They’ve been stirring enthusiasm all month with the whisper on the street that this year’s 2009 Oscar ceremony was going to be totally different than any other you’ve ever seen, and the first order of business was that Peter Gabriel was not going to sing his nominated song, whatever it was.  I took heart at this new item, since I have never warmed up to Peter Gabriel, even though I know he’s supposed to be a genius or whatever.  I think maybe the time period in which he attained fame, I was still on drugs and missed the whole thing, so all I got was that one song that John Cusack plays on the big boombox outside that girl’s house in yet another seminal classic I missed.  People tell me that Peter Gabriel was married to Rosanna Arquette or discovered Kate Bush and it gives me a migraine, for I’ve discovered there are entire bodies of knowledge I’m too tired to take in any more.  Thus I was glad to hear the new broom swept out Peter Gabriel and any chance of me having to study his face once again to see if I recognized him from somewhere; was that his real name, I wonder, or the conflation of two great Biblical loud mouths, Peter and Gabriel?

This was the year the Oscars were going to change altogether, and some of the changes I liked (the anti-Peter Gabriel rule) and some I did not.  Why mess once again with what was once my favorite segment, the In Memoriam montage of all the stars who died during the past year?  Actually I liked having Queen Latifah come and sing “I’ll Be Seeing You,” while the photos changed, but due to some incredibly bad camerawork we completely missed the opening—hmm, dead celebrity, for the cameras were still climbing all over Latifah!  Only people with really sharp eyes could have identified the tiny images pixilating across the stage of the Kodak Theater as representing the one and only Cyd Charisse, star of Two Weeks in Another Town and Party Girl, who died this past summer, nearly our last link to the old MGM studio dream factory.  Pshaw!  She deserved better than that!  Reminds me of the year we were at an Oscar party at Craig Goodman’s house and the In Memoriam montage concluded without ever having shown us a clip of Dorothy McGuire, who had died the preceding year and had actually been nominated for an Oscar, and in the ensuing silence someone said, “Well, somebody fucked up.”  We totally expected heads to roll or, maybe the following year the Academy might correct its mistake at the beginning of the telecast, perhaps by devoting a good 20 minute chunk of the show to the great McGuire (whose role as the mom in Old Yeller alone could have made her immortal), but instead Dorothy McGuire has still not been mourned the good ol’ fashioned proper way.  And why not?