Not a great Oscar telecast, but certainly enjoyable. No real surprises either, not many political rants. I believe that Jon Stewart did a good job of hosting, although some of his monologue stuff fell flat. Then again, you don't really know how the audience is miked so hall response might have been better than we at home seemed to believe.

Loved the beginning with appearances by all the recent hosts and Jon Stewart's 'dream sequence.' If you saw the ABC 'red carpet' special, plus the various bits in the telecast itself, you'll understand Stewart's joke about their running out of clips. Still some nice tributes, but was sort of surprised that neither Don Knotts nor Darren McGaven were shown in the memorial sequence.

Since I never saw any of the nominated films I don't feel strongly enough about the winners or losers. If nothing else it was good to see George Clooney getting the Best Supporting Actor statue and later talking about how it's difficult if not impossible to judge performances against each other unless they all did the same role.

One of me favorite Stewart lines, which both Donna and I laughed at, was "Michael Scorsese Zero, 365 Mafia One."

One note was that Stewart and others seem to have dropped the "watched by billions worldwide" bit, since as Mark Evanier pointed out in his pre-Oscar piece this has been disproved and mentioned even in the mainstream press of late.