Turn the Oscars from boring twaddle to a marketing tool

The Oscars suck. They suck for host ABC, for whom they should be a television event to rival the Super Bowl. The network treated the news that 36 million people tuned in for this year's show as a success story. But the numbers are poor in the context of the show's own high watermark -- the 55 million who watched the "Titanic" Oscars of 1998. They also suck for those advertisers who look to the few remaining truly mass-media events for reach and overnight selling power. Most surprisingly, the Oscars suck for movie marketers. Fixing the problem starts with the product.