the morning after

The Oscars were as silly as usual. We never feel any pressure to see the nominated movies; we just tune in on Oscar night and watch the posturing and the pomposity and the ridiculous musical "comedy" numbers. We especially enjoy seeing who has the class not to applaud for themselves (hint: it's the Europeans).

My favorite part every year is the montage of people who died last year, aka "The Parade of the Dead." This year they did some weird editing thing which I did not like at all: instead of just showing us everyone who died, the people were displayed on a bunch of screens on the wall and the camera swooped back and forth around the screens, making it hard to read people's names at times. I was also irked at the omission of Eartha Kitt. Sure, she was more on television and on stage, but she did appear in some great movies like Anna Lucasta and St. Louis Blues. And then they included Ricardo Montalban, who died in January. Very strange.

I did a Harold Arlen tribute show yesterday which went pretty well, I think. Wish I had remembered to plug it in advance but I almost never do. I lucked out in a major way: I had gotten The Wizard of Oz from Netflix so I could get some music from the movie -- I really wanted that "you're out of the woods, you're out of the dark, you're out of the night!" song from when they approach the Emerald City. Well it turns out the DVD has a "music and effects track." Which is the whole movie minus the dialogue. Jackpot! There were several nice bits of score that were the perfect length of my talksets. Just what I needed to round out the show.