"On social media, Mr. Macron’s sunglasses were seen as a political statement, projecting a tough image in the face of Mr. Trump’s threats to..."

"... impose tariffs on French wine and champagne and to annex Greenland. He has previously used his clothing to send a message, donning a turtleneck in the winter of 2022 as Europe contended with an energy crisis in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Some people likened the bespectacled Mr. Macron to the naval aviator played by Tom Cruise in 'Top Gun.' Others recalled former President Joe Biden’s penchant for aviators, though Mr. Biden was not known to wear his sunglasses while addressing world leaders...."

From "Why Was Macron Wearing Sunglasses at Davos? An eye condition, not a style choice, prompted President Emmanuel Macron of France to don aviators to address the World Economic Forum" (NYT).

I've written about aviator sunglasses before. Let me find that. Here, from March 2017, "And gold aviator eyeglasses are one of the sexiest shapes you could possibly wear." I wrote:

For the annals of sexiest shapes imaginable. Aviator glasses are back in style, we're told in the NYT.

I'm not buying that these glasses are obviously sexy. There's also... 

"One of my style icons is Gloria Steinem, and she’s worn that look forever."...

Aviator glasses were adopted by stylish people in the 60s. I'll never forget seeing Mort Sahl — the political satirist — on "The Tonight Show" holding up a picture of Gloria Steinem and railing against her, harping specifically on her glasses. As I remember it, he took the position that it was ludicrous to wear aviator glasses unless you were an aviator.

"Facing down this digital firehose of – pardon the Silicon Valleyese – 'content,' how does Hollywood now decide what merits a cinema release?"

"Facing down this digital firehose of – pardon the Silicon Valleyese – 'content,' how does Hollywood now decide what merits a cinema release? What executives are looking for – at least at Sony, according to one of its partner producers I spoke with recently – is 'theatricality.' By that term, the company means films with 'the urgency to get people to leave the comfort of their homes, he says. Working out what urgency – or 'theatrical intent,' to use the marketing lingo – means is the current Hollywood obsession. Tom Cruise, for instance, interprets urgency literally – banking on personal peril in the form of old-fashioned, non-CGI stunt work to pack in the punters. It worked for 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick.... His proselytisation of real thrills in real cinemas is one way of defining theatricality – though the danger is the approach relies only on fading muscle memory of blockbusters past...."

I'm reading "All hail Avatar! How event movies are trying to bring back the box office blockbuster/Ahead of James Cameron’s latest Avatar sequel hitting the big screen, we look at how studios aim for ‘theatricality’ to get streaming film fans from sofa to cinema" (The Guardian). 

From the depth of my memory came a question that sounds like an entry for a new Dictionary of Received Ideas: Who was that French theorist who said theater must be spectacle? I believe he died putting on his shoes.

Such raw thoughts are — I think — good AI prompts. I immediately had the name: Antonin Artaud. Here's his Wikipedia article. He wrote a manifesto about what he called the Theatre of Cruelty. Here's a Grok-made chart to help you compare him to the Hollywood execs:

Minor matters that are still on the President's agenda.

He'll definitely be finding out. You'd think other matters might come up and rank higher, leaving no time to be spent on the relationship between NBC and Seth Meyers. But no. He'll definitely be finding out.

"I’ve worked with far lesser actors who would leave me to read with an assistant when they’re off-camera."

"But Tom does not play that way at all. At one point, his face was literally smashed against the [side] of the camera, to get in my eye line as much as possible, even if I could only see the corner of his eye. He was like, 'What do you need, what can I do, how can I help you?'" 

Said April Grace, about making the movie "Magnolia" with Tom Cruise, quoted in "Tom Cruise is here to help/For more than four decades, the actor has attained near-mythic status by giving us what we want — including seven ‘Mission: Impossible’ movies." (WaPo).

The article, written by Ann Hornaday, a film critic, continues:

It’s easy to be cynical about Cruise’s messianic energy, his zealotry on behalf of an art form that, when he practices it, looks less like a profession than a holy vocation (is it any coincidence that he once contemplated becoming a Franciscan priest?).

Why be "cynical" about "a holy vocation"?! 

"So honesty is outlawed here? I can't be honest? That was our deal when we first got together — brutal truth — remember?"

What a scene! Kelly Preston, RIP.

This might be the most positive presentation of Trump I've ever seen in the New York Times.

This is the lead article at the NYT website right now:

A single author, Carl Hulse, begins:

The trick in Washington has always been to make sure a government shutdown is pinned on the other guy. President Trump is the first to ever pin one on himself.

In a new twist on the old game of shutdown politics dating to the 1990s, Mr. Trump was essentially goaded on Tuesday by Representative Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York into embracing ownership of a shutdown yet to come if Democrats do not accede to his request for $5 billion to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico.

