Some Academy Award thoughts.

Re the just-concluded Oscar ceremony:

1. So happy for Kathryn Bigelow becoming Queen of the World--twice (director and picture).

2. Re Sandra Bullock's "nice to me when it wasn't fashionable"--it may be, once the snarksters in the entertainment media have their way, the new

"you really like me." Hoping Sandy uses her award to do something more challenging than just

raising her quote and making THE PROPOSAL 2 or MISS CONGENIALITY 3.

3. Speaking of the other Sandy--Ms. Powell's "I already have two of these" snottiness isn't

likely to be forgotten.

4. Best Na'Vi presenter of the night--Ben Stiller.

5. Steve and Alec not bad as tandem hosts. Voting for Steve Carell and Elizabeth Banks

to take the job next year.

6. Interpretive musical score dances--bad bad bad. Almost made me long for the excesses

of Debbie Allen.

7. Not letting nominated songs be performed--also bad-to-the-point-of-insanity.

8. Cutting away from Ric O'Barry's dolphin text banner during THE COVE'S Best Documentary Feature win--rather childish and stupid of the producers and Disney/ABC.

9. Nice guy finishing first--Jeff Bridges for CRAZY HEART (and, also, a long body of generally fine work).

10. Slightly surprised by THE WHITE RIBBON not winning Best Foreign Language film this year. Apparently Michael Haneke's lengthy mix of ambiguity and emotional sadism (with the physical variety kept pretty much off-camera) was too severe for the Academy.

11. Advice for the 2011 Oscars--no more dance sequences, bring back nominated songs, have at least two honorary winners (would have liked to have seen Roger Corman and Lauren Bacall accept awards tonight) to give awards to on-camera, and--most important, have celebs that genuinely want to be there as presenters. I'm getting awfully tired of Kristen Stewart's "I hate celebrity and all its' trappings" sullenness. She should have been aware of what she was signing on for when agreeing to play Bella in the TWILIGHT series.

12. Forgetting his exact name, but Michael G who won original score for UP, had the best speech of the night when he said that people should strive to be creative even if they're disparaged by others with phrases like "waste of time."

Mixed feelings about the new documentary film THE COVE.

THE COVE--in case you're part of the 86% of this country who haven't heard of it--is a documentary film which tries to do two things at once. The first story it tells is of a former employee of Ivan Tors' FLIPPER TV series who changes from a dolphin trainer to a set-them-free-close-Sea-World-down-everywhere extreme activist. The gentleman in story one intersects with story two--about a Japanese town where big money is to be made from selling dolphins to Sea World-type parks and/or aquariums. Smaller money is made by brutally murdering dolphins in a secret cove and selling their meat (dangerously high in mercury), sometimes passed off as whale meat.

It's easy to get behind story two (and there's a bit of activism on the film's website to get the Japanese government to stop this mass slaughter), but a bit harder to accept story one unquestioningly.

The genie can't go completely back into the bottle re discontinuing the existence of dolphins and/or porpoises at Sea World or aquariums. But more stringent regulations regarding the care of dolphins--and an end to the "average everyday humans can swim alongside dolphins" tourism-- are necessary.

Here's Fisher Stevens (a co-producer of THE COVE) with a letter about how the film is being cold-shouldered by both the Tokyo Film Festival and Japanese distributors:
http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/hypocrisy-thy-name-is-tokyo-film-festival/