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?