Pelosi and Schumer "goaded" him into that position? I read it as: Trump surprised Pelosi and Schumer with a move that they had no planned response for. Trump took the lead. In Hulse's telling, Trump was pushed.

“I will take the mantle,” Mr. Trump told the two Democratic leaders in the Oval Office, saying he would proudly close parts of the executive branch if he did not get his way. “I’m not going to blame you for it,” he continued. “The last time you shut it down, it didn’t work. I will take the mantle of shutting down, and I’m going to shut it down for border security.”

A smiling Mr. Schumer seemed more than satisfied with Mr. Trump’s retort. “O.K., fair enough,” he said.

So Schumer subtly enjoyed a little victory. In a good negotiation, perhaps, you get the other guy to feel buoyed by a sense of winning. But who's who? They can't all win, can they?

The moment was a little reminiscent of the climactic scene in “A Few Good Men,” when Tom Cruise’s character elicits an incriminating answer from Jack Nicholson’s Marine colonel. In this case, Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer were more than happy to handle the president’s truth. Ms. Pelosi couldn’t say the term “Trump shutdown” enough times.

If I had just written "Mr. Schumer seemed more than satisfied," I would not proceed to say "Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer were more than happy." ("More than happy" is especially bad. It's a cliché, and for some of us, it's a cue to go looking for that old George Carlin clip.)

Anyway, casting Nancy and Chuck as Tom Cruise is a funny image. Remember, though, "A Few Good Men" is a movie, with a script that determined the ending. In the Nancy/Chuck versus Donald showdown, the American people will get whatever ideas they want — massaged by the media they select.

What I notice is that Trump played the media yesterday. He kept a negotiation going on in front of the cameras, even as Pelosi requested that the press go away. The media might like to take direction from Pelosi, but they're not going to turn away from the fantastic theater that Trump was putting on for them. Now, the video is out there, and the only thing the media can do is interpret and frame. The NYT idea is that Pelosi and Schumer were running the show. If they were, why were they the ones who wanted the cameras turned off?

In the 7th paragraph, Hulse says the things that suit the Trump-positive headline ("Playing by His Own Rules, Trump Flips the Shutdown Script"):

Mr. Trump has consistently played by his own rules in Washington, and perhaps this is just one more example of how he can upend the conventions of the capital and win a shutdown showdown on his own terms. Many of his most enthusiastic supporters are both anti-Washington and pro-border wall, so his decision to potentially close down a section of the federal government to secure funding for the wall could play well with them. It could also generate some welcome backing from his base at a time when he seems under siege on the legal end and is struggling to staff his administration as the two-year mark nears. In addition, the 2020 campaign is already on the president’s mind, and his efforts to limit immigration have worked for him in the past....

Politicians with more experience in government shutdowns aren’t so sure that is a good idea....

I know! We've been hearing from Politicians With More Experience ever since Trump brought his unique instincts into their domain. As Trump likes to say, we'll see what happens.

A video store full of nothing but VHS tapes of "Jerry Maguire."

It's an art exhibit by an art collective called Everything Is Terrible! The NYT reports:

The collective’s obsession with Jerry Maguire, which was released on VHS in 1997, the same year that DVD players began to arrive in American homes, is a product of the ubiquity of the VHS version of the film, as well as its status as a somewhat useless object.

The film “sort of called to us,” Mr. Maier said. “We kept seeing it over and over again.” (Wikipedia claims that itis [sic] the best-selling, non-Walt Disney VHS film ever. But according to a 1998 press release from Blockbuster, the film “Titanic” broke records in video home sales, surpassing several Disney filns [sic] as well as “Jerry Maguire.” )

Filns. It's some kind of commentary on where we are now, that on the day — yesterday — that was the 50th anniversary of the death of Walt Disney, there's no article about him in the NYT, just a mention of his name, lifted from Wikipedia, in an article about an art installation about a 20-year-old Tom Cruise movie, alongside the sad typo "filns."

Here's a little video conveying the off-handed art of Everything Is Terrible! Of course, it's terrible. They'd be lying if it were not terrible. Everything is terrible:


JERRY MAGUIRE VIDEO STORE! from Everything Is Terrible! on Vimeo.

The highlight of the video comes at 9 seconds, when the walking pile of "Jerry Maguire" videotapes passes by the Scientology building. The NYT article does not mention Scientology or allude to Tom Cruise's religious nonconformism, which may have been a reason for making him the butt of an art joke:

The Jerry Maguire Video Store at iam8bit Gallery will be a perfect re-creation of a video rental store circa 1996, but instead of carrying thousands of porn quadrilogies and action movie knockoffs, this store will carry only Jerry Maguire on VHS. Seeing thousands of Jerrys finally reunited will forever destroy the viewers’ previous perception of culture, waste, and existence as a whole. The Jerrys are a beautiful thing.

