The Oscars really got it mostly right this year. I personally would have preferred Paul Mescal or Colin Farrell for Best Actor, but among the frontrunners, I was fine with Brendan Fraser, who sucked in the abysmal The Whale, but seems a nice fellow.

Perhaps the only award I just can't abide is ignoring All the Beauty and the Bloodshed for Best Doc.

That said, good show, and heart-warming winners.

One thing that jumped out at me, since I'm obsessed with dead celebrities, is how few made it into the In Memoriam this year. There were so many gasp-inducing exclusions that I quickly realized, after Lenny Kravitz stopped playing, that the Academy must have decided not to have a full In Memoriam at all, and will likely direct all bitching to their site, where they do, in fact, honor everyone (except killer Robert Blake, and I think they left Sacheen Littlefeather off because of her ancestry kerfuffle).

It's the cry more! strategy.

But even so, for fuck's sake, these 23 people were egregiously overlooked:

Joanna Barnes (realllly top-drawer), Ricou Browning (last surviving Universal movie monster), Pat Carroll (they included a commercial for The Little Mermaid on the live telecast but excluded dead Ursula?!), Carole Cook (boobies!!!), Charlbi Dean (she was in a Best Picture nominee — this year!), Melinda Dillon (Spielberg is RIGHT THERE), Bert I. Gordon (honoring Jamie Lee was enough genre for one telecast?), Gilbert Gottfried (Aladdin), Anne Heche (could she have died more memorably?!), Hugh Hudson (he directed Chariots of Fire, yet they remembered Vangelis), Marsha Hunt (she lived to be 104!), Leslie Jordan (as with Heche, his death was at the forefront of many viewers' minds), Robert Morse (genius), Nehemiah Persoff (Some Like It Hot! Yentl!), Eileen Ryan (Sean Penn's mom!), Tom Sizemore (everyone's uncle knows who he was), Paul Sorvino (Mira Sorvino's dad!), Stella Stevens (didn't fellow Poseidon passenger Carol Lynley get left out of it when she died, too?), Topol (it's fucking Topol!), Barbara Walters (her interview specials), Fred Ward (it's fucking Fred Ward!), David Warner (226 credits, for fuck's sake!), Cindy Williams (American Graffiti!).

There are others, but those are the ones that surprised me the most.

23 most egregious oversights in the #Oscars2023 In Memoriam, in random order (assuming Robert Blake and Sacheen Littlefeather were deliberately dumped for controversy reasons):

— Matthew Rettenmund (@mattrett) March 13, 2023