The Oscars: beloved entertainment ritual or easy-to-bash Hollywood relic?

        You decide.

        I read an L-A Times article on the air Friday, bemoaning the small crowd Sunday night's show attracted, the way the Academy chooses to hand out it's honors, the fact that a lot of time is wasted on acknowledging people few if any of us mopes at home care about (the oft-bashed technical awards).       It ripped the Academy for sticking with a format it maintains no long works in our short-attention span culture: after all, the variety show is dead and gone from the prime time grid because we no longer would have the patience to suffer through things we don't care about to get to an act we longed to see.     Just thing "Ed Sullivan", who every Sunday would make kids sit through a bit of opera or a hunk of a Broadway musical before he'd trot out the beloved Italian mouse, Topo Gigo.

         I have to admit, I didn't watch this year's show.      I was in bed by seven last Sunday night, having had a rather hard week.    I needed to prioritize: sleep versus slinky actresses in elegant gowns.        As Vince Lombardi so rightly intoned, "Fatigue makes cowards of us all."

          I was all set to bury Oscar as a relic when I surfed to the Times this morning, only to see another articulate piece of the Academy awards, this one of a glass-half-full variety.         Reading it makes me with that there was another Oscar show on tomorrow night, since I'm now caught up on sleep and way behind when it comes to achieving my fill of slinky actresses.

Enjoying these ramblings, or do you find that they make fine liners for the bottom of your beloved parakeet's cage?     Tell me what you think at mueller@620wtmj.com.