And this is only the beginning. At the Jerry Maguire Video Store, EIT! will be unveiling plans for the enormous, permanent pyramid in the desert where all the world’s Jerrys will live until the end of time....

See the satire of religion?

Disney's deathiversary did get the briefest notation in the NYT, which publishes the AP column "Today in History."

In 1966, movie producer Walt Disney died in Los Angeles at age 65.

Here's the obit the NYT published at the bottom of its front page 50 years ago:



Do you know that the mouse head weighs 8 ounces?

A journey into the past.

A week ago, we took a road trip east, and we stopped in Wayne, New Jersey, where I lived from 1964 to 1969, when I graduated from high school. I hadn't been there in over 40 years. I'd lived on Mountainside Drive in Packanack Lake (and looking it up to get a link, I see that Tom Cruise was my neighbor, an elementary school kid when I was a teenager (maybe he noticed me... I never noticed him)).

So it was very strange going back, to that little lake.



I live surrounded by lakes now, in Madison, Wisconsin, but Packanack Lake is mythic to me. Ah! There's the bridge. We walked across that bridge in the evening when we were 18....



How mysterious it all was! Does anyone see me here in 2014, in this place that seems as though it shouldn't even be real, but should be lost in the past, in the summer of 1969, when we spent the whole night out on The Peninsula?

"Welcome to New York, pal — now go to jail."

"An Italian tourist spent his second night in the city behind bars after staff at an upscale East Side steakhouse called cops when he claimed he left his wallet at a friend’s place."

Graziano Graziussi, a 43-year-old lawyer from Naples, is a regular at Smith & Wollensky....

“I was going to leave my iPhone,” he said. “I suggested they bring a bus boy with me... It would have been an easy trip.”

One police veteran told the Daily News he wasn’t surprised to hear that the restaurant wouldn’t take the phone as collateral.

“How do they know that iPhone was his? It could have come from anywhere,” the cop said.

The restaurant is getting some horrible press, but I'm sure people rip off restaurants all the time with the old forgot-my-wallet routine. If you let the guy leave, 9 times out of 10, you never see him again. I made up that statistic for rhetorical purposes. What do you think the statistic is? How much money do you think restaurants lose every year? They'll have to compensate by charging more to the people who do pay. But now they're stuck with the bad PR, because they called the cops on a photogenic lawyer, which means: 1. Focused outrage, 2. Ability to contact and talk to the press, 3. Big newspaper willing to run the story.

***

Readers of this blog might be thinking: Smith & Wollensky, where were we just talking about Smith & Wollensky? Was it in "The Great Gatsby"? It sounds like the name of the place that's been around long enough to have figured in "Gatsby," which takes place in 1922, but it opened in 1977. It adopted an old-fashioned image way back then. It was founded by Alan Stillman, the man who invented T.G.I. Friday's.

According to Stillman, there was never a Mr. Smith or a Mr. Wollensky involved. He opened the Manhattan phone book twice and randomly pulled out two names, Smith and Wollensky. The announcements for the opening, however, carried the names Charlie Smith and Ralph Wollensky. Stillman later admitted that Charlie and Ralph were the names of his dogs.

What's the deal with Stillman and Friday's? T.G.I. Friday's started back in 1965. Stillman — Wikipedia says — was a "bachelor perfume salesman [who] lived in a neighborhood with many airline stewardesses, fashion models, secretaries, and other single people on the East Side of Manhattan near the Queensboro Bridge, and hoped that opening a bar would help him meet women."

At the time, Stillman's choices for socializing were non-public cocktail parties, or "guys' beer-drinking hangout" bars that women usually did not visit; he recalled that "there was no public place for people between, say, twenty-three to thirty-seven years old, to meet." He sought to recreate the comfortable cocktail-party atmosphere in public despite having no experience in the restaurant business.

So he kind of invented the singles bar?

With $5,000 of his own money and $5,000 borrowed from his mother, Stillman purchased a bar he often visited, The Good Tavern at the corner of 63rd Street and First Avenue, and renamed it T.G.I. Friday's after the expression "Thank God! It's Friday!" from his years at Bucknell University....

Aw. I'm rooting for this guy, who made his mom happy, by facilitating a million fucks, some of which were his. Ah! Here's a whole interview with him, complete with photos:

NCR: Did your strategy work? Did you meet good-looking girls?

Stillman: Have you seen the movie Cocktail? Tom Cruise played me! I was lucky enough to do it for three years — he only did it to make a movie. Even today, the advantage of being the guy behind the bar is huge. Why do girls want to date the bartender? To this day, I’m not sure that I get it.

