Some ice breakers for your Oscar night

Yesterday, our Friday program the Nose was all about the Academy Awards with occasional Commonweal film critic Rand Cooper, the Atheneum’s ridiculously photogenic film buff Vivian Nabeta (pictured) and The Simpsons’ Mike Reiss, whose rant about poop pies is worth playing the audio for.

I thought maybe you’d like to see some of the stuff we looked at to get ready (although it did not necessarily inform our discussion.)

Here’s a nice piece about Billy Crystal, and it manages to embrace both the pros and cons of having him host. On the show audio, Reiss tells quite a story about Billy’s work ethic during a cameo on Mike’s old animated show “The Critic.”  That’s what makes me happy about the return of Billy. You get the feeling this man doesn’t know what coasting feels like.

We — like a lot of people — were cool toward “The Descendants,” but I circulated this piece singing its praises.

There are some amusing charts in here.  I think I’ll leave it at that.

This deeply eccentric site carries modern Oscar fetishism to its extreme — predicting the awards  many years out.

These are mean, but a little bit fun. Really, what’s the point of “tracking down” an embarrassing clip of Jonah Hill?

OK, that’s enough for now (although we definitely have more). Let’s end with this reminder of how good Billy can be.