Another Oscars ceremony comes and goes

I don't have a lot to say, one way or another, about this year's Oscars.

And don't take that as some kind of passive-aggressive complaint about it. I mean exactly what I say: I don't have a lot to say.

But I believe philosophically that it's the responsibility of a film blog to at least stop and acknowledge the Oscars once a year on the morning afterward. Even if your postmortem doesn't amount to much more than this post will amount to.

That's a fairly big change from the way I handled the Oscars on this blog just two years ago, when I built up to the telecast with a week's worth of Oscar-themed posts. I even used a little Oscar logo at the top of each piece, to denote its status as part of a series.

But I think that year may have been the aberration, rather than this one. For some reason, that year I felt an unusual amount of pre-show enthusiasm. I didn't particularly care about either of the films vying for best picture (Avatar and The Hurt Locker) and I knew the top two acting awards were going to go to performances from movies I didn't think were so great (Crazy Heart and The Blind Side). For some reason, though, that year I had a lot to say.

But I think this year is more the norm, or at least the new norm. One big difference is that 2010 was the last year I didn't have a child. There was nothing to impede watching the show in real time, and there were fewer distractions in general.

This year? We didn't start watching the show until other people had been watching it for more than two hours. The show starts at 5:30 in LA, and that's when we start feeding our son dinner. After that he's got a bath and story time -- not to mentioning pooping time, which is a period of unspecified activity that lasts maybe 10 minutes in between dinner and bath time, in the hopes that he will not poop in the bath. (Something that has happened less than five times, but has traumatized us enough that we've added pooping time to our regular evening routine.) I was just relieved as hell that the DVR was faithfully recording it when we turned it on two hours later.

However, last night we did rise to the occasion of making up some homemade appetizers to eat with a yummy cocktail that involves pear liqueur and rum. I made some chicken strips covered with bread crumbs and my wife made some chorizo empanadas. After the difficult day we had (some unwanted gardening busted our water pipe, leaving us without water for about five hours), we couldn't believe we actually pulled it off.

I guess that's a moment every parent who loves the Oscars reaches -- at some point, real life just forces itself to take precedence.

But now that I've wasted your time on a bunch of preamble, I will make a few isolated comments about the show. These are not in any way intended to compete with the hundreds of other Oscar postmortem pieces that were written last night and today, so don't come away disappointed.

1) I was glad that The Artist won best picture. It was the nominee I had ranked second highest out of the eight that I saw, and the one I ranked higher (Moneyball) didn't have a snowball's chance. If I had been on the losing end of the head-to-head duel among the top two contenders, as I have been numerous times in the past (including last year), The Descendants would have won. So I'm glad it didn't and that I could have one of my alternating years of feeling satisfied by the film that won.

2) I don't care if the show was a bit boring, I was overjoyed to watch Billy Crystal for three hours. The great thing about Crystal is that even when a joke doesn't work, he's such a professional that it doesn't throw him, and he always manages to pass it off in a jovial way. I just loved his enthusiasm, the fact that he did his usual song, and the fact that in a year of nostalgia-themed movies, he gave us a dose of nostalgia for Oscars past. I'm writing this before I've even read any comments about how he acquitted himself, and for this I am glad -- he will at least be untainted for a bit longer in my mind. And so what if he were riffing on songs that the youngest people in the audience didn't know -- if any year at the movies has tried to tell young people to learn their history, this was it. (Possible favorite moment: Realizing, a few moments later, that "Hanks ... is a memory" was the only reference to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in the opening number.)

3) As much as it kills me to say anything positive about her, Angelina Jolie has really nice legs.

See you back here tomorrow with our regularly scheduled Audient piece.

Silent means silent. That means you, old lady.

After seeing The Artist Tuesday night, I posted on Facebook that an audience talking during the movie was even worse when it was a silent movie. Some people tried to offer me the glass-is-half-full perspective: At least the noise pollution wouldn't be preventing me from hearing the dialogue.

That's a good idea in theory, but not in practice. Sure, it's possible you would miss some key information if some jerk were talking over the dialogue, but the worse problem created by audience chatter is that it functions as a distraction. If it happens enough, it takes you out of the movie. And with only music playing -- no dialogue, and not even any sound effects -- you can't help but focus on the content of the surrounding chatter. You could look at it this way: In a Michael Bay movie, the talking of other people is not such a distraction, because the explosions tend to drown it out.

Fortunately, I was not taken out of The Artist. But there were a couple of yammering old ladies behind me whose occasional failures of impulse control were downright comical. The thing is, they weren't really that old, even -- mid-50s maybe. I'm calling them "old" because a) they were older than me, and b) their tendency to blurt out whatever thoughts were in their head is trademark old-person audience behavior.

I knew we were in trouble when they came in late, during the trailers, and carried in whatever hilarious conversation they were having outside. Something quite funny had just happened to them, or so they believed, and they had to laugh about it for another two to three minutes after they sat down. Sure, I didn't care that much about the War Horse trailer, but I knew this would be a preview of things to come.

Here were the highlights, all spoken in a regular speaking voice rather than a whisper. They'll make sense to you if you saw the movie, and will not ruin it if you didn't. (Though I'll try to keep it abstract.)

During the dream sequence: "I don't get it."

Later on: "That's all his furniture!"

A little after that: "He shot his dog?"

Then the most mysterious verbal expulsion: What sounded like halfway between a groan and scoff during the film's indisputably effective emotional climax.

At least my wife and I got a good laugh out of it later on.

And speaking of that ... Tuesday night was our first real experience with how expensive a good old-fashioned dinner and a movie can get when you are also using a babysitter. Even a reasonably priced babysitter ($10/hour) like the one we've just started using.

Here's a breakdown of our costs:

Two tickets to see The Artist, including the $1 surcharge for purchasing online: $27
Two Cokes and two bags of Smart Fries: $15
Dinner afterward of gourmet sandwiches and one cocktail each (including tip): $66
3.5 hours of babysitting (including tip): $40

So yeah, we spent $148 on our evening.

Ouch.

We could have saved a couple bucks if they ever started a movie at a convenient time to get dinner first. We went to a 7:50 show, but even an 8:30 or 8:40 show would have allowed us to eat beforehand and prevented our desperate need for some pre-movie sustenance in the form of the theater concession stand.

Dinner also would have been cheaper if we hadn't gone to a place that charges $14 for sandwiches (but oh, they're so good) or if we hadn't gotten cocktails. But what's a rare dinner date with your wife if you don't have a cocktail?

At least we didn't have two. I'd have had to take out a loan or something.