"Oscar night is no longer about movie stars feting each other in front of an awed audience. It's about viewers deconstructing celebrity...."

Alessandra Stanley on the Oscars show:

Oscar night is no longer about movie stars feting each other in front of an awed audience. It's about viewers deconstructing celebrity — abetted by a cottage industry of stylists, dermatologists, surgeons and trainers who reveal the fakery behind even the most seemingly natural beauties: celebrity with a dehumanized face. And TV commentators fawn and probe on pre-Oscar shows and red-carpet interviews with little to no curiosity about filmmaking or news events but insatiable appetite for details about clothes and personal grooming. (There is something delicious and embarrassingly decadent about the national obsession with the Oscars — an entire country caught eating raw cookie dough while reading "in Touch.")

No, no, what would really be embarrassing would be if we were the "awed audience" they'd like us to be. We're doing exactly what we should be doing, eating the cookie dough of truth.