The big news out of Vegas is mostly about rising ticket prices for entertainment.  The new Celine Dion show at Caesars Palace has a top price of $220 a seat.  One suspects the premise here is along the lines of, "Well, some people will pay it, if only to show off.  And then the seats we don't sell at that price, we can give away as comps and people will think, 'Wow, I'm getting a $220 comp!'  Best of all, it will make the overpriced tickets that aren't quite as overpriced seem reasonable."  These would be the seats for $166.50, $143.50, or $102.  Hard to believe they could charge more than a hundred bucks a seat in a town where people grab up funbooks full of coupons for a dollar off the lunch buffet.  But apparently they can.

The Las Vegas Advisor has done its annual survey of show prices and concluded that the average ticket now goes for $45.91.  That's more than five bucks up from just a year ago — though lower than it was in 2000, a year when there was a temporary shortage of cheap shows at cheap hotels.  There are now plenty — not that you'd want to go see them — and they distort the stats a bit.  The average price for a ticket you might want to buy — say, for one of the Cirque Du Soleil shows — can be over a hundred dollars.  Lance Burton's show at the Monte Carlo is $55-60 a seat and it'll run you $65, at least in theory, to see Penn & Teller at the Rio.  The trick is to look for discount coupons.  It's real easy to find a $10 discount ticket for Penn & Teller (there's even one on the Rio website) and when business is slow, the hotel spreads around even better bargains.  There are also some good, low-price afternoon shows (Mac King at Harrah's, Ronn Lucas at the Rio) which weren't included in the Las Vegas Advisor price survey.

I used to marvel at the folks who'd do Vegas armed with every discount coupon book they could find, eating breakfast at an inconvenient hotel at an inconvenient time because they had a coupon for a buck off on the French Toast.  I prided myself that I was too sophisticated to mess with that kind of thing and lectured that if one were to just lose twenty bucks less at the gaming tables (i.e., stop playing five minutes sooner), one could save a lot more money than being a slave to coupons.  But I think, in the future, I'm going to be a bit less quick to disdain their value.  On some transactions, it's getting to be like buying a new car: Only a dummy pays the sticker price.

Nothing I'm reading about the current conflict in Iraq is quite as unsettling as the notion that it's just the first of many engagements; that the long-range goal of the Bush Administration is to rid the world of Muslim fundamentalism.  If that's where we're headed — as theorized in articles like this one by Joshua Micah Marshall — then it's gonna be a long series of bloody battles.

I am also informed by half the film buffs I know that on the Academy Awards, in the montage of Best Actress winners, there was another poorly-chosen bit of footage.  They were supposed to be honoring past-winner Janet Gaynor with a shot from the movie Sunrise — but they picked a clip from that film with Margaret Livingston.  I think they should have just done another cutaway to Martin Scorsese.

By the way: Today on some cable channel — E!, I think — I heard someone talking about the "injustice" of Scorsese never winning an Oscar.  Could we save the word "injustice" for things like a guy sitting on Death Row for ten years for a crime he didn't commit?  Or our country arresting and detaining people for months without actually charging any of them with a crime?  Or a zillion other things more unfair in this world than a highly-honored filmmaker missing out on one honor?  As my Uncle Aaron used to say, "Never feel sorry for anyone who makes more than a million dollars a year."

These may look like scenes from some sort of pin-up calendar but they're actually part images from ticket jackets used by PSA, an airline that criss-crossed western states from 1949 until 1988.  It was the most popular way to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Oakland or Las Vegas — partly because it had so many flights per day but mainly because of its stewardesses.  Back then, Pacific Southwest Airlines had the "best-looking stews" — that's how all my friends put it — and the company was not shy about exploiting that image. There were some who scoffed, saying that the ladies in the ads and on the ticket folders couldn't possibly be real "stewardesses." They had to be professional models. But whenever I flew PSA, I could believe those were real employees posing.

One time in the early seventies, when a bunch of L.A. comic fans decided to go en masse to a convention in Oakland, several insisted that we all had to fly PSA for that reason.  One of them was even collecting ticket jackets.  There were several different designs and both ways, he went through the plane asking passengers for theirs, hoping that one of the servers on our flights would be on one of them so he could get it autographed.  He only got as close as one of the ladies telling him she'd posed for a folder photo but it hadn't been issued yet.  Happily, she agreed to take his address and mail him a signed one once it was released.

