Daily Blague

It was a good show. Brokeback Mountain won the almost-most-important award along with a few others, but even more important, Reese Witherspoon finally won an Oscar and so did Philip Seymour Hoffman. You might say that the character actors triumphed. George Clooney's win at the beginning was elegantly hailed by Jon Stewart with a reference to the title of his film, Good Night and Good Luck - as the gossips have already made perfectly clear to anyone not living under a rock, this just might be what Mr Clooney says at the end of each date. (He has come out for the sexual preference of Not Marrying Again.) There was a lot of studio-era discipline in evidence.

My interest in the Academy Awards would have been much greater if either Romain Duris or De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté had been nominated - that, for me, was the Best Picture of 2005. Aside from Crash, which I still haven't seen, I loved the movies that did win, but the thorn stung anyway: no French film was going to walk away with an award. Unless of course it starred penguins, who have been stand-ins for proper French diplomats in generations of cartoons.

Larry McMurtry, I'm happy to discover, is a real writer. He's almost unpresentable, jeans notwithstanding, and he has no knack for public appearance. What I'm waiting for, of course, is the day that Jane Smiley accepts an Academy Award, preferably for Horse Heaven, a movie that ought to have been greenlighted the moment that Seabiscuits's opening receipts were tallied.

Today's conversations, I suppose will be dominated by none of the above but by the simple question: How bad was Lauren Bacall? To which I say: How ridiculous was Dolly Parton?