The 13th Annual On Cinema Oscar Special last Sunday promised to be “The Last Oscar Special.” Unsurprisingly, things didn’t go as planned — one might even say it was a true tragedy.
(Note for those still catching up with On Cinema: Host Tim Heidecker is now going as New Amato because *takes deep breath* “New” is short for “Newman,” which he thought was his ex-wife Toni’s last name but was actually her ex-husband’s, and “Amato” was the last name of his adopted father figure.)
Let’s recap On Cinema at the Cinema season 16. New and Gregg are now living together in an extended stay hotel, where New is recovering from the side effects of a supplement called “Warp 10” from Dr. Jian Wang which promises to reduce the age of his organs. Unfortunately it causes New to become bedridden and all his hair to fall out.
Eventually they take the show to the rec room at the senior living home where G. Amato now resides, with New and G. co-creating a series called “Dootle Dots” based on some crayon scribbles they made together. This chapter is short lived as G. Amato dies after eating an expired can of cream of shrimp soup that Gregg Turkington claimed to be a priceless movie prop. New puts himself in charge of the funeral and handles it in the most self-centered, tasteless way imaginable, using it as a vehicle to debut his new song and music video.
Kicking off the Oscar Special, a live action version of the Dootle Dots cartoon characters introduce New. He begins with an apology for ending the series, promising to explain more later.
With that out of the way, let me go into the six most outrageous moments in The Last Oscar Special.
This will include spoilers.
New’s depressing new life in Lake Havasu, Arizona
In a recurring segment in the vein of MTV’s Cribs, we see New showing off his new home in a depressing suburb called Lake Havasu in Arizona. Despite living there he’s unable to pronounce the name “Havasu.”
Here, he’s dating an older woman named Deb who works at a bar and has two large pet birds, one of whom is trying to turn New’s wig into a nest.
The upbeat music in these segments is in sharp contrast to how bored New seems throughout, finding not much to do aside from drinking alcohol and complaining about his home state of California.
Movie Opinions
Gregg proudly introduces a new segment he calls “Movie Opinions,” which turns out to be him straight-up stalking Kaili Amato to get her opinions on movies after she turned down his marriage proposal two years ago.
Leave her be, Gregg!
The craziest part? Not only has Gregg misread the situation between them completely, but didn’t he see her and Joey together at G. Amato’s funeral?
Gregg has never been one to read the room, but this was so viscerally uncomfortable it had me squirming in my seat.
The Michael Phenomenon
Gregg dresses up as Michael, John Travolta’s character from the goofy 1996 comedy Michael, with poofed-up hair and angel wings. And a prop cigarette because “he smokes in the movie.”
This outfit is funny enough on its own, but Gregg takes things up a notch with another one of his poorly thought out trivia game shows. In “The Michael Phenomenon,” contestants are given a question where the answer is either the movie Michael or Phenomenon, another supernatural movie featuring John Travolta, which came out the same year.
Manuel and a Betty Boop impersonator are selected as contestants, though to everyone’s confusion somehow neither of them can win as the movies are awarded points — whatever that means. Gregg notes which movie is coming out ahead by tallying the score on a wadded up piece of paper in his pocket.
Meanwhile, a process server barges into the studio and serves New with a lawsuit regarding the financial assets of G. Amato.
New’s son Aidan
Back in the second season, New (then still known as Tim) was suffering from blood clots in his brain. It was never exactly elaborated upon, but for some reason his wife at the time said she’d leave him if he got surgery to fix the blood clots. Perhaps she foresaw his future, or perhaps she simply wanted him dead.
If I recall, this storyline was only brought up once more, and at that point even Gregg had forgotten that Tim had a son.
All these years later while working on the pilot episode of his new Dootle Dots show, New/Tim somehow ran across his long lost son Aidan on Indeed.com while looking for an animator. New uses this as an excuse to reconnect with his son despite Aidan’s lack of experience in animation.
New wastes no time in driving his son away from him again, first in trying to pressure him into drinking champagne, which Aidan wisely avoids, then becoming more and more uncomfortable as New grows immediately jealous of Aidan’s stepfather who raised him. Feeling entitled to your own children who you didn’t bother to raise is always a sign of a lack of empathy, but coming from New who found and adopted his own stepfather in G. Amato makes it especially hard to swallow.
If there’s one silver lining it’s that this isn’t a “like father, like son” situation as Aidan quickly sours on New’s mean-spirited temperament.
Dootle Dots cartoon
New shows the debut episode of Dootle Dots, his cartoon show that seems to be a knockoff of a knockoff of something like Cocomelon, aimed squarely at toddlers to watch on their parents’ iPads.
Co-created by New and G. Amato and animated by Aidan, the entire episode is a mess that doesn’t make much sense to the adult audience in the room. Axiom and Manuel seem at least mildly offended by the stereotypical Italian chef character and question whether it may be racist.
The animation style (video embedded above) is atrocious, making The Flintstones look like a big budget Disney movie by comparison.
