Steven Soderbergh’s “Traffic” and “Erin Brockovich,” Vilanch sees the former as a springboard for Michael Douglas zingers, and the latter as a movie “about a girl with huge [breasts] solving pollution with her Wonderbra.”

What will not be seen tonight are early conceptualized computer-generated crouching tigers that were to have been inserted here and there, nor a ballet number saluting the British import “Billy Elliot,” cut because of the film’s few nominations.

“You can make jokes about pictures that don’t get big nominations, but they won’t get the same kind of response,” says Vilanch. Last year, he plotted many jokes involving “Man on the Moon,” even planning an appearance by Andy Kaufman alter-ego Tony Clifton. “Then the academy ignored the movie altogether, so it didn’t really work out.”

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Martin, who tonight will put in roughly 20 appearances during the course of the evening, declined an interview request, explaining that he expected he would be asked questions he would refuse to answer, namely about “secrets” he has planned for the show and comparisons to Crystal. But Cates and Vilanch provide a few clues: Martin will not be participating in a musical medley nor will he be morphed into clips of nominated films--two gimmicks popularized by Crystal during his memorable openings.

“That’s not Steve,” says Vilanch. “We’re doing some special stuff with him, but it’s not on that grand scale. He wouldn’t want to try to top Billy.”

Even so, during the recent U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., Martin accepted some words of wisdom from Crystal on pacing and how many times he should appear onstage. Vilanch hints that we may see traces of Martin’s the Great Flydini, the magical puppeteer Martin played on one of Johnny Carson’s final “Tonight Shows.” But Vilanch will neither confirm nor deny any specifics, realizing that the element of surprise is crucial to the success of any awards show, whether it is planned surprises or the wonderful, unexpected moments and mishaps that surprise even producers.

More than who won or lost, what we remember are recent Oscar moments, such as when Roberto Benigni climbed over Steven Spielberg, or when Jack Palance dropped to the stage for some one-arm push-ups, or when a teary Cuba Gooding Jr. gave an acceptance speech that, for an instant, made us forget his “Jerry Maguire” catch phrase, “Show me the money.” In some instances, the enthusiastic foreign-language film director or the outlandish costume of an actress who relies more on her far-out persona than her talents provide the only escape from hours of monotony.

To safeguard against snoozer acceptance speeches, Cates, Mischer and Dick Clark (producer of all the runner-up awards shows, including the American Music Awards, the Daytime Emmys, the Golden Globes, the Academy of Country Music Awards and the Soap Opera Awards) all send letters to the nominees requesting that they keep their speeches short and emotional, and avoid reciting a laundry list of names from a piece of paper. An added incentive at the Oscars this year is a high-definition TV set for the winner who delivers the shortest acceptance speech. Cates is also offering winners the option of listing an unlimited number of thank-yous on the Academy Web site, to be posted as soon as their names are announced.

“Every producer has heart palpitations when the winner reaches into his or her pocket and says, ‘I have a list I want to read,’ ” says Clark. “There goes the spontaneity; there goes the heart.” Still, even the super-efficient Clark admits that all the planning in the world cannot prevent the occasional mishap, which Clark always secretly roots for. “There’s very little left of live television--unscripted stuff that people can look at and say, ‘Oh wow! I didn’t expect that to happen,’ ” he says. “You want the trophy to be dropped on the floor, the answers to be misread, the lady getting locked in the bathroom”

“The shows that really work the best,” says Vilanch, “are the ones that have a balance of the stuff that you plan that really works and those great spontaneous moments that capture us all.”

But should things start to drag tonight, Vilanch, as always, will be just offstage, scribbling gags for which the host will take all the credit (or the blame). “There isn’t very much the host can do other than to just be alive and be part of the party, kind of like what the quarterback does at the Super Bowl--as each play goes down, he has to be able to roll with it and come up with something spontaneous,” says Vilanch.

God forbid, should nothing humorous present itself, Vilanch has prepared a playbook of material to fall back on. For instance, last year, Crystal appeared midway through the show in a bit spoofing what the stars were thinking (such as a shot of Dench contemplating: “I shouldn’t have worn this thong”). Goldberg modeled all the nominated best costumes, another Vilanch inspiration. And this year, Vilanch and Co. have come up with something for Martin to do as a half-time wake-up call. Also on hand to liven things up: presenter Mike Myers will do a bit.

So with all this comic weaponry in his arsenal, what does Vilanch expect will be the hot topic of chatter around the water cooler Monday morning?

“I have no idea,” he says. “I just hope the show won’t still be going on.” *