Dear Hollywood:
As you prepare for your yearly celebrity prom in the form of the Academy Awards, I'd just like to make a request to the presenters at this year's event: Memorize your damn lines!
You're presenting an award, not giving a speech at the United Nations. Turn off the teleprompter! You may think it's preventing you from a public gaffe but, in reality, you look like you're having difficulty sounding out unfamiliar vowel/consonant combinations, or like Mark Wahlberg.
Now, I hate to ask such a big favor. It is your big night. You are the one, after all, who struggled for such a long time paying your dues, studying the craft of acting at NYU for nearly two full semesters before your dad's friend cast you in a commercial for yogurt that apparently gives you orgasms. And that, of course, led to a thrilling series of movies where you were on the run from human-robot hybrids, or robot-human hybrids, or Anthony Hopkins. It's hard to keep them straight.
Regardless, your profession revolves around taking written words, memorizing them, making them believable, and artfully delivering them to casting directors, audiences, and law enforcement officers. And you're good at it! With the exception of Mark Wahlberg, you're all very good at it!
Just a small tip. The very same skills you were paid millions for on that remake of that movie you just did. You know, the one based on that other movie that only came out a few years ago but was a big hit so why not cash in, right? Cha-Ching! Get this, you can use those same skills to memorize lots of things - shopping lists, addresses, the phone number to one of Hollywood's many fine escort services. And yes! You can even memorize the 14 and, yikes, sometimes 20 words written on the teleprompter to introduce Best Sound Editing in a Feature Film.
Of course, I understand the pressure. Millions of people are watching. Meryl Streep is most certainly judging you. People are rooting for you to fail. They did offer the presenter spot first to Amy Adams, and you know that little pinch hitter Margot Robbie is just waiting to swoop in and take your place if you flub a line. But I know you can do it, and you can do it with pizzazz. You don't have to deliver your lines flat and without emotion or, as the zombie-like rhetorical style has come to be known, “Wahlberg-esque.” Use your personality! Show off some of that spark your first acting teacher said you had right after he cashed your parents' check.
The important thing is to have fun and enjoy yourself and show the world you are a star, regardless of what the critics, audiences, and box office returns would have you believe. Make those few words count and deliver them with meaning. Just pretend you're in a yogurt commercial!
That is all.