Sorry Hugh – you gave it your best shot but the 2009 Oscars laid an egg. You’re such a nice guy that I hate to criticize you but doing more musical numbers is not going to make the Oscars more interesting. Here are my suggestions to make the Oscars a must-see event:

1. You can’t eat your cake and have it too. It’s either an industry event or a glamathon, and if you want to get your ratings back, I suggest the latter. Either way, get a benevolent, insider comedian like Billy Crystal to be the host.
2. News flash: The only people who care about art direction, cinematography, sound mixing and editing, film editing, costumes, visual effects, make-up, and all the shorts are people in the industry. Clump these categories like the science awards and synopsize them on Oscar night.
3. Don’t be greedy – the Oscars are already one big advertisement for the movies so don’t gild the lily with a million commercial breaks.
4. The viewers want to see celebrities in all their glory – they are our monarchy and we want the red carpet pageantry, but we also want to see them saying something from the heart so abolish laundry list acceptance speeches. I suggest all nominees submit the names of those they wish to thank and the winner’s list can be shown in a crawl at the bottom of the screen.
5. We want celebrities and more celebrities. The Oscars should be an animated version of Us Weekly. When you pan the audience, give us some pop-up factoids, like Jen Aniston used to be married to Brad Pitt who’s now married to Angelina Jolie who’s still not speaking to her father.
6. The previous set was starting to look as creaky as an episode of Playhouse 90 so the smaller, more intimate staging is a great improvement (although I’ll miss the suspense of watching the gals teetering up the steps in their spike heels and trains).
7. Now it’s time to razzle dazzle me by bringing the presentation technology into the 21^st century and filling my TV screen with electronic flotsam and jetsam. Utilize the computerized pyrotechnics CNN displayed during the presidential election. Show clips of nominated movies with the presenters superimposed in the lower righthand corner of the screen like every TV station now does to hype their own programming.
8. Whatever you do, the show cannot last longer than ninety minutes; sixty minutes would be even better.

Finally, I think the Oscars should come to grips with the fact that fewer and fewer people see movies in a timely fashion so that many have not yet seen the nominated films and therefore do not have a stake in the outcome. I am a total movie addict, yet my current schedule and lifestyle have necessitated the use of Netflix so that even I found the Barbara Walters Special and the red carpet interviews more compelling than the Oscars themselves of which I watched only an hour for the first time since I could dictate my own bedtime.

In conclusion, I say unto you: Do not go gentle into that good night! Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

A friend of mine called the other day to ask my opinion about something that happened with her nine year old daughter. They were shopping at Claire’s and decided to take advantage of the fifteen items for five dollar deal. They couldn’t find a basket to hold their trinkets so they asked a sales clerk to get one for them. After they left the store, her daughter revealed that she had some items she had forgotten to pay for since she’d put them in her pocket while awaiting the basket. There were a few fishy details that made my friend not entirely sure her daughter had ended up with these items by accident. She decided the right thing to do was make her daughter return the items to the store which besides being emotionally challenging for her daughter, involved a two hour detour in their day. The sales clerk remembered them and rather dubiously accepted the items as if she couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

I, in turn told her about what had happened with my daughter who at that age had been playing with a little boy next door. His father called up after she came home and asked very diplomatically if there was any way my daughter had accidentally taken twenty dollars from their home. He had just returned from the bank so he knew he had a certain amount of twenties on his desk and now one was missing, He said he wouldn’t have called if they hadn’t already “strip searched” their son. So I confronted my daughter who burst into tears and admitted she’d been seduced by the sparkling, crisp, new twenties lying so alluringly out in the open and had taken one. However, before leaving the house, she’d realized this behavior was wrong, had panicked and hidden the twenty in a drawer in the downstairs bathroom. After relaying this information to the father and being greatly relieved to hear that the money was indeed in the bathroom, I told my daughter she would have to apologize to the boy’s parents. Her shame made her distraught at the idea of facing them but I was adamant. Fortunately, they were very kind to her -- stern yet forgiving – and didn’t hold it against her as a black mark on her character.

I further related to my friend an incident that had occurred when I was in third grade. A little girl came to class with a gold ring set with a small stone and all the kids made a fuss over her since at that time – the early sixties (and well before the advent of Claire’s)-- it was rare for a child that age to have jewelry. I did not want the ring but I guess I wanted the attention since I did not return the ring to her when I found it in the box that served as our class lost and found but rather hid it in the drawstring bag we were all required to have for our crayons and scissors and paste. Very shortly afterwards, a great hue and cry went up when the girl discovered her ring was lost and the teacher asked if anyone had seen it. When no one came forth she then announced that there would be a search row by row. I knew my goose was cooked but there seemed nothing to do but march outside with all the other kids in my row and await the fatal discovery which was bound to be made. We marched back inside to an ominous stillness and then the teacher called me up to the front of the class and announced that the ring had been found in my drawstring bag. She then proceeded to denounce me as a thief and a liar, and said she would call my parents.

