PB & J Oscars

That had to be one of the blandest Oscars I've ever seen. Ellen was okay but not very funny nor very surprising. The biggest surprise was when she ordered in three boxes of pizza and then handed out pieces to a few of the audience. Dumb and classless. The whole show was a little like eating a peanut butter & jelly sandwich on very white bread, tastes pretty good but not very exotic and really forgettable. My mouth was all set for duck a l'orange or Beef Wellington and I get a pb & j. Gravity's Cuarón won for best director and the movie grabbed a bunch of the peripheral stuff, but 12 Years a Slave got best picture. Everyone else was pretty much predictable. The acceptance speeches were mercifully brief with the best Kate Blanchett's for her win as best actress in Blue Jasmine. The four songs up for best original song were emminently unsingable, with the Frozen "Let It Go" the winner. But where in this last decade are the songs that stick around and around and we all know and can sing them? Pink reminded us of great songs from the movies when she sang "Over the Rainbow," the winner 75 years ago. And one could go tripping through nearly all the winning songs from the last 65 years of the 21st century and know them and be able to sing them from memory. For example, "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing," "All the Way," "Mona Lisa," "Moon River," "Days of Wine and Roses," "The Shadow of Your Smile," "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," "For All We Know," "The Way We Were," "Evergreen," and "Beauty and the Beast." And then we get to the songs of this century: "Things Have Changed," "If I Didn't Have You," "Lose Yourself," "Into the West," "Al Otro Lado Del Rio" (I'd defy anyone to tell me they can hum this one), and one of the all time mistakes in this category, "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp." I think you get the idea. They should look at how Neil Patrick Harris has hosted the Tony Awards. Now there's a classy awards show, and no one has ever hosted anything better than Harris has. Let's hope the producers for the Academy Awards learned something from this year's debacle.