So, Oscar Night is over, and the only really interesting thing about the show was Jack Nicholson’s enormous head.

And once again I was baffled by the selection of songs they had nominated for an Oscar. Now, I didn’t exactly do a whole lot of research apart from watching the show, so I can’t tell you any names (well, a few), but I’ll be glad to describe the performances to you:

# Title song for silly animated movie Cars. An accountant with guitar on a stool, Randy Newman on the piano. Account strums guitar lazily, sings extremely boring song, probably about cars falling asleep or dying of boredom.
# Title song for An Inconvenient Truth. Melissa Etheridge rocks the stage. Or tries to. Strums on her guitar, sings extremely dull song about being aware of stuff, meanwhile long-haired second guitarist parties like it’s 1999.
# Some song from Dreamgirls, performed by Beyonce Knowles (whose voice always somehow resembles the squawking a chicken makes when you throw hand-fulls of clay at it – rumor has it) and that one girl who won an Oscar for being on Teen Idol.
# Again
# Again

After that presentation of superb mediocrity, I do wonder how the Academy decides on those songs. In 2006, 804 movies were released in the US alone (yes, I grudgingly decided on some research, which consisted of googling the words “number”, “movies” and “released”). 600 of these were probably straight-to-video pieces with music written by a monkey and performed with a flute and a Hammond Organ by the director’s ailing grandmother, but that still leaves a whole lot of movies which I’m terribly sure have a combined number of at least 50 songs better than what they presented at the Oscars.

So here’ my question: What the fuck is up?