I bet I haven't missed more than a couple Oscar shows in forty years. And yes, that is both scary and pathetic. But a long time ago, I gave up expecting them to be something they'll never be, which is uproariously funny—with some white-hot comedian laying zingers on Steven Spielberg for stinking up the place with that last Indiana Jones flick—or in anyway spontaneous with streakers and one of the losers going all Joe Pesci on a winner on their way to the stage. It's Hollywood's prom night, for God's sake. No one gets mussed when they're that made up.

Last night's show, which I clocked at three hours, fifty-five minutes (7 to 10:55 p.m.), was just different enough to bring out the claws today. Here's a couple stunners: Hugh Jackman wasn't particularly funny and danced too much. Also, those testimonial things, with former winners speaking directly to this year's nominees (in excruciating close-up), were either cloying or cringe-inducing, maybe both.

Oh yeah, and back to Jackman and Beyonce and all that top hat hoofing stuff--hello! this isn't Broadway. This one is about the movies, you know?

Generally speaking, I'm in the camp that says the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should put on a movie-based awards show, with lots and lots of clips of the year's best performances and clever bits of examples of the year's best cinematography (and good lord, Slumdog won that one, too!), sound editing, costumes, etc. Beyond, I mean, the ten seconds they show of this stuff.

The problem, of course, is that this doesn't give the stars in the Kodak Theater much to do all night other than watch the giant monitors and check their iPhones to see if their agent got anything back from the producer sitting two rows away. Still, there's no good explanation for the "show tunes" interludes at the Oscars, with forty former members of the Cats road show kicking and clapping to the forgettable muzak of some soundtrack or another. (There was a song in Wall-E?) Jai Ho may linger a few days longer than whatever won last year, but its connection to Slumdog Millionaire is peripheral at best.

After eighty-one years, all America really wants out of Oscar night is a chance to turn off the relentless gloom of the evening news, ignore the fact we'll all have to work until we're older than Benjamin Button, guzzle adult beverages, eat fatty snacks, and make hissy remarks about the beautiful people . . . their taste in clothes . . . (I liked Sean Penn's tie) . . . and whether they seem reasonably real when they win or lose. (I liked Kate Winslet's dad whistling from the wings.)

Coming on the heels of one of the frothiest, this-just-in-from-another-planet distractions of the media year—Fashion Week in New York, where attention is drawn to clothes .01 percent of the population might actually wear one night out of the year—Oscar night, as the grandest of the 300 different "red carpet events" staged in Los Angeles each year, has adroitly morphed escapism with gratuitous cattiness. Suddenly, I guess, instead of being movie fans, people who, you know, were emotionally involved in great storytelling, we are encouraged to connect with our inner Perez Hilton and speculate on just how gay Ryan Seacrest really is or what in the hell a great looking woman like Jessica Biel thought she was doing wrapping herself in something that looked like a banquet tablecloth. (See, it's easy and fun!)

The Oscars will never change. A. Because they don't have to. Despite the loosey-gooseiness of the Golden Globes, where Sacha Baron Cohen can happily monologue amuck, 500 million people around the planet will always watch this show. And B. By staying a bit/a lot on the staid and stiff side, the Academy protects the grandeur of the event for its members while simultaneously giving the ankle-biters--that's us--plenty to gnaw on the day after. The kvetching is the fun of the show. The stars might be fabulously rich and beautiful, but we know better.

On a pure entertainment scale, the Grammys, which is still pretty much a joke in terms of having its finger on the best in the year in music, has made its show into something a hell of a lot more fun than the Oscars, if only because you get to see the talent doing what they do. It is an example for the Oscars.

Give us ninety seconds more of Philip Seymour Hoffman--like that scene where he melted down in his boss's office in Charlie Wilson's War--and subtract ninety seconds of the Cats kids miming the love scene from Wall-E.

Finally, I get the charm of Slumdog, and few movies sent their audience out of the theater with bigger smiles than that one did with that Jai Ho line dance number in the train station, but if technical awards for stuff like cinematography, sound mixing, film editing, and costume design mean anything, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button should have swept all that stuff. I can't remember a more technically stunning movie since the prime of Stanley Kubrick.

But hey, Penelope Cruz looked good, the pizza and wine held out . . . and I came in third in the party pool. Best Foreign Film: Departures ? What the . . . ?