As if this weren’t ill-conceived enough, there’s also no clear reason to have live action mascots singing and dancing in the Oscar Special to promote a cartoon.
TotoGate
In his opening monologue about winding down On Cinema, New justifies it by stating for the umpteenth time that nobody cares about movies, and questioning Gregg’s expertise. But now he has a “gotcha” which he hopes will cast doubt on Gregg once and for all.
New asks Gregg point blank if he actually watched Wicked 2, and when Gregg says yes he then points out that during his review, Gregg had previously stated that Dorothy and Toto were not in the movie. Damning stuff! How will Gregg weasel his way out of this one?
Gregg defends himself by claiming a cosplayer in a witch costume with a large hat was sitting in front of him in the theater, blocking his view of the brief scene featuring Dorothy and Toto. This ultimately leads New to recreate the scene in a movie theater set, with Gregg wearing a GoPro on his forehead and Axiom sitting in front of him with a witch hat on his head.
It’s a Gregg Turkington witch trial, if you will. For the jury, New selects his son Aidan, Joe Estevez, Manuel, Axiom, and Clare from Hav-A-Scoop. The five of them aren’t particularly convinced either way and decide it’s possible Gregg really did see the movie, much to New’s disappointment.
Dootle Dots closing number
After the last break of the night we return to see New with the live action version of the Dootle Dots characters as he begins to sing the theme song, only to interrupt himself and get angry, boiling over into a complete meltdown.
In a tonal whiplash, New goes from smiling and joking to yelling “What the fuck is the matter with you?” at the performer dressed as Baxter, the frowny-face Dootle Dot. This quickly escalates into New getting into a physical altercation, shoving him to the ground and yelling, then turning around and blaming it all on his son Aidan, who he calls a disappointment.
The Baxter performer returns sans costume, grabbing New’s wig off his head and the two come to blows. Eventually New’s pants fall off as he’s shoved to the floor, with the performer dumping tuna salad from Hav-A-Scoop on his head.
And just like last year, New ends the night with his bare ass on display once again.
Honorable mentions
- Hav-A-Scoop caters the special, with visibly uninterested employee Clare, who’s made the trek all the way from Lake Havasu (hence the name) to serve scoops of tuna salad in ice cream cones.
- Gregg swoops in at the last moment to take advantage of New’s situation to debut a segment revealing that he correctly predicted that One Battle After Another would win best picture. Eagle eyed viewers may have noticed, however, that the note card Gregg is holding actually says F1 on it.
- New sort of forgives Joe Estevez for allegedly dating his ex-wife, only to turn on him when Joe says he’d fallen off the wagon and had merely had lunch with Toni at Sizzler. This is a problem for New not so much because he cares about what his ex-wife may or may not have done with Joe, but because he wants Joe to testify in a lawsuit he’s preparing against Sizzler.
- Dekkar’s performance in this year’s special was a tribute to the 250th anniversary of America — with half of New’s bandmates being illegal immigrants, of course. The problem with this segment is that it didn’t take the joke far enough, as it wasn’t even half as cringey as watching real life MAGA Republicans pretend to enjoy Kid Rock lip syncing to his hit song from two decades ago.
- Grok Amato: With the untimely passing of New’s adopted father figure, G. Amato, he turns to using third-rate AI platform Grok to imitate Mr. Amato’s voice and offer words of encouragement and dubious advice.
- This year’s deranged movie tribute was in honor of Woody Allen. It was more creepy than funny, with the saving grace that it focused mostly on Jon Lovitz talking about Woody Allen. Still, I can’t say I was expecting it to feature a photo of Allen with his buddy Jeffrey Epstein.
- Gregg debuts “Let’s Reboot,” a series in which he suggests which movies need reboots along with an intro of shaky handheld phone footage of a store selling cowboy boots. While not dark and depraved like his previous “Forgotten, But Not Gone” segment, his convoluted plan to have Daniel Radcliffe star in a Dirty Harry reboot simply because the character’s name is Harry is the type of incomprehensibly dumb idea only Gregg would come up with.
- Mark unfortunately couldn’t attend this Oscar Special because he was having his vocal chords removed. Get well soon, Mark!
- Meta: Early on in the special, you can see Tim and Gregg both crack a smile as Gregg drones on and on about movies featuring angels. I thought for sure they were both going to break this time, but they held it together. Barely. In the live broadcast version you could hear someone on the crew burst out laughing at the end when Tim was on the floor, head covered in tuna salad.
While cringe comedy is often associated with short sketches, On Cinema proves that sometimes the joke is that it just keeps going way past the point where it makes you feel uncomfortable, somehow becoming funnier as you feel your brain melting out of your skull.
In case it wasn’t clear, The Last On Cinema Oscar Special is “the last” in the sense that a band might have a “farewell” tour, only to be back on the road the next year. Speaking of which, I’ve already got my ticket to On Cinema’s Five Bags of Popcorn Tour when they perform live in San Francisco next month.
The Last Oscar Special is streaming on HEI Network.
