Gone in sixty seconds: Hanks shows how to accept an Oscar

The late Billy Wilder once said that the first nine rules of making movies were all the same: "Thou shalt not bore the audience." With days to go before the Oscars, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is working overtime to teach Wilder's maxim to its award nominees in anticipation of their statuette-clutching moment in the limelight.

Every year, the Academy begs Oscar winners - mostly in vain - not to spend their allotted minute thanking their armies of anonymous agents, lawyers and accountants, or hugging and kissing so many people on their way to the stage that they run out of time to say anything.

This year, though, it has a new gimmick: an eight-minute instructional video, narrated by two-time Best Actor winner Tom Hanks, which it has distributed to each of the 150-odd nominees. A relaxed and wry-looking Hanks guides nominees through the art of handling that speech-making moment "with wit, flair, creativity - or at least with brevity".

Entitled An Insider's Guide: What Nominees Need To Know, the video includes clips of Oscar moments that stuck in the memory - such as Jack Palance doing one-arm push-ups, or Roberto Benigni gliding over the tops of everyone's chairs en route to the stage - and ones that decidedly did not - such as the interminable thank-yous delivered by the crew from Lord of the Rings two years ago, which was about as interesting as a reading from the New Zealand telephone directory. Another bad example was Gwyneth Paltrow's tsunami of tears.

Rule number one, Hanks says, is to manage the triumphal approach to the stage and the speech in no more than 60 seconds. "Instead of hugging everyone within a 10-row radius, you might have to settle for a few fast high-fives as you sprint down the aisle," he says.

Rule number two: if there are multiple winners, let one person speak on behalf of everyone. (Subtext: since you're just costume designers or producers, nobody cares about you and you probably aren't that good- looking anyway, so do hurry up.)

Rule number three: "Lose the list." The Academy now allows winners to post their thank-yous in full on its website, a bit like the trend in footnotes in academic publishing. No need to weigh everybody down with it when your lawyer's obnoxiously hard-charging negotiation over your profit participation deal is of no concern to the great unwashed.

Hanks' most valuable tip: "Maximise your moment." This is a smart way of encouraging people to be interesting and entertaining, without falling into the trap the Academy has set for itself in previous years, when it has implied that what it really wants to avoid is controversy or any hint of spontaneity. Michael Moore got booed off the stage in 2003 when he launched into an attack on George Bush in the midst of the Iraq invasion but it was undoubtedly good theatre.

Behind the Hanks video lies a piece of perennial Oscar insecurity: that the ceremony, for all its centrality in US pop culture, still has to work hard for its audience and can't afford to be complacent. In particular, the Academy is forever afraid the public will see it as a nauseating orgy of self-congratulation, and switch over.

Television viewership has been in decline, as the telecast has tended to grow ever longer. The video is part of a campaign to instil a little discipline on set, keep the running time lean, and make sure the jokes and the emotional highs are at least as frequent as the commercial breaks. This year, the concern about attracting an audience is particularly acute because none of the five nominees for Best Picture has been a box-office smash, and the race for Best Actress, in particular, is bereft of high-profile names. "You've devoted your passion and your dreams to the entertainment industry," Hanks says, "so use a little of that Oscar-winning creativity to make your speech entertaining."

Billy Wilder's 10th rule, incidentally, was ensuring he retained the right to the final cut. It's likely at least a handful of winners will disregard whatever they are told and try to assert their own authority - they always do. We can only hope it's in a worthwhile, and entertaining, cause.