Hey, Oscar. These days, your whole campy, top-hat-and-jazz-handsy dance is wildly out of step. You've become your own Botoxed, bloated parody. So what's a stiff old gold guy to do?

"It is not the critic who counts" is the opening line for this new and unexpectedly highfalutin' Cadillac spot, which breaks at the Oscars this Sunday. So I guess as a critic, I'm out.

It was an uncanny week of sudden death and public loss for the media. First, the shocking items about major "news" people that were disclosed minutes apart: beloved fake anchor Jon Stewart was leaving his post at "The Daily Show" after 16 years, and Brian Williams was suspended without pay for six months.

We are a country with big secrets, in desperate search of heroes. And the heroes that the media seeks to embrace are managed and packaged. Real heroes are the ones who do what they do away from the media glare.

As you read this, the Barton F. Graf 9000 agency is scrambling to come up with a new Super Bowl spot and have it turned around in time to run on The Big Game on Sunday.

To be fair, all politics is theater, and certainly a televised occasion like the State of the Union speech, and its follow-up, is all performance. Whereas the follow-up part of the ritual - the ostensible honor of being chosen as the official responder to the State of The Union - appears increasingly to be a curse.

I wasn't expecting this big, emotional, Super-Bowl-type spot promoting the Golden Arches to pop up during the Golden Globes. But there it was: the stirring, food-free, children's chorus-sweetened 60-second "Signs."

The first week of 2015 has proven surprisingly harsh and even heart-rending. But we have weathered worse; and keep in mind that as January progresses, we are only an ambiguous number of months away from the return of "Mad Men"!

It's hard to believe that the backstory surrounding "The Interview," the dimwitted bro-mance road movie that Sony Pictures ended up pulling from theaters Wednesday, could have achieved such levels of worldwide crisis and stupidity. Yet it did.

I know they're supposed to be stodgy; nothing quite out-stiffs the British Royals on state occasions. But for some naive reason (maybe only having to do with her terrific fashion sense), I thought that Kate and Prince William were the young and modernized versions. So I was surprised to see that during their recent trip to New York City, much was made of Kate's visit to a child development center in Harlem, where she -- get ready -- sat down and wrapped a Christmas gift.