Today, it sounds sexist and almost childish…and it must have been humiliating for women who were fully qualified to do the job that they got turned away because they weren't young and pretty enough. Folks were just starting to get sensitive about such things. It might help to remember that this was before the airlines were deregulated.  Fares were the same everywhere so the only way in which a carrier could make the case that you should fly them instead of the other guy was to sell service and smiles.  Above and beyond the fact that PSA had good-looking ladies bringing you peanuts, there was something friendly about the airline.  Everything was colorful and everyone seemed to enjoy their jobs and act really happy to have you on board.  American or United could get you to the same place at the same time for the same fee but they seemed so damned serious about flying the plane.

In the mid-eighties when PSA got caught up in a wave of airline mergers and disappeared into USAir, I felt a certain sense of loss.  The grown-ups had won again.  Today, Southwest Airlines has some of the same spirit, and the new Hooters Airline is reviving the concept of flight attendant as sex symbol.  But I can't shake the feeling that even collectively, they don't equal PSA…and that no airline ever will.

Chris Laborde, a pilot and flight instructor, offers a wonderful website full of PSA history and memorabilia over at www.ilovepsa.com.  If you remember PSA — or have a thing for women wearing short orange-and-pink skirts — fly on over there.

I am about to do some of you an enormous favor, saving you a heap of cash by again recommending Travelaxe.  This is a piece of free software that works as follows:  You download it from here.  You install it on your computer.  Then when you're thinking of going out of town, you call it up and enter your destination and dates.  Travelaxe goes online, searches a dozen or so different travel agents' websites, and presents you with a chart of available hotels and what it will cost to book them through each agency.  You will usually find that you can save hundreds of smackers by booking through one agent instead of another.  I just did a search for a trip I'm thinking of taking.  Travelaxe found me a rate of $479 for three nights via one travel agent.  The same room in the same hotel for the same nights was $929 from another.  That is, as advertised, a heap of cash saved.

A lot of you reading this are planning on attending the Comic-Con International in San Diego from July 17 through 20.  If you are, you should go directly to the con's website and book your room immediately.  Like right this second.  Based on the way it's gone in recent years, they'll be sold out any day now.

As long as rooms are available through the convention, you should book that way.  It should give you the cheapest rate, and it helps the con to get credit for filling San Diego's hotels.  But once rooms are no longer available through them, Travelaxe is your next resource.  It covers many hotels that are not available through the con site.  The current Travelaxe software (2.1) also has a feature that lets you arrange the hotels on its chart based on their distance from an address you enter.  If you select "San Diego" and enter the address of the convention center, which is 111 W. Harbor Drive, you can see exactly how far each hotel is from the action.

Travelaxe — in which I have no financial interest, no matter how it may appear — is completely free and works for more than 465 cities.  It's especially marvelous for finding cheap rooms in Las Vegas.  My last trip there, it led me to a rate at the Orleans significantly cheaper than I could get from the Orleans' website or their phone reservations clerk.  I'm so confident that this will save you serious bucks that I'm going to put my tipping box right under this item.  You will all save so much money that, in gratitude, you'll use the link below to send me a nice gratuity.  (I'll let you know in a week or so if this yields more donations than a picture of Julie Newmar.)

Thsi kind of thing happens to me more often than you'd imagine:  This afternoon, I was dining al fresco at Farmers Market here in L.A. with my good friend, screenwriter Adam Rodman.  We were talking about the O.J. Simpson case (we're right on top of every current issue) and about some of the detectives involved in it.  One of us mentioned Phil Vanatter, who was one of the lead investigators of the matter…

About ninety seconds later, I looked up at a gentleman who was walking past with his wife.  I whispered to Adam, "Take a look at that guy in the flowered shirt.  Is that who I think it is?"

Adam looked and, sure enough, it was who I thought it was: Phil Vanatter.  Probably still carrying that vial of Simpson's blood around with him.

I immediately changed the topic of conversation to Halle Berry and Carmen Electra but without, alas, the same result.

This website has finally won an award.  It just snagged a Squiddy as "Best Focused Web Site."  I'm not quite sure what it's supposed to be focused on, but I do know what the Squiddies are.  Each year, the participants in several of the rec.arts.comics newsgroups vote in a mess of categories for the best writer of comic books, the best artist, the best character, etc.  Each winner receives a Squiddy, which as far as I know consists of nothing more than the right to post that neat little logo on my site.  The awards are more properly called the "Rec.Arts.Comics" Awards, only nobody calls them that.

