Okay, Billy Crystal was a little rusty, the microphone issues were painful, and I still don’t understand why the nominated songs aren’t being performed anymore(Seriously, Academy! There were only two of them! And one featured Muppets!), but all in all, this year’s ceremony was a zillion times better than last year’s. Can’t comment on most of the winners, since I think the only one I saw was Christopher Plummer(and like everyone else, I was just glad to see him win a trophy in general), but it was nice to see all the French people clearly so grateful for the recognition, among other winners. Besides, it’s not like most of the other viewers probably saw the nominated movies either. I think the show even kind of acknowledged it; there seemed to be more montage footage of movies people actually did see than usual. They knew they had to make the ceremony a proper commemoration of the year *somehow,* and their large group of white male voters weren’t getting the job done.
But still not relevant enough for us to speedily move on to the Dancing With the Stars cast. I’ve only had time to glance over it so far, but there seem to be a lot of TV stars this time around. More exciting to me, of course, is Martina Navratilova, though one has to be cautious given the history of tennis players with these shows. Poor Tony. Glad to see both Maks and Val Chermkovski back, and Tristan McManus as well. Meanwhile, Derek gets yet another TV host, which leave me torn between amused and nervous.
