More Oscar odds and ends

• Going to the movies in LA is a different experience. At the theater we go to, the crowd is what you'd expect to find at an art gallery. Lots of cordoroy and folks in square-rimmed glasses. It’s also the type of place where portraits of Cindy Sheehan hang in the theater’s lobby, and any reference to George Bush elicits boos from the audience (as happened at a recent screening of Breach). However, in our eyes the theater forfeited most of its movie snob credentials when it reserved its special cinerama-capable Dome screen for successive screenings of Norbit and Ghost rider.
  

• Menino’s former press secretary comments on the Departed's Oscar win. Of course he bemoans the fact that that the mayor wasn't acknowledged in Scorsese's speech. If you’ve followed Boston politics at all, this should come as absolutely no surprise. (Truth be told, we think it’s a nice post. He links his former boss to an Oscar winner- something nobody else is in a hurry to do. That’s loyalty.)

• This exchange is a nice little summary of everything we’ve been told to expect here in Hollywood:

"Backstage, Ms. Lansing said she had not known that Mr. Cruise was going to give her the award. “I saw him at an Oscar party a few days before, and he was sort of cold to me,” she said. Onstage, she said, he had whispered in her ear: “This is an honor. I really wanted to do this, you know how much I love you.” From the New York Times.

(For what it's worth, our experience here so far has been nothing but great. We're surrounded by some very generous people, all of whom have lived up to their word. )

• An iPhone ad appeared during the Oscars broadcast. We just watched it, and are not at all surprised to see that the iPhone ad featured every kind of phone except for the iPhone itself. Hmmm… still no actual working phone yet?