Best Oscar show ever??

Adam Shankman, one the producers of the producers of this year's Oscar awards has announced that this year's show will be the best ever!

Read AP's Sandy Cohen's report...

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Oscar producers promise fun, energy, innovation
By Sandy Cohen, AP Entertainment Writer

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – The Academy Awards' art department is plastered with geometric and architectural images. Sketches show the brand-new stage setup in various forms. A sample of the show's crystal curtain hangs in one corner. Copper-colored circles, squares and rectangles dangle from a cork board.

"We commissioned, with every great intention, the most complicated automated set the Oscars have ever had," says Adam Shankman, half of the production team putting on this year's Academy Awards. "We've had to add additional technical days now, just to make sure that it's all going to work together. So there's a mixed bag of excitement-slash-fear that's coming with that because, if it works, it will be the most beautiful thing the audience has ever seen on the Oscars."

Shankman and Bill Mechanic have been crafting the March 7 telecast since October. They've planned their production numbers, designed the new stage and come up with a clever way to present the 10 best-picture nominees. They've hired the hosts (Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin), booked a bunch of presenters and sketched out the show's 13 acts.

Now, all they need are the nominees.

"By and large, we know the layout of the show," Shankman says from the Academy Awards production office, tucked inside a quiet office building in Beverly Hills. "But there is a huge piece of content that is yet to be decided, which is the most significant piece of the content."

"We can't finish the show until we know," Mechanic says.

Sitting on twin black sofas inside Shankman's office, the two men finish each other's sentences and praise each other's work. When they first took the Oscar assignment, though, they didn't even know each other.

"I knew him through his movies," Mechanic says, citing Shankman's 2003 film "Bringing Down the House" and 2007's "Hairspray." "If we did any production numbers, I thought (his approach) was very contemporary. It felt like dance that I could watch.

"Dance for straight guys!" Shankman quips.

But when he first got Mechanic's call, "I actually thought it was a joke," Shankman says. "I'm not even in the academy."

He did perform on the Oscar show once, as a dancer in a production number in 1989, which "was so overwhelming and it just felt like a huge, huge deal."

("I had the weirdest thing where I got thrown off stage and almost killed Jessica Tandy," he recalls.)

Mechanic, meanwhile, is a longtime academy member and studio chief who has been to several Oscar ceremonies with films such as "Braveheart," "Titanic," "Cast Away" and "Boys Don't Cry." After attending the Oscars a few times, he started thinking maybe he could put on a better show. And now he's getting his chance.

The two men say they're a well-matched team. Mechanic is "the true film historian and the insane fan," Shankman says, "and I'm a little bit more of the P.T. Barnum energy."

So what kind of film-focused circus magic are the two planning?

The show will be funnier, shorter and more inclusive than past telecasts, Mechanic says. It'll feature not just nominated films, but popular movies from throughout the year. Music and performance will be integrated in a way that's "really spot-on," Shankman says, and the newly expanded best-picture category will "create some consistency" in the traditionally long telecast.

Expect "fun" presenters, Mechanic says: "We didn't do the normal-normal thing." Look for lively, emotional and educational moments, Shankman says: "You want to feel either like you're learning or you're getting to know people." And expect an homage to the best year in box-office history.

The two producers have been watching the season's other awards shows "to see what the story of the night is going to be and trying to build that into the show in a meaningful way," Shankman says.

Already emerging? The theme of ex-spouses James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow possibly competing against each other in the picture and director categories, Mechanic says.

The duo will have to wait until nominees are announced on Tuesday to discover what the night's other themes might be.

Regardless, the producers promise an Oscar show for movie makers, movie stars and movie fans.

"The cliche is it's the granddaddy of it all. There wouldn't be any other awards shows if it wasn't for the Oscars," Mechanic says. "It's the real thing. If you're in football, it's the Super Bowl. If you're in baseball, it's the World Series. If you're in movies, it's the Oscars. There's nothing like it."
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