Ha ha. But, Althouse, get back to where you were going: that time we were talking about Smith & Wollensky on this blog. Yes. It was 9 days ago, and the story was about some job applicant who was presented in the press as a young guy who used what I called "the old honesty-modesty routine." Posting, I accepted the media cue that he was a gutsy, charming underdog, but — using Smith & Wollensky as my clue — I got suspicious in the comments:

A key line in the letter, as reprinted in the Daily Mail is: "I met you the summer before last at Smith & Wollensky's in New York when I was touring the east coast with my uncle, ***** ******"

Why put the name of your uncle in the letter unless it's intended to influence the hiring? Perhaps this person's seemingly refreshing attitude is just the cheeky confidence of a young person from a privileged background.

Would a guy working his way up from a working-class background ever write a letter like this?

Which guy most nearly won your heart?
	Graziano Graziussi
	Alan Stillman
	The guy that wrote the cover letter
pollcode.com free polls

"Along with her new Catholic school, the 6-year-old daughter of Katie and ex-husband Tom Cruise will have a uniform..."

"... when she's in school, and 'normal kid' clothes when she's out and about."

This is the 6-year-old "fashionista" with $3.2 million worth of designer clothes and custom-made shoes.

Previously, the child was home-schooled within a Scientology milieu.

"Nothing of importance happened today."

Wrote King George III in his diary, July 4, 1776. Not. He didn't even keep a diary.

From a list of "10 Things You Didn't Know About the Fourth of July."

Happy 4th!

Also, a Meadhouse dialogue:

MEADE (singing): We carried you in our arms...

ME: Why are you singing "Tears of Rage"?

MEADE (talk singing): ... on Independence Day...

ME: Oh....

And here I was thinking he was reading about the Katie Holmes/Tom Cruise divorce, within which there's the topic of Suri getting carried everywhere. I'd just read: "Kids as young as five can be sent to the military like Sea Org. I’m guessing she can’t bring her child-heels or get carried everywhere, which is something Katie would not approve of."

Oh what dear daughter ’neath the sun
Would treat a father so
To wait upon him hand and foot
And always tell him, “No?”

That's what Bob asked, mysteriously. Who is this daughter who always says "no," but waits upon him hand and foot? She sounds pretty devoted. The opposite of a daughter who says "yes," but does nothing. I'm assuming the official Bob Dylan website erroneously placed the question mark inside the quotation mark.

Perhaps the song really is about Independence Day, and the daughter is the United States, carried in the arms of England....

What we learn about Scientology from the Katie Holmes/Tom Cruise divorce.

Holmes seeks sole custody of the couple's 6-year-old child Suri, who has supposedly been raised under principles of Scientology:

Suri is apparently treated as an adult, free to make decisions on her clothes, make-up and diet.

Scientology expert Rick Ross explained to the Daily Mail's Alison Boshoff last year: 'Scientologists treat kids as if they are individuals capable of making their own decisions.'

Indeed, Tom echoed this approach in an interview in 2010.

'I say to Suri, "I really want you to eat this protein if you’re going to have that sugar,"' he said.

'She looks at me and she goes: "Dad, I don’t think you should try to force me to do something I don’t want to do."'...

Just last week, an evening of pizza and ice-cream with her mother ended in tears when Katie took her daughter's cone away.

If we assume, for the purposes of discussion, that Cruise follows a religion-based approach to child rearing, involving maximum autonomy, and Holmes now objects to that and wants to raise the child according to more conventional decision-making and discipline by the parent, how much of a factor should that play in determining custody? Should Cruise's ideas about child-rearing have more weight or less weight because they are premised on religion?

"Disappointment for Katie Holmes over axed Jackie Kennedy series."

1. First, of all: "axed." Should we be saying "axed"? There hasn't be a high-profile ax murder in a while, and now if there is one, The Daily Mail will have to answer for it.

2. Katie Holmes looks a little like Jackie in that get-up, but something's missing — something in the legs and arms proportionality. And that expression! Why is Katie always so sad?!

3. "JFK's niece Maria Shriver, and his daughter, Caroline Kennedy, are reported to have lobbied hard for the History Channel to pull the plug on the series." Katie and Tom less powerful than Maria and Caroline? Noooo!

4. A History Channel spokesperson said: "While the film is produced and acted with the highest quality, after viewing the final product in its totality we have concluded this dramatic interpretation is not fit for the History brand... We recognise historical fiction is an important medium for storytelling and commend all the hard work and passion that has gone into the making of the series, but ultimately deem this as the right programming decision for our network." Find the lies in that statement. Why'd they approve of the production in the first place if that sort of thing isn't "right" for them?

