Random on a Sunday while watching the Oscars

1. Yeah, I'm watching the Oscars. It's a ritual. I watch them more often than not, actually more often than that--I think I've missed one year since 1979, when I first watched the Oscars with Lon. My sainted husband was a movie critic when we first started dating. Later he was the editor on the Chicago end of the phone, talking to Roger Ebert filing his story from the west coast. So the Oscars, it's a family thing.

2. Right now I'm watching each of the supporting actress nominees smile sweetly and modestly after their clips are played. Have they been practicing? And the Oscar goes to -- arghhh-- there's a prepared crawl of who the winner would like to thank, too small and too fast to read. Ah, but  the winner of the best supporting actress Oscar is wearing yellow, beautifully, like a movie star.

3. I need a new dress for an Event. Will I see something tonight on the Oscars that will inspire me to shop? The leather jacket on the Mad Max costumer? Not really me. But everything else I see seems to be strapless. And the women seem to have incredibly broad shoulders. The woman film editor winner has style I can manage, which is to say, not much. But she had such smart things to say ....

4. I cannot imagine sitting down at a computer to write the copy for this show--the stuff that people introducing the awards read. Forgettable appears to be the standard. Or maybe there's some secret rubric the writers have to follow to write sentences that can be read by actors who've been drinking since mid-afternoon.

5. My Sunday began with a quick dip into Marilynne Robinson's collection of essays "The Givenness of Things." And now I have the book open again, looking for something to share from what I've read in the last day or two. It's not super-quotable stuff--it's paragraph after paragraph of ideas opening onto other ideas. Can't read too much at one sitting. My mind stays expanded only if I go bit by bit.

6. "You can make stuff." So say the Oscar-winning producers of "Inside Out."  Hands down my favorite quote of the day.