Billy Crystal With The Best Tweet Of The Day

Helaine was excited when she got the news. She sent me a text message immediately.

Helaine was excited when she got the news. She sent me a text message immediately.

Billy Crystal hosting the Oscars 🙂

We’re big fans. He’s the best Academy Award host, by far, I can remember. I look forward to the production piece he will undoubtedly open with.

Here’s how Billy announced it.

@BillyCrystal: Am doing the Oscars so the young woman in the pharmacy will stop asking my name when I pick up my prescriptions. Looking forward to the show

Tweet of the day!

We’re Watching The Oscars

We saw a lot of movies this year. My most spoken line to Helaine is “Who is that?”

We are watching the Oscars. Yeah, I know.

We saw a lot of movies this year. It makes no difference. My most spoken line to Helaine is “Who is that?”

Hugh Jackman is very likable. Very talented. He disappeared in the second half of the show.

Heath Ledger’s family is walking up to accept his Oscar. “They couldn’t have gotten better seats,” asked Helaine?

Ben Stiller–funny as Joaquin Phoenix. I am surprised that single appearance on Letterman was considered enough of a universal experience to use it.

I miss Billy Crystal.

I miss Jon Stewart.

Sorry Dave.

Jerry Lewis looked frail and in pain.

Whenever anyone says something good about Slumdog Millionaire (a movie we both enjoyed) I am fearful people will go without knowing how violent and depraved some parts are. And, by the way, why is that movie now being heavily promoted with the totally meaningless credit roll dance scene? It isn’t really part of the movie.

Oh Jennifer Aniston. Helaine says Jennifer Aniston has too much personal baggage for me. Not quite an unbiased view, is it?

You don’t want to know how much time you can save by watching the Oscars on a DVR five days after the fact.

Jon Stewart On The Oscars

My friend Farrell has already written me four or five times on this subject. The last time, attaching an article, he wrote the single word, “Ouch!”

Jon Stewart was a major disappointment at the Oscars.

I guess the good news is, he was a disappointment because he’s normally so good. The bad news is, for many people, this is their introduction – and possibly their final impression.

Tom Shales was brutal in today’s Washington Post – but Shales specializes in being brutal&#185.

It’s hard to believe that professional entertainers could have put together a show less entertaining than this year’s Oscars, hosted with a smug humorlessness by comic Jon Stewart, a sad and pale shadow of great hosts gone by.

I wonder what’s going through Stewart’s mind today? Is he having second thoughts about he approached the broadcast? Has he just tossed it off and moved back to his ‘real’ life?

&#185 – After I put this online, Farrell called and questioned my characterization of Shales.

Shales does not specialize in being brutal. He writes better than anyone on the subject of television period. He’s honest, frank. Likes TV and when he sees something good, he praises it. When he sees something bad, he’ll write and say so. And you can quote me, WeatherBoy&#153!

Continue reading “Jon Stewart On The Oscars”

The Oscars

All week long I watched as Matt Drudge tried his best to stir up controversy with this year’s Oscar host, Chris Rock. Even after Rock opened the show, getting a standing ovation (sort of shooting Drudge’s concerns in the foot) and then asking the audience to put their asses in their seats, Drudge felt compelled to rail again. The show was still in progress and he was going off on Rock!

The must be some sort of Drudge grudge at work here.

I’m a big Chris Rock fan and I thought his opening monologue was great. OK, maybe he hit Jude Law a little hard, but the rest was really funny and I laughed aloud though I was watching in a room by myself. Of course the very stuff I liked was creamed in USA Today and lambasted last night by one of my co-workers, who was not favorably impressed.

The rest of the show was watched by me in ‘collapsed’ form off the DVR.

It was a fairly lackluster telecast. I was disappointed there wasn’t more of Rock in his other appearances during the evening. He needed to do more than hit and run. There needed to be one or two more extended pieces with him. That being said, I hear the ratings were very, very good. So, obviously, I’m not as good a judge as I’d like to be.

I was touched by the acceptance speeches of Morgan Freeman, Hillary Swank (“I’m just a girl from a trailer park who had a dream”) and Jamie Foxx. Then, this morning on CNN Headline News, I heard someone say Foxx had given the virtually same acceptance speech at two other awards shows. That’s not right.

Winner of the “David Niven Funniest Ad Lib Award” went to Jeremy Irons. Chris Rock introduced him, as “comedy superstar,” to which Irons replied, “It’s so good to be recognized at last.”

Then, as he was delivering his nominations, a sound… something like a gunshot, rang out. Without missing a beat, Irons said, “I hope they missed.” His timing was perfect.

Last night’s taped pieces, including the Johnny Carson tribute and annual “death medley,’ weren’t as good as I wanted, or had come to expect from the Oscars. Whoopie Goldberg was used in the Carson package, but why not Billy Crystal and Steve Martin, two recent hosts who had a lot of contact with Johnny.

I was also stunned that “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” won an Oscar. As I had written last April, it was one of the worst movies I had ever seen. What were they thinking when they made it and voted on it?

What strikes me as most interesting as bout the show was the rise in the ratings this year even on a night where few movies produced any kind of passionate following.

I wonder if Billy Crystal will be back next year?

On Sickness and Health

A friend called me this morning. He’s a very good friend, a close friend. We don’t speak often enough.

The conversation hadn’t gone very far when he told me about another mutual friend with an awful form of cancer. Then he told me about another friend of his, someone I’ve met, with another awful form of cancer&#185. And, as the “coup de grace,” he told me about a small, inconsequential operation he had had.

Billy Crystal says we call them procedures, but they’re operations.

This evening another friend called. His son had suffered a seizure – not the first. Now he would be re-examined for the possibility of a rare disease from an overseas trip to a third world country.

Finally I spoke to my dad tonight. A close friend of his, someone I’ve known all my life… someone whose house I ran away to when I was 12 or 13… is in the hospital. He needs surgery but isn’t medically ready at the moment (whatever that means)&#178.

Where am I going with this?

As I faced into the new year, I realized I was approaching my 55th birthday. When I get there everyone will tell me it’s not as old as it seems or as old as it once was. C’mon. This is like putting lipstick on a pig.

Fifty five is old and I am now out of warranty.

No, I don’t feel like an old person and I try not to act like an old person. I have often said, “I’m 54, but I’m immature for my age.” I’m only middle aged if I’m living to 108! Those things that affect old people become inevitable.

Helaine says this is why you should live for the day. In the abstract that’s right. In reality it’s much more difficult to do.

Growing up, getting older, looked so much more promising from my viewpoint as a kid. From here, the view is not quite as sweet (nor as sharp without my glasses).

There is no moral here. I have no uplifting message to tag on the end. Life is a journey – a finite journey. You never know when or how it will end. In fact, you’re the one person who never finds out.

&#185 – I’m not sure why I am using the word awful as all forms of cancer pretty much suck.

&#178 – This guy, a lifelong smoker whose wife doesn’t know, told the doctors he doesn’t smoke. He might as well ask them to cure him by touching up the x-rays.

Billy Crystal – King of Comedy

Though I worked tonight, I made sure to stay home long enough between shows to see Billy Crystal open the Oscars. Now, after work, I’m watching it again.

Billy Crystal is the King of Comedy. He has an amazing presence and comic sense. The fact that he doesn’t do the Academy Awards in consecutive years seems to only make him better, as in “absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

I noticed tonight that Billy was getting rim shots during jokes on his opening performance.

Meanwhile, I really did look forward (for weeks) to his opening movie and song. They were worth waiting for… and re-watching.