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This past Monday morning on “The View,” Barbara Walters announced that 2010 will mark her last “Oscars Special”.
“When you do it, you’ve got to do it,” the legendary newswoman mused on retiring, leveling a pointed look at the camera — a dig at Jay Leno, but delivered with a sweet smile.
Barbara Walters, for those of you born after, say, 1980, was once an important figure. There used to be this medium called television, and things that a very few people said and did on it mattered. Barbara Walters — the first woman to anchor the “Today Show,” the first to co-host the nightly network news — was one of them. In 1981, she hatched the pre- or post- (depending on your time zone) “Oscar Specials,” in which she regularly interviewed three of the year’s most intriguing and buzzed-about stars.
With the programs, Barbara pioneered the Glossy Celebrity Interview. Impeccably prepared and with an air of intimacy yet aristocracy about her, Walters took her lights, camera, and action into the homes of stars long before they were “just like us” as the tabloids now proclaim, and amply illustrate. From Goldie Hawn to Kate Hudson, John Travolta to Nick Jonas, Cher to Annie Hathaway — everyone fell, and still falls, under her purview.
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The show has been maligned over the years. For example, Walters will never live down the fact that she once asked Katherine Hepburn, “What kind tree would you like to be?” (Walters maintains the query was simply a response to Hepburn offering that in another life she would like to be a tree. Well, what would you have asked?) The interviews have also come to seem old-fashioned and highly choreographed — the television version of Photoshopped — despite attempts at “currency,” like allowing Hugh Jackman to give the now 80-year-old Walters a lap dance last year.
But one part of the shows has remained raw and compelling, no matter what the year or who the star is that she is interviewing. Barbara Walters specials were — and are — the best in the business at making the most powerful, envied, and luckiest people in the pop culture constellation cry.
How does she do it? If one looks at the footage — Harrison Ford getting emotional, a young Goldie Hawn holding back — one can see a method to eliciting such PR madness. Walters speaks very, very slowly, she looks very, very deeply into her subjects’ eyes, and she emphasizes her empathy with a very, very motherly manner. Of course, this distinction might seem dubious or crass or even borne out of deep cynicism on Walters’ part. But I posit that it is not — and in fact, it’s quite profound. Because Barbara Walters has been able to make Americans believe — indeed, to show us — that on a deep level, celebrities are just like us. Despite a culture in which they are ridiculously deified, they do feel our pain. And she has shown us this by allowing us to feel theirs.
Will we miss her? The special’s time has come and gone; her decision to discontinue them feels post-mortem pop culturally, even if they do still rake in the ratings. (Last year, she pulled in just under 12 million viewers to the Oscars’ just over 35 million.) And adding polish to the decision is that she’s trying to retire with style. As she alluded to on Monday, doing that on prime time television these days is something to be proud of in itself.
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