5. Sorry about the "Schwarzenegger" tag. I don't feel like making a separate tag for Maria Shriver.

The Golden Globe nominees are announced...

Here. I've seen few of these things -- and not just because many of the best movies don't play until the end of the year. It's also that I don't enjoy going to the movies these days -- for about 6 reasons.

But I did see "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," which is up for best comedy/musical. And it's got a best comedy/musical actor, Javier Bardem, and supporting actress, Penélope Cruz. I haven't seen the competition, so it's not my place to say who ought to win, but they were excellent, especially Penélope Cruz. She's in competition with Kate Winslet -- a favorite actress chez Althouse -- who is nominated for "The Reader," but Kate also has an actress in a drama nomination, for "Revolutionary Road," so both Kate and Penélope can win.

There's some interesting competition, too, in the supporting actor category:

Tom Cruise for Tropic Thunder (2008)
Robert Downey Jr. for Tropic Thunder (2008)
Ralph Fiennes for The Duchess (2008)
Philip Seymour Hoffman for Doubt (2008)
Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight (2008)

All I can say is, if you're going to give anyone extra points for drugs, give them -- the points, not the drugs -- to Robert Downey Jr. for living, not to Heath Ledger for dying.

Tom Cruise roasts Matt Lauer.

So Matt Lauer got one of those Friars Club roasts, and you wouldn't care -- would you? -- but Tom Cruise showed his adorable face, and he was hysterically funny:

"You know, I was just taking his advice. He told me, 'Nobody wants to hear about your dopey movie. Go crazy. People will love you for it.'

"Matt's great at giving advice. When Katie asked him if she should leave the 'Today' show for CBS, he said, 'Absolutely, you should definitely do that. People will love you for it.'

"Jay Leno was No. 1, but Matt told [NBC exec] Jeff Zucker to cut his contract. 'You'll be ahead of the curve before his ratings go down and you'll look like a genius. People will love you for it.' Leno's ratings never went down.

"A few months ago, he was talking to O.J. Simpson and he said, 'Juice, those guys in Vegas have all your stuff. Don't be a p---y, just go there and take it. Trust me, Juice. People will love you for it.'"...

"Matt and I are so close now, that if we can't be together, we talk on the phone three, four times a day. I'll call him up and ask, 'Are you watching this?' And he'll just say 'yeah,' and we'll watch the whole show together on the phone."

More here:

Cruise ended with a toast: "To our friend who we wake up to every morning only because we had the channel on NBC before we fell asleep." He then told Lauer, "Lose my number, you glib putz." And then signed off by finally saying, "Cruise out!" which was kind of unspeakably awesome. Lauer jumped up to the mike: "Tom, can you stay? We can get a booster seat."

Later, Lauer explained that he'd never been prepared for what a sensation the infamous 2005 interview would be, until he went home, "and someone told me what the word glib actually means. That burned my fucking ass!" Lauer also announced that he and Cruise have an interview scheduled for December. "So officially we have now buried the hatchet," he said. "But just between us, if he pulls that shit again, I will fuck him up. The guy is, like, five-foot-three. I will drop a building on his ass."

Do you love it when Lauer talks dirty to Tom?

This needs to be on YouTube, but it's not, so let's go back to Tom's wonderful old performance on "The Today Show" -- which will help you if you've lost track of the "glib" reference:



Ah! That never gets old.

8 rules for writing a short story.

Found in this Wikipedia article about Kurt Vonnegut, whom I was thinking about because my commenter Bissage linked to a book of his here and because — also this morning — I was in a long IM conversation that ended up — though it started being about the New Hampshire primary — being about the number 57, Tom Cruise and Scientology, whether humans are the most rational or the most irrational animals, why we love our ideas so much, religion, and "Cat's Cradle."

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

I like the way somebody put in Wikipedia links for "sadist," "pneumonia," and "cockroaches." It seems to mean something. Perhaps you could write a short story in which it does and which follows the 8 rules.

ADDED: Here's a nice NPR interview with Vonnegut in which he talks about these rules, some other things about writing and reading (it's meditation), and laughs about the time Nazis wanted very much to surrender to him.

When Germans think they're being anti-Nazi by singling out one religion to discriminate against.

How bizarre. Tom Cruise is filming a movie called "Valkyrie" -- the story of the man who nearly assassinated Hitler -- in Germany. But some Germans are upset about it, because they don't like Cruise's religion, Scientology.

The German press has given blanket coverage to the film but some officials have baulked at the choice of Cruise to play the Nazi officer Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, who was executed by firing squad after the failed bomb attack of July 20, 1944.

They cite the actor's ties to the Church of Scientology, which is viewed here as a commercial outfit that exploits vulnerable people, as making him unfit to play a German martyr.