This was the early sixties, before Nixon so dishonored the presidency, making it conceivable, to my mind, for ordinary folk to be similarly dishonest so that illegal acts such as those performed by Leona Helmsley (tax evasion: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes”) and Martha Stewart (insider trading: “I didn't cheat the little people. We're all little people”) are soon forgotten, and by extension, forgiven. My parents sat me down and, amid much hand wringing and soul searching, tried to figure out where they’d gone wrong. My father thought it must have been because of the wooden coat hangers and soft, thick towels he’d begun to bring home from his hotel stays. (Yes, Virginia, there was a time before hookless hangers and thin, rough towelswhen such thefts were rare.)

I’m always challenged by what I think I might get away with versus what I know is the right thing to do. Somehow I feel entitled to get something for nothing. Since I was scarred for life by my third grade escapade, I would never ever steal something outright but there are plenty of gray areas to test one’s integrity. For example, I once received a check from my insurance company made out to me in the amount of five thousand dollars. I could’ve cashed it no questions asked, but I called the insurance company to tell them I could think of no reason for them to have sent it which led to the discovery that it was a mistake. I felt rather let down that they weren’t more impressed with my remarkable honesty but other people’s reactions are really none of my business. On another occasion, I tried to pay for an item for which I hadn’t been charged and the store’s customer service department told me it was too difficult to rectify such a thing in the system. I always try to catch a mistake when I’m being given change even though it’s terribly hard for me to relinquish that extra ten I received. Once, my daughter found eighty dollars in a car rental parking lot. If it had been eight dollars I guess I would’ve just let her keep it. But eighty was a large enough amount that someone might come back for it so we turned it in. (And I had to pry it from her cold, dead hands.) Then I thought, wait a minute, why should the parking lot attendant get to keep it so I went back and left my name in case it wasn’t claimed. It wasn’t and eventually my daughter received the money.

I’m not alone in this gray area. I think there is a lot of petty larceny that goes on because people don’t ‘fess up to mistakes in their favor or mistakes that are unnoticed. While Christmas shopping, my eighty year old mother accidentally left her purse in a shopping cart after unloading it at her car, and no one returned it to her. She lost her cell phone and two hundred and fifty dollars in cash. She kept praying someone would call but her hope dimmed after the second day, and was snuffed out after a week. A more extreme example is Timothy Geithner who, even though he is universally agreed to be the best person for the job of treasury secretary, almost didn’t get the job because of $34,000 in unpaid taxes which we were told is a common error for someone working overseas, although a similar error had been called to his attention. And Caroline Kennedy who was not universally agreed to be the best person for the job of New York senator, didn’t get the job because she supposedly didn’t pay nanny taxes. (Not the first woman in this position, I might add.) And Sen. Tom Daschle who was universally agreed to be the best person for the job of secretary of health and human services withdrew his nomination because he owed $146,000 in back taxes. These are all gray areas which might have remained unaddressed had these people not ventured into the limelight as opposed to Bernie Madoff who entered the limelight as a result of his financial skullduggery. The point is that Geithner, Kennedy, Daschle and maybe even Madoff, if he waits long enough, will most likely not be judged harshly by today’s lax moral standards. By that I mean they may be penalized, even jailed, but they’ll still be invited to cocktail parties. Well, maybe not Madoff, at least not by Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick.

So what does that say about us as a culture? Has too much reality TV inured us to reality? When my mother goes to buy a newspaper from a sidewalk vending machine, invariably the person ahead of her will offer her a free paper after they’ve opened the box and when she indignantly declines, they shake their heads over her foolishness. However, my mother-in-law, who has no qualms about accepting erroneous gifts from the universe, was angry that Geithner got the job. I told her that in a better economy we could afford to take the moral high ground but that we needed to overlook his foibles for the sake of the country. She disagreed saying he should’ve resigned. I said how about if we give him a year to fix the economy: if he fails, he resigns; if he succeeds he stays.

What I don’t understand about the outrage surrounding Geithner, Kennedy, and Daschle is that it seems like most Americans cheat, at least a little, on their income taxes. Or if they don’t cheat, they at least manipulate in their favor. The prevailing attitude among “the little people” seems to be don’t ask, don’t tell, or it’s only wrong if I get caught, as seemed to be the case with Martha Stewart. I see this attitude most vividly exemplified on the road, where it’s every man for himself. Who cares if it’s not safe nor ecologically sound to drive ninety miles an hour? It’s only wrong if you get a ticket. And even then, you can try to talk your way out of it as one man recently did by claiming his mother-in-law was nagging him.

It feels like there are two versions of morality -- the official, public version and the real-life one. Reminds me of right after 9/11 when the grocery store parking lot was filled with cars bearing patriotic flags, and it was also littered with carts that no one could be bothered to put back.