Oscars may be held even earlier

The Academy Awards may get moved up even earlier.

The Oscar ceremony was held on Feb. 29, this year, up from March 23 last year — a move that caused controversy in Hollywood. Supporters said that the reduced time between the announcement of the nominees and the awards resulted in one of the cleanest Oscar campaigns in years, but detractors said it gave underdogs less of a chance to lobby for their films.

‘It would make the Oscars more boring than ever.’ — source

But now Joe Roth, executive producer of the Oscars, is telling people he wants to reschedule the event, moving it up two weeks so that it will be held in the middle of February. “That would put it in the middle of sweeps, so it would be a huge financial boon to ABC, which could charge even more for ads,” says a source, “But it would make the Oscars more boring than ever.”

“In recent years we saw feisty, late-breaking little indies like ‘The Pianist,’ ‘Monster’s Ball’ and ‘Training Day’ pull off upsets over the studio Goliaths because they had that usual extra month to build buzz and momentum,” says one source who opposes the re-scheduling. “This year you could feel support building for Shohreh Agdashloo and Johnny Depp, but there wasn’t time for that to register in the vote tally. In the future, there won’t even be time for that new buzz to build.”

Roth was vacationing and couldn’t be reached for comment. When asked if the Oscars might be rescheduled, a spokesman for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said that the board would meet to vote on it. “Joe [Roth] has been talking to everyone telling them that’s what he wants,” says Academy spokesman John Pavlik. “The Academy doesn’t have an opinion. The board will meet sometime at the end of March, and then we’ll have an opinion.”

Getting under the devil's skin
As a director, Mel Gibson has shown a penchant for exploiting skin disorders in his flicks. So celebrity dermatologist Reese Vail wasn’t surprised that the bad guys in Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” have skin problems.

“In ‘Lethal Weapon,’ [Gibson] took on a trigger-happy assassin with albinism. As ‘Braveheart,’ he was menaced by a leering leper,” writes Reese on Skinema.com. He goes on to note that in “The Passion of the Christ” the character who plays the devil has a “lack of eyebrows [apparently caused by] the condition alopecia areata. And those nails!  . . . Looks like a Hellish case of fingernail fungus. The debate continues whether the film is anti-Semitic, but one thing is clear: Gibson thinks the devil is in the dermatology.”

Notes from all over

Pool / Getty Images

Madonna’s skivvies are up for sale. The lacy drawers that the singer wore in “Evita” can be purchased for a mere $3,650 from Infinitely Better, a shop in Swindon, England.  . . . Sarah Jessica Parker and her on-screen beau Chris Noth have something in common, alleges AwfulPlasticSurgery.com, which claims they’ve both had nose jobs.  . . . Now that Charlize Theron has won an Oscar, Japander.com is running ads she did for Lux soap in Japan. Also on the site, Theron fans can see two-year-old Honda ads featuring a homely puppet flirting with the South African star.

Jeannette Walls Delivers The Scoop Mondays through Thursdays on MSNBC.com

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