"Stauffenberg stood for the most noble motives a person can have," Frank Henkel, the general secretary of the Berlin chapter of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, told rolling news channel NTV.

"I consider Tom Cruise as a self-proclaimed ambassador of Scientology inappropriate for the role."

The remarks came after sharp criticism from a number of politicians and even Stauffenberg's eldest son Berthold, 72, who has told the press that Cruise "should keep his hands off my father."

So, in your mind, the adherents of one religion are ignoble? What an absurd attitude to take exactly at the point when you're contemplating your Nazi history.

Simulblogging the Oscars!

I've got to get home first. The flight to Madison is boarding, so let me get going. Start without me!

ADDED #1: Hey, I made it home. No flight delays, but you should have seen how buried my car was. Well, you will see, because I took pictures. Anyway, I can see you're way ahead of me talking about this. 29 comments as I start. But the TiVo is running, and I've seen the really charming Errol Morris film that kicked things off. A sweet, self-effacing attitude. And now, here's Ellen DeGeneres, continuing the sweet, charming, self-effacing tone. She's wearing a dark red velvet tuxedo -- with white shoes -- and looks very sharp. Her first joke makes me laugh. She has a nice joke about Americans not voting for Jennifer Hudson (on "American Idol") and then how they did vote for Al Gore. For no apparent reason, a gospel choir comes out and Ellen dances and plays tambourine. Now, for the first award, for Art Direction, and it's Nicole Kidman, looking very Barbie-like, all plastic-y and shiny. She's wearing an impossibly tall, thin red dress, with a knot at the side of the neck. The award goes to "Pan's Labyrinth."

ADDED #2: They didn't start with a supporting acting award. Good! Now, there's a comedy song, and I'm using it as a chance to try to catch up with you guys. On to the next award: makeup! Again, with the "Pan's Labyrinth." The makeup did look pretty cool. Ooh, now it's Abigail Breslin and Jaden Smith. Kids. They're short, so they do the nominees for shorts. Sorry, it's another fast-forward opportunity.

ADDED #3: Wow, you guys are up to 43 comments. I'm desperately trying to catch up with you. Ooh, it's Rachel Weisz. She looks just great in a strapless beige dress that has a nice jeweled swirl across the chest. I like her dark red lipstick and piece-y dark brown hair. She's doing the Supporting Actor award. Aw, Eddie Murphy looks like he really wants to win. It's Alan Arkin. My favorite. I love this guy. He puts the Oscar down on the floor so he can pull out his speech. The film -- "Little Miss Sunshine" -- can help us in our "fragmented times." It's a choice not to act out the speech. Surely, he could have memorized it. Maybe he was acting the part of a guy reading a speech.

ADDED #4: Melissa Etheridge performs the song from "An Inconvenient Truth," and then out come Leonardo DiCaprio and Vice President Al Gore. Al looks happy (and carries his great weight well). Leo asks him if he's got anything he'd like to announce. He says he's "just here for the movies." He thanks Leo for being "such a great ally" in his anti-global-warming efforts. Leo's all "thank you, sir," and the camera -- pretty randomly -- goes to Jerry Seinfeld, who's caught looking like this:



Cameron Diaz, who also has piece-y dark brown hair, gives the award for animation to "Happy Feet," and she's unbearable cutesy and phony. Nice clip show about movies about writers. At the end, we see Jack Nicholson -- who was featured in the clips for both "The Shining" and "As Good As It Gets" -- and he's shaved totally bald. (A tribute to Britney Spears?)

ADDED #5: "The Departed" wins Best Original Screenplay. Hey, you guys are up to 75 comments. I'm still not reading them, because I'm trying to catch up. I'm sure it's all clever and stuff. There's a great commercial for American Express -- must be a Jerry Seinfeld thing, explaining the "random" shot noted above. And a beautiful ad for iPhone... of lots of hellos from movies. (No need to convince me to buy one of those things when they are available, so the commercial seems to just be about getting me more excited about it.) They're doing the costumes award now. "Marie Antoinette" wins. Tom Cruise presents the Jean Hersholt "humanitarian" award to Sherry Lansing. We're in the depressing "dead" center of the show now, so let me regale you with pix of my car, as I encountered it after my long trip home. It was in this deep:



And here's how it looked after digging just enough of a space to back it out:



How did I get it dug out? Am I the kind of person who keeps a shovel in the trunk? No, but as I was walking to the car, dreading seeing how locked in it was, I ran across a woman with a shovel, and she loaned it to me. Then, carrying a shovel, I attracted a man who helped me because he needed a shovel and a second man who had his own shovel. These two guys dug out the snow while I scraped the windows and lights. (I do keep a scraper!) And I was out in no time. And don't just say: Guys! Because there was also that woman with the shovel. I asked her, "Do you work here?" And she said no, she just drove over with a shovel because a friend called her up, and she trusted me to return the shovel to a spot in the snow that we agreed on. I left that trust with Guy #1 and I'm sure he kept it.

