Big Night Had a Few Snags

Shake up the Oscars, the grande dame of Hollywood galas, and you’re bound to get a few glitches.

Like those flat TV screens mounted above the crowd inside the Kodak Theatre -- purportedly best viewed by the swells in the orchestra seats. “You broke your neck looking up,” Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Frank Pierson said Monday.

Or that echoing boom from backstage that went off as the award for live action short was being presented from the audience, another innovation this year. “I hope they missed,” the presenter, Jeremy Irons, suavely quipped. (Actually, a piano used in a previous musical number was being moved, and no one muted a microphone on top of it before unplugging the device.)

Then there was the unscripted moment when a stagehand had to scurry onstage to give a microphone to the show’s host, comedian Chris Rock.

And how about that no-show, Catherine Zeta-Jones? Wait, that one apparently was in the game plan. When Adam Sandler walked onstage without his co-presenter, Rock volunteered to read her lines, leading to some sexy banter between the two.

“If people were listening, they’d realize that was a joke,” an academy spokesman said. “It was not the kind of patter presenters normally do ... very schticky, in fact.”