They call them the Squiddies, a name that derives from a typo.  There used to be a comic book called The Suicide Squad.  Once, when someone in a newsgroup was asking a question about it, he accidentally typed "Suicide Squid" — which, when you think of it, is a much, much better name for a comic book.  This led to a rash of jokes, and to the Suicide Squid becoming the newsgroup mascot and…well, before they play me off, I'd like to thank everyone and to note that we live in fictitious times with fictitious comic books published by fictitious companies run by fictitious editors…

It was nice to see the late Ward Kimball included in the "In Memoriam" montage at this year's Oscars.  It would have been even nicer if he'd had something to do with the animation clip that accompanied his photo.  It was a scene of the hippo and alligator dancing from Fantasia — a scene rather famously animated by Preston Blair, Norm Ferguson and John Lounsbery.  Kimball did work a little on Fantasia (he handled Bacchus in the Pastoral sequence) but how difficult would it have been for the Academy to get a clip of, say, Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio?  Or any of Mr. Kimball's other great works?  Otherwise, it's like honoring a dead artist and showing someone else's paintings.

A fellow named Andrew Leal reminded me of this in an e-mail that also contained a bit of Hanna-Barbera trivia I hadn't known.  Some of us have wondered who did the singing voices of Yogi Bear, Boo Boo and Cindy Bear in the movie, Hey There, It's Yogi Bear.  Andrew has identified Cindy's sing-in as Jackie Ward, whose vocals have been heard on hundreds of TV shows and movies.  She's the lady who dubbed Natalie Wood's rendition of "The Sweetheart Tree" in the movie The Great Race.  She was the female voice in the songs of The Partridge Family.  And she's done lots of other things you can read about in this interview.  Thanks, Andrew!

This news report from Reuters makes the same mistake that a lot of news reports make every year about the Oscars…

Maverick director Michael Moore, director of the documentary "Bowling for Columbine," issued the bluntest denunciation of the war against Iraq from the winner's podium before an estimated audience worldwide of 1 billion people.

No, they did not have a billion people watching…not even close to a billion people.  This is one of the great myths of the Academy Awards.  (Another is that everyone votes with one, easily-explainable viewpoint; i.e., "Everyone voted for Roman Polanski because they want him to return to Hollywood," or whatever.  You'll read lots of things like that in the days to come.)  But no, the billion people figure is ridiculous.

While I'm at it, three people have e-mailed me to ask where they could find the exact text of what Moore said.  Here it is…

Whoa.  On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan from Canada, I'd like to thank the Academy for this.  I have invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and we would like to — they're here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction.  We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times.  We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president.  We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons.  Whether it's the fiction of duct tape or fiction of orange alerts we are against this war, Mr. Bush.  Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you.  And any time you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up.  Thank you very much.

Also: I checked the end-credits of the Oscars and someone was listed as being in charge of the seat-fillers.  I saw enough empty seats to conclude that either they changed their mind at the last minute and didn't use them, at least to the extent they usually have, or whoever was in charge of dispatching them did a poor job.

Dave Barry, the syndicated humorist, was among the writers of Steve Martin's material this year.  Here's an article he wrote about the experience.

Here's something I'm amazed everyone in show business doesn't know: When you introduce someone and you mention their name, audiences often applaud.  If you say it in the middle of a sentence, you usually get interrupted by at least a partial ovation, and you muddy the moment.  Some folks out there won't know if they should stop clapping so they can hear the rest of your sentence, or if this is the wrong moment, so you get that kind of hesitant "we're not sure" clapping.  If you're introducing, say, Peter O'Toole, put his name at the end of a sentence, if not the entire speech.  Give the audience a clean applause cue.

One other observation and then I have actual work to do.  I thought the audience shots were very sloppy this year, especially during Mr.  Martin's monologue.  Now, getting shots of celebs in the audience is not as easy as one might think.  The movements of the cameras are very carefully planned and rehearsed so that every camera is in the right place at the right time, and so the cameraguys don't get into each others' shots.  Still, the director usually has the monologue a day or two in advance and since they know where all the biggies will be sitting, they can actually practice getting a camera positioned to shoot each star as he or she is getting mentioned.  This year, of course, there was some question as to whether certain people were going to show, but I'm wondering if there wasn't some other security-related tech problem at work.  The cuts to the folks in the audience all seemed unnatural, and not because 75% of them were to Martin Scorsese and Richard Gere.