ADDED #6: Speaking of movies, I got my little movie up at last in the previous post. You can hear me and my long-time ex-husband RLC talking about things seen in a record store window. Whoa! You guys are up to 119 comments! Okay, I've gotta rush. Visual Effects. Doesn't Naomi Watts look lovely in that yellow-gold, strapless dress with a thick black band under the breasts? "Pirates of the Caribbean" wins. Now, we see Catherine Deneuve for... what the hell is this? Ah! There's Sacha Baron Cohen in the audience. He's so adorable! "Best Foreign Language Film. "The Lives of Others." Oooh! It's George Clooney. He's handsome! Best Supporting Actress!!! Jennifer Hudson!!!!! She says: "Look what God can do!"

ADDED #7: It's Jerry Seinfeld. He's doing the Documentary award. Oh, so they showed him before when Al was on stage because later he was going to present the award for which Al is nominated. Seems too fix-y to me. And Al wins the Oscar!!!!! Closeup of the oh-so-pleased Steven Spielberg. Why did they make the film? Because of the problem of global warming??? Oh, no: "We were moved to act by this man." So says the director, reaching over to touch the hem of Al Gore's garment. He's gasping with awe. It's kinda embarrassing. He pumps the Oscar weirdly twice in Al's direction and he says "We share this with you." The camera goes to Larry David, clapping righteously. Now, Gore speaks: global warming is "not a political issue, it's a moral issue." I like Al. He makes his wooden squareness hip and cool.

ADDED #8: Kirsten Dunst is wearing a beautiful, witty dress. It's gray and has a see-through section at the top with a collar that seems to belong on a prim blouse. It's intelligent. And the dress makes me love Kirsten! The award is Original Screenplay, and it goes to "Little Miss Sunshine." Now, we see Jennifer Hudson sing a song, which must be fun for her, having already won the Oscar. I try to imagine how Simon Cowell would detect deficiency. Beyonce joins her, and -- isn't it true? -- Beyonce is the better singer. Does Beyonce feel she needs to prove her superiority?

ADDED #9: There's a Michael Mann montage about "America." We're racist war mongers, you know. Then the elegant Thelma Schoonmaker wins the editing award for "The Departed." Now, we see Jodie Foster, dragging excess yards of slate-blue fabric along with her. But she's introducing my favorite segment, In Memoriam. I'll impolitely name the ones that had the most effect on me: Don Knotts, Sven Nykvist, Robert Altman.

ADDED #10: Phillip Seymour Hoffman arrives to give the Best Actress award. It's no surprise that the wonderful Helen Mirren wins. I love the array of actresses as the award is announced. They all do a perfect performance of the thought: Indeed, Helen Mirren is grand! I love the way Mirren "salutes" Elizabeth Windsor.

ADDED #11: It's Reese Witherspoon, here to give the award for Best Actor. She's got major hair extensions and a simple black strapless gown. Oh, don't you want Peter O'Toole to win? Yikes, what is that incredibly smarmy look Jada Pinkett Smith gives Will? Does she hate him + is a terrible actress? And it goes, as expected, to Forest Whitaker. The look on Peter O'Toole's face says: And now, it's impossible. He's very old. Whitaker raves -- touchingly -- about how acting is the belief that we can connect to others and create a new reality.

ADDED #12: Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg gang up to deliver the long-awaited Oscar to Martin Scorsese, and the Oscar really does go to Marty. Li'l Marty hugs C, L, and S. He stammers and just thanks a lot of people. "So many people over the years have been wishin' this thing for me."

ADDED #13: Damn! I never caught up! I've been struggling and fast-forwarding, but I never could make it. I hope you accept my belated scribblings! Well, Best Picture now. Presenting: Diane Keaton (swathed in black) and Jack Nicholson (gloriously bald). I'm just thinking about how nobody made a political statement tonight. They kept it clean and elegant. And the winner is... "The Departed." Excellent!

ADDED #14: I turn off the lights and collect my bags to trudge upstairs after a long day. I peer out the front door and see the people came to shovel my walks as I was watching the Oscars. I'd parked my car in the street and stalked through foot high snow when I got home tonight. So I put on my big down coat and went outside to pull my car into the driveway. Let me leave you with one last shot of my car at the airport. Actually, this one is so abstract, I'm not positive it is my car:

"At the nearby Trattoria del Castello, guests could order a 'Tom e Kat' - a basket of parmesan cheese with truffles and mushrooms."

