Oscar Night Was For The Birds, Man.

English: Neil Patrick Harris at the 1st Streamy Awards in 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The 87th Academy Awards, held Sunday night at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles, went on for nearly four hours, with a lower-than-usual TV audience sitting through three hours of minor awards and montages just to get to the major awards.  But it wouldn't be the Oscars without the bloat, right?

The big winner was "Birdman, or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance" (and we're only going to mention this once), which starred Michael Keaton as a washed-up comic book movie hero attempting a Broadway comeback.  It took home four Oscars, including Best Picture, director (for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu), original screenplay and cinematography.

The Best Actor and Actress honors went to two people whose characters they played had neurological issues:  Eddie Redmayne for "The Theory of Everything" and Julianne Moore for "Still Alice".  And there's your template for Oscar immortality, folks.  Play someone who has an incurable disease.  Better yet, play someone with a British accent who has an incurable disease.

Supporting Oscars went to J.K. Simmons for "Whiplash", and to Patricia Arquette for "Boyhood".  For Simmons, it means that the price of continuing to do Farmers Insurance commercials just went waaay up.  For Arquette, who can spend her newfound capital on working for laws that put women's pay on equal terms with men, she will be going back to TV as the star of the new "CSI" spinoff.

Much has been made of the failure of the Motion Picture Academy to include minorities in the Oscar nominations, giving the impression that there really weren't any noteworthy performances by "people of color" this past year.  To compensate. African-American actors and actresses (some of whom are currently employed by ABC) were used as presenters.  The Academy even threw a bone in the direction of "Selma", a movie about the 1965 civil rights march whose historical inaccuracies hurt its awards chances, with a Best Original Song Oscar for John Legend.  Nice try, but not good enough.

Neil Patrick Harris is a modern day song-and-dance man who has won praise for hosting award shows such as the Tonys and the Emmys.  But he struck out on the big stage.  Lame jokes, showing up onstage in nothing but his underwear, and his "prediction bag" gag all fizzled.  Those "predictions", when they were finally revealed prior to the announcement of who won Best Picture, turned out to be nothing more than what some comedy writer must have whipped up backstage in five minutes.

After Lady Gaga performed a medley of tunes from "The Sound of Music", it's reasonable to ask if she's at a career crossroads.  Gaga no longer has to resort to outrageous behavior for folks to see that she has the pipes to carry off jazz tunes (see Tony Bennett) and show tunes.  Maybe she no longer wants to be the next Madonna.  She might want to be the next Julie Andrews instead.  Or she can put the meat dress back on.

Someday, the Motion Picture Academy will get its act together and streamline the Oscar telecast.  Cut back on the musical numbers and montages.  Move the craft awards to earlier in the day.  Let the winners talk as long as they want without being rudely interrupted by an orchestra performing on the other side of town.  If they don't do something, the Oscars will be as passe as Bob Hope and Billy Crystal.

Brian Williams and Jon Stewart: A Matter of Trust

Jon Stewart (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Brian Williams at the Vanity Fair celebration for the 9th annual Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Once upon a time in America, back when nobody had ever heard of cable and the Internet, a man named Walter Cronkite had the attention of millions of TV viewers as he and his team of CBS News reporters recounted the events of the day.  There was no time for embellishing the stories that were coming from Vietnam and during the Nixon era, nor could they be found hamming it up on the TV variety shows of the day.  At the end of the thirty-minute broadcast, Cronkite would say " and that's the way it is".  For this, Cronkite was considered the most trusted man in America.

In 2015, Cronkite's torch had long since been passed to Brian Williams of NBC News and Jon Stewart of Comedy Central.  An unlikely pair, yes.  Williams, until recently, was a network news anchor in the Cronkite tradition who occasionally appeared on late night comedy shows.  His "Nightly News" had topped the dinner hour ratings since he took over for Tom Brokaw in 2004, and has propped up a news division that is otherwise in disarray.

Stewart, who is a comedian by trade, is a self-admitted fake news anchor whose nightly takes on the world at large and the media that covers it became gospel for those who have been let down too many times by those same media.  He had been hosting "The Daily Show" since 1999, leading the way for Stephen Colbert and John Oliver to introduce similar shows.

But now, Americans are going to have to find someone else to trust.  Williams has been suspended without pay by NBC for six months because he's been caught telling different versions of what happened to him while covering the Iraq war in 2003, claiming that his helicopter was under enemy attack when it really wasn't.  When some of the soldiers who were with him on that trip complained about his story, Williams did an about-face and made an on-air apology.  There are also allegations that Williams "misremembered" tales of other events he covered, such as Hurricane Katrina.

Stewart, who had just mocked the media's coverage of Williams' troubles on Monday, returned the following night to make some news of his own.  Stewart has chosen to leave "The Daily Show" by the end of the year, giving the reason that his contract with Comedy Central was expiring and that he wanted to do something else.  Or maybe it was because the recent Charlie Hebdo massacre had driven home the point that satire is a lot more dangerous than it used to be.