Okay, back to a deadline…

The overnight ratings say that last night's Academy Awards ceremony drew an estimated viewership of 37 million people in the U.S. of A.

As of this morning, the Census Bureau's population clock says there are about 291,000,000 people in this country.  So something like 12% of Americans watched an American event featuring (mostly) American stars giving awards to (mostly) American movies.

Okay, so in what countries do we assume interest is so much higher that the telecast makes up the other 963 million viewers?

Just received this e-mail from a friend who attended the Academy Awards last night.  The friend is very much against George W. Bush and the current war, which makes his remarks more interesting…

I think people at the Oscars mostly stand and clap for age or courage.  They went nuts for the Polanski vote not because they approve or disapprove of his personal life but because it was a courageous film to make and I think they were also applauding themselves for the courage to vote for it.  The person next to me commented on the pressure she felt to vote for the popular choice (Marshall for Chicago) or the sentimental choice (Scorsese).  She didn't vote for Polanski but felt it showed integrity for the Academy to do so.

Everyone also clapped for Moore when his win was announced because whatever you think of his film (I didn't see it) it took courage to make and courage to fight for and his work does something which most documentaries cannot do which is to achieve some commercial success and draw in audiences who usually would not be caught dead at a documentary.  When Moore started his anti-Bush remarks, I was among those who booed not because I disagree with him (I think Bush is a war criminal) but because it was the wrong time and wrong place and it was a bad way to do that.  From where I sat, I think about a quarter booed but it was hard to tell and it wasn't clear to me what everyone was booing.

There were some people there who loved Bush who were booing because of that and some who like me hate him but booed because they thought Moore's timing was abominable.  There were also some people there who hate Bush and thought Moore was out of place but who didn't boo because they didn't want their boos to be interpreted as pro-Bush.  There were also some people who didn't boo because they just aren't the kind of people to boo at a public event ever and especially at the Oscars.  Several said it was just undignified for an audience (especially that audience) to act like they were at The Jerry Springer Show no matter what anyone said on that stage.

I don't think anyone can say for certain what percentage booed and I'm sure no one can say how much of that was because they hate Bush and how much was because Moore went against decorum.

It was also quickly forgotten.  On the way out, I heard more talk about Halle Berry's outfit than Moore's remarks.

This is ME again.  I agree that the booing was ambiguous in its meaning, and I think it's interesting to see folks this morning trying to "spin" it as proving whatever they want to prove.  Some say Moore was "booed off the stage," which clearly wasn't the case.  Others misquote him as saying the war was fictitious.  The most interesting, possibly-valid remark I'm seeing is along the lines of, "I thought it was a rude moment, but everyone who voted for Moore knew he'd do something like that.  And maybe there were some foreign viewers watching who were impressed that in the United States of America, we allow a man to get up in front of the world and say that our leaders are liars.  That's one of the big differences between us and Iraq."  That's kind of a nice thought — and if Mr. Moore had phrased his remarks better, it might make me wish the show really did have a billion viewers.

One more thought on the booing (or not) of Michael Moore's remarks.  The prevailing thought throughout Hollywood today seems to be that the booing heard on the telecast was more from stagehands than Academy members.  It's all a function of where the microphones are.  The ones over the audience are pretty far away from them.  If Jack Nicholson stood up and screamed in the middle of the ceremony, you probably wouldn't hear it too well at home — perhaps not at all.  But the stage crew, which tends more towards the conservative side, knows where the open mikes are.  Some of them, knowing what Moore was likely to say, may even have moved into position to register disapproval.  Apparently, a couple of them did give the filmmaker a pretty rough time backstage, as per Steve Martin's comments.  This may explain why Moore, in backstage interviews, said he only heard about five people booing.  They may not have been booing down front.

Dave Mackey corrects me: The female announcer last night was Randy (not Randi) Thomas, who is most-often heard as the spokesperson for "Hooked on Phonics" and on the Game Show Network program, Lingo.  She has her own website at www.randythomasvo.com.  Dave also reminds me that the year before they used Glenn Close and Donald Sutherland, the Oscars had Peter Coyote as their announcer.  I don't know why it pleases me so to see them return to non-celebs but it does.

Oscar thoughts at what I hope is past the mid-point: Could we please have even more awkward shots of Martin Scorsese in the audience?  They couldn't get a camera near Olivia DeHavilland or Mickey Rooney when they were mentioned but Scorsese is in every third cut.

