The buzz this morning - many are asking if last night’s 83rd Oscar telecast was the worst ever.

Perhaps more importantly, with the majority of Academy voters over the age of 50, do the Oscars even matter to the all-important 18-49 demographic?   The King’s Speech overcame The Social Network, a film arguably more relevant to a younger demo.  (ABC wrote an interesting analysis of why The King’s Speech dominated.)

The King’s Speech was the audience favorite safe choice, but not the forward thinking choice.

Randy Newman’s uninspired We Belong Together from Toy Story 3 won for original song.  The win was another geezer selection.  The Academy overlooked If I Rise by Dido & A. R. Rahman, gorgeously rendered by Florence Welch (Florence and The Machine).

My friends (lmost all in the left coast geezer class, btw) were perplexed by the Randy Newman selection, although everyone felt the Academy redeemed themselves by awarding Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross the Oscar for original score for The Social Network.

The 83rd Oscars also felt a bit heavy on the rude this year.

Although not unexpected, the producers used the orchestra to bestow acceptance speech time favors on stars.  They slammed best adapted screenplay winner Aaron Sorkin (for The Social Network) who delivered his speech over the swelling strains of the music.

For a terrific graph of speeches and orchestral meddling go here to nationalpost.com

In accepting the Oscar for documentary feature, The Inside Job -  which chronicles the 2008 financial meltdown and Wall Street greed - Charles Ferguson still had something more to say:  “Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail — and that’s wrong.”

But he too was unceremoniously slashed by the orchestra after about a minute.

There were a few lovely, inspired moments, some of which ironically came from the courageous geezers.  A flirtatious 94 year-old Kirk Douglas basked in what might be his last moment in the sun.  The producers did have the good grace not to cut him off with the orchestra.  73-year old David Seidler, a child stutterer, faced the microphone to accept his Oscar for original screenplay for The King’s Speech.

Otherwise the telecast flatlined.  The winners had been pre-coronated.  The show lacked dramatic tension.

Then there was The King’s Speech acceptance speech mini-scandal.  The winners were interrupted by the orchestra after about one minute thirty in order to cut to the concluding number of Somewhere Over The Rainbow sung by kids in green and blue t-shirts.

Perhaps the most curious choice of the evening was a what-were-they-thinking montage of the ten nominated films for best picture.  On one level the scenes stitched from all ten nominees set to the audio of The King’s Speech was a brilliant piece of editing.  On the other hand, it was poor taste to favor one film over the others.

I might have given up on the 83rd Oscar telecast, except for Twitter.  Following the clever observations and occasional snark rescued what would’ve been a very long evening.

UPDATE: ratings are in, and it’s not good.  Audiences bailed.

Today, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Joe Scarborough became a sort of  Margaret Chase Smith of the media.  Sure, the so-called lefty bloggers have questioned Glenn Beck’s sanity and the damage his paranoid ravings are having on national discourse.  But Scarborough, a conservative, believes the Glenn Beck neo-McCarthyistic style discredits the right and plays into the worst caricatures of conservatives.

Scarborough quoted extensively from a blog post by Peter Wehner, a conservative writer and Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Glenn Beck has become the most disturbing personality on cable television. One cannot watch him for any length of time without being struck by his affinity for conspiracies and for portraying himself as the great decoder of events….The danger when one paints the world in such conspiratorial terms is that it devalues the rational side of politics. It encourages a cast of mind that looks to expose enemies rather than to engage in arguments…what ought to worry conservatives in particular is that Beck not only has the unusual capacity to discredit virtually every cause he takes up; he also confirms the worst caricatures of the right.”

Scarborough said: “It’s the conspiracy theories that are the most dangerous because that gets people acting out.”

Whehner

AT&T is torturing American - or at least San Francisco Bay Area - audiences - with ads, lots and lots and lots of ads, the same ads relentlessly aired over and over and over again until we go mad

The first one (imbedded below) is the SPELLING BEE.  Has anyone NOT seen the Spelling Bee ad.  OMG.  Girl in the ad who’s head flops back in the chair: we share your pain.  This AT&T ad pretty

The other is the “world is your living room” ad, wherein a couch inhabited by an odd assortment of characters (a woman carrying a birdgage etc.) shifts into a subway car and it’s really

Whoopi Golderg and Joy Behar stalked off the set of The View this morning, in protest over Bill O’Reilly’s comment that “Muslims killed us on 9-11.”  In the heat of the discussion, as the group was stepping all over each other’s remarks, O’Reilly continued to assert that “Muslims killed us on 9-11.”  At that point, Goldberg and Behar walked, although the theatrics felt a tad contrived, guaranteed to generate plenty of headlines.

After Barbara Walters stated she disagreed with her colleagues behavior and proceeded to calm the waters, O’Reilly apologized for “demeaning all Muslims, “acknowledged that his comments were “inartful,” and qualified his remarks by saying “Muslim fanatics, terrorists, whatever word, killed us.”

Okay - fair enough.  Nevertheless, in the unscripted moment, O’Reilly inadvertently expressed sentiments held by many Americans - a bone-deep fear of Muslims.  (See the NY Times editorial mentioned below.)

O’Reilly said polls show that “70% of Americans don’t want that mosque down there [at the World Trade Center site]”

I’m not sure which polls O’Reilly was citing, but this is certainly true of New York City residents.  Per a NY Times September 10, 2010 editorial, sixty-seven percent of NYC residents “thought the mosque planners should find ‘a less controversial location.’”

Further, the editorial states that the poll (click here for the results) found “considerable distrust of Muslim-Americans.”

Here’s the clip from The View 

 @johnmcquaid

In case y’all missed it, President Obama joked he might hold a “slurpee summit” with GOP leadership.  (And yes, 7-11 has gone into overdrive to promote it. )

Earlier today, when asked by ABC News’ Diane Sawyer if he might attend a “slurpee summit,” soon-to-be-Speaker of the House John Boehner quipped, “I don’t know about a slurpee. How about a glass of merlot?”

@johnmcquaid ’s response to all this on Twitter

Unfortunately, now picturing Obama and Boehner as the guys from “Sideways” http://bit.ly/bKJvQL