Lester Holt, usually the weekend news anchor and "Dateline NBC" host, will take over "Nightly News" for the time being.  Who replaces Stewart is another matter.  Colbert will soon become David Letterman's replacement on CBS, and Oliver already hosts "Last Week Tonight" on HBO.  A better question is whether Comedy Central should go in a different direction.

Should Williams ever return to NBC, he's going to face a long road back from the huge hole he dug himself if he is to regain the trust of viewers who turned to him for a straight rendition of what happened today. And that should go for all media, because it is always a good idea to let the facts get in the way of a good story if you want to be taken seriously as a journalist.

That should be the way it is.

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On a somber note, Bob Simon of CBS News was killed in a car accident on Wednesday.  He was 73.  Simon had been with the network since 1967, covering wars, the Middle East and the State Department as a correspondent.  Since 1996, he was a "60 Minutes" correspondent.  CBS News has lost a familiar face and voice, and so did we.

UPDATE (6/2/15):  Stewart has announced that his final "Daily Show" will be in early August.  Trevor Noah will take over when the show returns in late September.  As for Williams, NBC is still deciding his fate.

UPDATE (6/19/15):  NBC has apparently decided Williams is sufficiently rehabilitated enough to go back to work for them, but not for "Nightly News".  Instead, he'll be the "breaking news" anchor at MSNBC, a cable network that has seen its ratings and credibility drop after Keith Olbermann left and took the channel's audience with him.  Lester Holt has been given the "Nightly" anchor position on a permanent basis, but he'll be looking over his shoulder at Williams should the ratings falter.

The 2015 Grammys: The Best That Could Be Found On Record.

Kanye West performing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back in the 1960s, before the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences began putting its Grammy awards ceremonies on TV, NBC used to air a yearly music special called "The Best on Record".  It was hosted by Andy Williams or someone like that, and featured performers of Grammy-winning songs that had been awarded weeks earlier.  It should also be noted that rock music was barely acknowledged by the folks at NARAS at that time.

Here in 2015, the Grammys have gone back to the future--sort of.  In a three-and-a-half-hour CBS telecast (hosted by LL Cool J, who's taken over Williams' job as the show's perennial host) that was chock full of performances--most of it consisting of made-for-TV collaborations that seldom made sense--nine awards were handed out, with the rest relegated to non-televised pre-show festivities.  What occurred Sunday in Los Angeles' Staples Center wasn't necessarily the best on record.  It was more like the best that could be found on record, or digital stream.

A fellow named Sam Smith took home four Grammys, including Best New Artist, which was more than any other nominee.  His "Stay With Me" also won for Song of the Year (a songwriters' category) and Record of the Year.  Smith, who could be mistaken for any male crooner with a less-than-distinctive voice, earned his trophies despite the following shortcomings:

• "Stay With Me" sounded an awful lot like Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down".  So much so that Smith was forced to add Petty and Jeff Lynne to the songwriting credits, which was part of a settlement of a copyright dispute.
• Smith was outsung on the Grammy telecast by Mary J. Blige, who did a better job on "Stay With Me" than he did.
• Smith has been mentioned as the "next Adele".  So where is his album full of Number One hits that's been played to death on the radio?  Or his next highly-anticipated project a couple of years from now?  That's a lot of pressure to put on a guy.

One major Grammy not won by Smith (though he was nominated) was for Album of the Year, which went to Beck for "Morning Phase".  Kanye West took great exception to the result, almost storming the stage like he did at the MTV Video Music Awards a few years ago, taking away Taylor Swift's moment of glory in support of Beyonce.  This time, West waited until after the show to unload on the Grammy voters for not recognizing that Beyonce, not Beck, deserved the award.  West is entitled to his opinion, but disrupting someone else's triumph is not cool.  Heck, we didn't even know that Beck had a new album.

As for the performances, they varied in quality depending on your tolerance for them.  A brief rundown on some of them:

• AC/DC, who opened the show, turned out to be the only rockers on the telecast.  Unless you count the Target ad featuring a live performance by Imagine Dragons.
• Lady Gaga hammed it up with Tony Bennett, but she wasn't half bad singing jazz.
• Annie Lennox stole the show from that "Take Me to Church" guy with her rendition of "I Put a Spell On You".
• President Obama and a woman who said she's a domestic abuse survivor brought the proceedings to a screeching halt, urging the rest of us to report bad domestic behavior.  Then Katy Perry sang a song that fit the theme.

Maybe someday, the Grammy Awards will simply stop handing out trophies on TV and reward the winners with a prime-time concert.  Those of us who actually care about who won could go online to NARAS' website to see who did, and spare themselves the task of watching the obligatory Taylor Swift reaction shots to almost anything at all.  Only then will the circle be complete.  "The Best on Record" is back on TV.