As usual, Academy Awards night at the Faust home begins with us making jokes to our cat Oscar (named for wholly different reasons) not to be concerned about the fact that he’ll be hearing his name a lot over the coming four hours. He treats the whole thing with the disdain only a cat can muster, something I’ve never been able to do.

I don’t watch any other awards shows and I wouldn’t bother wasting our newsprint and your time with predictions. Still, watching the Oscars remains a longstanding habit, like fish on Fridays.

Over the years the producers of Hollywood’s annual tribute to itself have whittled away most of the inane excesses that made it so compelling in a train-wreck kind of way. Who can forget those 1970s musical segments that turned ersatz rock songs into Busby Berkeley production numbers?

But bad taste hasn’t been totally lost, it’s just moved from the actual awards show to the pre-event program. This is where some of journalism’s true bottom feeders are dressed up and situated on the red carpet to ambush actors on their way into the auditorium. And apparently someone out there—probably the same people who buy magazines from the supermarket checkout lane—likes this part, because it’s been expanded from what used to be a draggy half hour into an interminable 60 minutes of celebrity ass-kissing.

This wouldn’t be so bad if any of these microphone-wielding clowns had any talent at interviewing or commentary. As is, they’re taxing themselves trying to pronounce everyone’s name correctly. Here’s some sample patter: “The red carpet already brimming with the wholesome goodness that is first-rate Oscar fashion...check out Jessica Alba—oh my god, that’s just gorgeous...Ben Stiller looking studly as ever...Jane Seymour looking elegant as well...Lauren Hutton, a classic model reinvented for the 2001 decora—and of course the beautiful Matt Dillon.” After babble like this, a montage of clips from movies featuring monkeys and a peek at Wolfgang Puck’s Oscar-shaped smoked salmon and caviar were welcome relief.

But eventually 8 pm rolls around and the show gets underway:

Dolly Parton performs

George Clooney accepts award.

Mickey Rooney appears at the 2006 Academy Awards.

• I yield to no one in my appreciation of Jon Stewart, who seemed constrained in his role as host of the show. But the yearly fuss over who should host the Oscars consistently misses the real point: If you want to improve the thing, replace the writers. You could easily tell which of Stewart’s quips were provided by his Daily Show staff and which were written by the Catskills rejects who must be related to the show’s producers.

• MVP of the evening: George Clooney. He provides a target for some of Stewart’s jokes, amiably mugging for reaction shots, and even delivers one of the best acceptance speeches in noting that when Hollywood is accused of being “out of touch with the times,” it usually means that they’re ahead of the times on social issues. If Stewart turns down the show next year, this is who they should hire.

• Definition of irony: that a show so obsessed with astronomically expensive designer clothing is sponsored by JC Penny.

• If they really want to make the Oscar show interesting, make it interactive—station a hundred cameras throughout the auditorium and let us look where we want. None of this cutting away from the losers as they listen to someone else’s acceptance speech. If these people didn’t want to be on perpetual display they wouldn’t have got into this line of work.

• Stewart: “Capote addressed very similar themes to Good Night and Good Luck. Both are about determined journalists defying obstacles in a relentless pursuit of the truth. Needless to say, both are period pieces.”

• When did Joan Rivers get these ridiculous implants? Oh wait, it’s Dolly Parton, performing her song from Transamerica. You think she’s had some work done? Bless her for her good nature and high spirits, but she looked like the underfed offspring of the Joker and Chesty Morgan.

• The montage of gay-seeming clips from classic westerns is an idea borrowed from Rock Hudson’s Home Movies. At least it got Ennio Morricone onto the show.

• The Ben Stiller bit, involving a green-screen that doesn’t work, is funny for about 10 seconds. Which for Stiller is par for the course.

• I will always remember this as the first and probably only Oscar show to feature an appearance by Ed Wood, glimpsed (in drag) during a montage about movies based on the lives of real people.

• Morgan Freeman in tux sans tie. Because, after all, he’s Morgan Freeman, even if he can’t pronounce “demonstrative.”

• Stewart: “Bjork couldn’t be here. She was trying on her Oscar dress and Dick Cheney shot her.”

• Here’s a new one: The orchestra starts playing softly as soon as winners begin their speeches. Do they just want to be ready to crank it up if the winners go overlong? Or do they think, in classic Hollywood style, that everything is more emotional with background music?

• Introducing a film noir montage (written and assembled by someone who apparently doesn’t know the first thing about film noir), Lauren Bacall has difficulty with her lines. My guess is that there was a teleprompter screw-up. And I would also guess that, even if she is 81 years old, she went backstage, found the technician responsible and ripped him a new one.

• Best Documentary inevitably goes to March of the Penguins, breaking with the Academy’s unwritten tradition of ignoring the commercially successful nominee in favor of an unknown that could benefit from the publicity (and Street Fight, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Darwin’s Nightmare deserve all the publicity they can get).

• The performance of the song from Crash looks like the finale of Carrie—all that’s missing is for singer Kathleen York to have a bucket of pig’s blood dumped on her.

• Obligatory Mickey Rooney appearance. How far in the back do you suppose they sit him? And why can’t he be a presenter? If you’re going to have a live telecast, you need to put loose cannons like the 86-year-old Rooney on camera.

• And still another montage, this one apparently designed to emphasize how much better movies are in theaters than on DVDs, which doesn’t make any sense to an audience watching on television. Stewart: “I can hardly wait until later, when we see Oscar’s salute to montages.”

• It takes me a minute to realize that Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep’s introduction to the honorary Oscar for Robert Altman is meant to approximate the sound of an Altman film. And it’s kind of brilliant. Consider that it’s much harder to fake this kind of conversation than it is to set it up and capture it the way Altman does, and you can see why they looked so exhausted when they were done. (Millions of viewers who have never seen an Altman film were presumably baffled, which is always a good thing.)

• Big disappointment of the evening for me is the award for Best Foreign Language Film. Everyone expected Paradise Now; I was rooting for the French Joyeaux Noel, one of the most potent anti-war films I’ve ever seen. Instead, the winner was Tsotsi, which I haven’t seen but which has drawn the weakest reviews of any of the five nominees. But let’s withhold judgment until it opens in Buffalo later this month.

• Doesn’t anyone in Hollywood have a father? These speeches are more mom-obsessed than James Cagney in White Heat.

• Never play poker with Jack Nicholson—his face was so impassive in the brief moment between opening the envelope for Best Picture and announcing the winner that I was sure it was the expected Brokeback Mountain. Count me pleased that Crash got it, if for no other reason than to overturn the conventional wisdom that “good movies” have to be released in December or else they’ll be forgotten come awards season. (And imagine all the people of the future who will watch David Cronenberg’s Crash by mistake instead and come away wondering what the hell the Academy was thinking back in 2006).

To respond to this article, e-mail editorial@artvoice.com or write to: Artvoice, 810 Main St., Buffalo, NY 14202