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.