Note to Oscars: Get real

In an era where everyone's lives are twice as busy and their attention span has been cut in half, it is simply suicidal to put on a pokey three-hour-plus award show. As the legendary B-movie master Sam Arkoff once put it, when trying to sell a film that stunk: "If you can't make it a better picture, you can always make it a shorter picture."

The academy should heed his advice. Here's how we watched the Oscars in my household: We TiVo-ed the broadcast, came back from Little League practice, hopped in bed with some snacks and zapped through the commercials, the musical numbers and most of the craft awards, giving our full attention to Stewart's routines, the clip compilations and the big awards and acceptance speeches, starting with best animated feature. Total elapsed time: one hour, 45 minutes, tops.

Our family's version of the Oscars, thanks to the magic of TiVo, didn't drag a bit. If academy chieftain Sid Ganis is going to staunch the bleeding, he needs to put the telecast under the knife. Although I'm sure it will cause a firestorm inside the academy, the technical awards -- sound editing, sound mixing, visual effects, makeup and costume design -- have to go. No one outside of the academy wants to hear acceptance speeches from people they've never heard of, no matter how heartfelt. The Oscars may have once been a celebration of craft, but the world has changed. Today's audience wants a horse race. The show is just bad TV.

The same goes for those cringe-inducing renditions of the best original songs. With the exception of a wonderfully spare rendition of "Falling Slowly" from "Once," they were all massively overproduced, drenched in so much glitz that they lacked any emotional resonance. I mean, who did the choreography -- Michael Bay? And speaking of Ganis, why is the academy president on camera, taking up valuable time explaining arcane voting procedures? It's just dead air.

There is plenty of precedent for streamlining the Oscar telecast. Just watch the Grammys. In a typical telecast, the Grammys have roughly 20 musical performances while giving out 10 actual awards. The other 100-odd Grammys are presented earlier in the day at a pre-award show with presenters, acceptance speeches and a full audience. As an experiment, this year's pre-show was webcast on Grammy.com with the idea of expanding it into a bigger event in the future.

MTV stages a Web simulcast for its Video Music Awards, with separate hosts situated backstage, giving fans watching on the Internet a chance to see some of the backstage action.