If you've been watching the National League Championship Series, seeing the Dodgers take it on the chin from the Phillies, you probably know what it means when a batter takes an emergency swing. It's what you do when you've got two strikes, the pitcher is throwing 98 mph fastballs and you're just trying to fight off a pitch and stay alive.
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Film academy makes a safe pick for its Oscar show
THE BIG PICTURE
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday, October 23, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 National Desk 1 inches; 34 words Type of Material: Correction
Oscar producers: The Big Picture column in Wednesday's Calendar, about the producers of next year's Academy Awards show, misidentified the Aaron Sorkin-Tommy Schlamme TV series "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" as "Studio 360."
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When it comes to emergency swings, no one took a better one Tuesday than motion picture academy President Tom Sherak. A serious baseball fan himself, having spent far more time in the past 20 years with Tommy Lasorda than with Martin Scorsese, Sherak picked Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman to produce the 82nd Academy Awards telecast, which airs March 7 on ABC.
Neither man was at the top of anyone's list of potential producer candidates, but the hour was getting late -- last year's producers, Larry Mark and Bill Condon, signed on for the job in September. As people inside the selection process had discovered, many of the top prospects for the job -- starting with director Rob Marshall, who has "Nine" coming out later this year -- were too busy making or prepping their own movies.
It's one of the brutal realities of picking an Oscar producer. The people you want the most, who could possibly transform the stodgy show into a dazzling visual extravaganza, are in demand, with careers at the top of their trajectory. The people who actually have the time to assume the crushing workload of staging the industry's most high-profile celebratory event are -- ahem -- more likely to be able to clear their calendar.
The flaw in the academy's selection process is pretty obvious -- they keep picking film producers to produce a TV show. If I were trying to spiff up one of the world's oldest, and in many ways most outdated, televised awards ceremony, I'd hire someone who's actually -- gasp -- produced a great TV show. It would open up a far broader spectrum of possible candidates.
An obvious first choice: Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme, the gifted creative team behind "The West Wing" and "Studio 360." With Sorkin, you'd get someone who could actually write some cutting-edge sketches and comic material; with Schlamme, you'd get a director-producer with a keen eye for exciting television.