So who's the truffle and who's the mushroom? I don't know, but I'm so relieved that now -- finally -- when the mushroomy/truffly Tom Cruise snuggles up in his baskety bed with his truffly/mushroomy Katie Holmes, that it will be with blessing of matrimony, sprinkled over them like Parmesan cheese. They traveled to Italy for this wedding, which didn't particularly tap into Italian tradition, since it was a Scientology wedding, where, I'm further relieved to see, the couple takes a vow "never to go to bed without communicating about any differences." I do hope this vow can be met with brief statements, otherwise every night becomes a talk fest, and what if you're really tired?

But here's the part about the Scientology wedding -- and having it in Italy -- that really gets me:

A spokesman for the Church of Scientology for Rome, Fabrizio D'Agostino, said an exchange of vows with a Scientology rite was not legally recognized in Italy, and would have to be preceded or followed by a civil union.

[Bracciano Mayor Patrizia] Riccioni said her office had not received a request to celebrate a civil wedding as of midday Friday.

Oh, for the love of... Hubbard! They aren't even getting married!!!

Can these two characters get off the public stage... perhaps by burrowing under a huge pile of shredded cheese?

UPDATE: According to the last line of this report of the wedding: "the couple had a legal civil ceremony before they left L.A., their publicists said."

Okay, I'm watching the Katie Couric show.

It's so annoying to feel forced into it! She's standing up and wearing a weird white jacket buttoned conspicuously at the waist as if to argue with those who said she'd been photoshopped into semi-svelteness. Now, she's sitting down, but in kind of a half standing position in front of a low desk, to give us more of a view of her torso. She's got a special white microphone to blend in with that white lapel. The first few stories are military, as if they need to drive it home that a woman can cover the manly topics.

Now she's interviewing Tom Friedman, who seems to really be trying to help by speaking extra quickly and smiling, beaming at Katie. They've got two armchairs angled together, with just enough room for Katie's bare, sinewy crossed legs.

The teaser going into the break is about gas prices, and we see the image of a gas pump nozzle, slowly rising, rather lewdly, I have to say, as if CBS felt the need to provide -- albeit symbolically -- the missing phallus.

After the break, there's an aggressively edited segment on oil. Lots of color and graphics and moving cameras and Shell logos gliding through space and guys yammering about hurricanes and whatnot.

Next, there's a segment called "freeSpeech." Not "free speech" or "Free Speech" or "freespeech" or Freespeech." "freeSpeech." Get it right. And it's Morgan Spurlock, fast talking, wearing a purple striped shirt and a purple paisley tie, and he's saying civil discourse, it's important. Okay, Mr. Spurlock, if you could, please don't wear that shirt and tie again.

Now the show veers into the female territory we were so worried about. That "freeSpeech" thing seemed to be the bridge. They're showing the Vanity Fair cover with the photo of the spawn of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise. The baby's name is Suri, and Katie -- Couric -- does the pun "Yes, sirree."

After the break, Couric introduces a "picture perfect idea" that combines travel scenery, kids -- orphans! -- and art. You have got to be kidding me. The artist is from Madison, Wisconsin, so I should be soft on this, but I'm not. Wait, this guy doesn't paint the portraits for the orphans. He gets American school kids to paint pictures of photographs of orphans. We're told the painters form a real connection as they stare at the photos, as is necessary in order to do the paintings. We're informed that staring into the eyes has a very special effect. What glop! And the privileged painter and the orphan paintee sometimes even become penpals. Arrgggghhhhh... I'm in pain from this one.

Now, Katie tells us coyly that she just can't figure out what her sign-off line should be. She shows clips of various real and fictional newsguys signing off and then tries to enlist us in the fun of suggesting sign-off lines. "Log on to our website," she says. Log on. When you go to a website, are you "logging on"? See, I'm ready to be irked by anything! Well, let's go over there -- log on over there -- and see whether people are suggesting insulting sign-offs, which is what I would expect, which is one reason it's such a bad idea.

But why did they think it was a good idea? It's like a schoolteacher's "hands-on" assignment. Ooh, she wants to include us. It's so feminine to want everyone to feel included. But how about having an identity instead of asking us to supply one or offering to please us with whatever we want? You couldn't even write a sign-off line or, more aptly, you had to use the sign-off gimmick to make it seem as though this is some new interactive version of the news? What a grand step forward for women!

Checking the website, I see the suggestions aren't openly displayed, and you've got to provide lots of info to make the suggestion. So there won't be any fun and games there.

IN THE COMMENTS: Among other things, readers are suggesting sign-off lines. My favorite, by johnstodderinexile, is "This is Katie Couric, and I can't wait to read what you blogged about me."