Oscar needs you — to boost its ratings

By Anthony Breznican
Associated Press

What's your Oscar pick? Place your vote online for your Oscar favorite in six categories. We'll reveal the results of the readers' poll in Sunday's Island Life.

The show planners would like to entice about 55 million people (the high-water mark from 1998, when "Titanic" was the big winner) to tune their televisions to ABC at 6:30 p.m. Sunday. They hope to raise the event's TV ratings, which sagged to their lowest point (33.1 million viewers) last year.

Before dawn Tuesday, Oscar telecast producer Joe Roth and actress Julianne Moore, a four-time nominee who presents the editing trophy this year, arrived at a small television studio in Culver City, Calif., for a promotional marathon.

Among the most repeated questions: "Joe, what kind of surprises can we expect this year?"

"Well, 'surprise' and 'expect' are funny words to have in the same sentence," Roth responded at one point, but he gave up pointing out paradoxes in favor of talking up host Billy Crystal's multimedia comedy bits and the silly, rather than sappy, tribute to "The Pink Panther" filmmaker Blake Edwards.

Asked what it is like to attend the Academy Awards, Moore became fond of answering: "It's like the biggest prom in the world."