I think, from a communications standpoint, the President did an excellent job delivering his speech last night, though I would have preferred if, like another “wildly silly” bit of over-the-top entertainment of the same name, the event had starred a pissed-off, sulky Ice Cube. (Now that was some terrorist ass-kicking --though it was no match for the explosive apathy of the box office.)

And if the grab-and-grope happy political theater of Presidential speechifyin’ isn’t your bag, there’s always more to be said about the other coast’s annual gathering of the pompous and ostensibly socially concerned—the Oscars. It occurs to me that this old Slate Franklin Foer article accusing The Weekly Standard of a “Stalinist” back of the book might just as well apply to yesterday’s Academy Award nominations. As Foer wrote:

It is impossible to parse out whether they dislike something because it is bad art or bad politics. And they spend so much time immersed in the political arguments that they often omit aesthetic judgments altogether.

With the Academy, it’s impossible to tell whether they like something because they think it’s good art or good politics, and subsequently, we get a host of nominees that make, at best, middling stabs toward both and end up failing either. The result is a ceremony that’s nothing but a bloviated muddle in which the iconic statues they award become the gold standard in self-serving mediocrity.

UPDATE: I should add that I'm not agreeing with Foer's criticism of TWS, just pointing out that what he complained about at TWS is clearly evident at the Academy.