And the Academy Award for best seating arrangement goes to …

I watched the Oscars last night on ABC and felt pretty blah about it. Co-hosts Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin? Blah. The men's and women's fashion? Toned down compared to previous years (= blah). The Oscar speeches? Too fast to comprehend (= blah). The best actor/actress "roasts" by people like Tim Robbins and Oprah Winfrey? Blah, blah, blah, snore.
  What the Oscars people love to do is make you sit around and watch the whole damn thing so you don't miss the "water-cooler moment." Congrats to Sandra Bullock for that moment. I think she was just as flabbergasted as we were. I haven't seen The Blind Side yet, but I'd like to see if it was an Oscar-worthy performance. (Why do I have a sinking feeling that it's going to be similar to Julia Roberts' in Erin Brockovich?)
  Who wants to sit through hours of teary acceptance speeches and shots of George Clooney if there isn't going to at least a little off-the-cuff drama? This year, it arrived in the form of the seating arrangement: James Cameron, director of megahit Avatar (which I saw and strongly disliked), sitting behind ex-wife and fellow best-director/best-picture nominee Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker). Sure, they are supposedly still buddies, and he smiled and clapped last night, but I wonder what CGI-scripted four-letter words must've been shooting through his mind when she got the nods for director and picture directly in front of him?
  Look, the votes happened, and The Hurt Locker won. I saw the film months ago and thought it was great—but did I walk out of the theater thinking best director and best picture? Not really. That seating arrangement, however, paid off in the end. That made the Oscars watchable. That put The Hurt Locker ahead of Avatar for me.
  The guy who came up with that idea should win an Oscar.

—Posted by Will Levith