After a year of gasping over Janet Jackson's exposed breast - and of politicians beating their own breasts to whip up a "culture wars" frenzy over decency on TV - ABC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences served up an Oscar telecast pre-programmed to within an inch of its life, free of any hint of spontaneity or unpredictability or anything that might be considered even slightly controversial.
It was as boring as a 3 1/4 -hour snail race.
Don't blame Chris Rock. He gave what was requested: quick and hip comedy, with enough pre-show "controversy" hype - courtesy of an Entertainment Weekly interview taken way out of context by Web hack Matt Drudge - to make sure young viewers tuned in for the first 20 minutes. His monologue, mostly poking fun at celebs like Jude Law, may not have played well with the Hollywood elite (certainly not with Sean Penn), but he got off a few good lines.
Don't blame telecast producer Gil Cates, at least not much. Cates did what he could - herding nominees onstage together, giving awards in the aisles - to trim the bloat of a ceremony that has often lasted four hours.
Blame, in large part, ABC for cowardice. For starters, ABC instituted a five-second delay on the live feed, lest the recipient of the Visual Effects Oscar decided to moon the Kodak Theatre crowd.
(There's also the odd case concerning Robin Williams, as reported in The New York Times. Williams had conspired with "South Park" composer Mark Shaiman to pen a musical bit about the secret lives of cartoon characters, aimed at lampooning right-wingers for such statements as James Dobson's suggestion that SpongeBob SquarePants is gay. ABC censors - a gang so humorless they could offer Sean Penn a job - objected that some lyrics were too political or offensive. The censors ordered rewrite after rewrite, until eventually Shaiman gave up and canned the song. In protest, Williams wore a piece of tape over his mouth as he took the stage, then used some of the song's jokes anyway.)
But most of the blame for a stultifyingly dull Oscar Night should go to the American public, for being asleep while this silliness over TV "decency" got so far out of hand.
In the past year, the Federal Communications Commission - chaired by Michael Powell, who announced in January that he would be leaving the job - has cracked down on profanity and lewd conduct with massive fines.
The FCC has left broadcasters guessing what is or isn't indecent. Instead of setting down any specifics, the FCC relies on viewer complaints. But the complaint process has been hijacked by the Parents Television Council, a right-wing lobbying group whose members spam the FCC with form-letter complaints. According to one recent accounting, the FCC last year received more than 1 million complaints - and 99.9 percent were from PTC.
Of course, you can't have such moralistic grandstanding without Congress feeling left out. The House last month passed 389-38 a bill raising the FCC's maximum fine for indecency to $500,000 per incident for broadcasters and performers. This week, two powerful GOP lawmakers, Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens and Texas Rep. Joe Barton, told a National Association of Broadcasters meeting that they want to put cable and satellite TV - including pay channels like HBO and Showtime - under the same indecency rules as broadcast stations.
"Most viewers don't differentiate between over-the-air and cable," Stevens told the NAB (as quoted in The Hollywood Reporter).
No, most viewers do know the difference between broadcast and cable: broadcast channels have the dull homogenized stuff, while cable has the interesting shows. Most viewers also can figure out how to work the parental lock to keep their kids from watching "The Sopranos." And one group of viewers, nine folks known as the Supreme Court, have previously ruled that cable-TV content is protected speech because viewers pay for it.
Meanwhile, this was a banner week for the use of the F-word if you're in combat. The FCC declared, three months after the fact, that it would not levy fines against stations that aired the obscenity-laced "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day. (More than 60 stations pre-empted the movie, fearing what the FCC might do.) And distributors of the upcoming documentary "Gunner Palace," which shows U.S. soldiers stationed in one of Saddam Hussein's old homes, successfully appealed to the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board to drop an R rating to a PG-13 without cutting any of the 30-odd uses of the F-word.
Incidentally, ratings for the no-rough-edges Oscar ceremony were lower than last year's. Meanwhile, the racy "Desperate Housewives" continues to be a top-rated show. The American people seem to be voting with their remotes.
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Got a question about the movies? Send it to movie critic Sean P. Means: The Salt Lake Tribune, 143 S. Main St., second floor, Salt Lake City, UT 84111, or e-mail at movies@sltrib.com.