Steve Martin's doing okay after a very up-and-down monologue.  A couple of moments there, he had that "I'm bombing and I know it" look.  Betcha if he ever gets asked again — and he probably will be — he's going to go out and do some stand-up appearances just before for batting practice.  Or refuse to do it at all during a war.

Told you Michael Moore would get a mixture of boos and applause.  The thing he perhaps didn't realize (or didn't care about) was that even some audience members who agree with his opinions would boo him for voicing them then and there.  And of course, we had to get two shots of Scorsese — one leading the standing ovation; the other, expressing his disapproval of, at the very least, Moore's manners.

Usually, the Oscars have tuxedoed extras there to fill empty seats when stars are out in the lobby or restroom.  This was the first time I recall seeing so many empty seats in audience shots, and I'm wondering if this isn't related to the heightened security procedures.  Looks like they did away with seat-fillers.

The CGI Mickey presenting one award was cute but if ever a character belonged in cel animation, it's The Mouse.  It's interesting how the almost-traditional "animated star giving out an Oscar" has progressed over the years as the technology has improved.  It used to be that he was awkwardly matted-in and since he was pre-recorded, the human had to open the envelope and read the winner.  A few years ago, they went to having the cartoon character open the envelope but he'd read the winner with the card covering his mouth so that the tech staff could dub in the proper pre-recorded line.  Then once we got to CGI, it evolved to them being able to film five different endlines, and the director would run the correct one.  I'm curious as to whether whoever did Mickey's voice (didn't sound like Wayne Allwine, but it might have been) was there tonight, and the whole thing was animated via live motion-capture technology.  Someone ought to do a big article somewhere researching the various ways these spots have evolved.

A job I'm glad I don't have: Deciding which members of the Hollywood community who died during the preceding year to leave out of the montage of the departed…and which one was the most beloved and should therefore close it.  I guess Billy Wilder was a good choice, though I'm surprised they didn't insert a couple of cutaways to Martin Scorsese.

And hey, isn't that Neil Ross announcing?  Catch you later at the post-Oscars party.

Michael Moore reminds me of something an ultra-conservative friend of mine once said about Rush Limbaugh: "Yeah, he's an enormous putz at times and says things that make me wince, but I still find him entertaining."  That still applies to Moore for me but I'm getting the feeling that prolonged exposure may change that.  Wish he'd been more subtle.  On the other hand, many of the press reports are describing it as a "violent attack" on George W. Bush.  Shouldn't we save that term for an action actually intended to inflict physical harm?  Describing it in the same terms as what's going on in Iraq at the moment seems rather silly.

So how did I do with my predictions?  By my tally, I got 14 out of 24, which amazes me since I didn't see one of these movies and was going wholly on industry buzz.  Here's my list again with the actual winners listed in boldface…

• Picture: Chicago
• Director: Rob Marshall, Chicago Roman Polanski, The Pianist
• Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, Gangs of New York Adrien Brody, The Pianist
• Actress: Nicole Kidman, The Hours
• Supporting Actor: Chris Cooper, Adaptation
• Supporting Actress: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Chicago
• Screenplay (Original): My Big Fat Greek Wedding Talk To Her
• Screenplay (Adaptation): Chicago The Pianist
• Foreign Film: Nowhere in Africa
• Documentary (Short): Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks The Twin Towers
• Documentary (Feature): Bowling for Columbine
• Short Subject: I'll Wait For The Next One… This Charming Man
• Animation (Short): The ChubbChubbs
• Animation (Feature): Spirited Away
• Cinematography: The Road to Perdition
• Art Direction: The Lord of the Rings Chicago
• Visual Effects: The Lord of the Rings
• Costume Design: Chicago
• Makeup: Frida
• Film Editing: Chicago
• Original Score: The Hours Frida
• Original Song: "I Move On," Chicago "Lose Yourself," 8 Miles
• Sound Design: The Lord of the Rings Chicago
• Sound Editing: The Lord of the Rings

I think I called the other things okay.  The show was supposed to run three hours but it clocked in a little over three and a half.  (Playing it safe, I set my TiVo for 4 and change.  Matter of fact, it's still recording.)  I forgot one other "always happens" prediction I was going to make.  There's always one winner who is foreign and whose attempts to thank everyone in English come across as charming and memorable.

And I guess there's always the one category where everyone was absolutely sure that So-and-so was certain to win, but the Oscar went to someone else.  Roman Polanski for The Pianist?  Okay.  Everyone said it would be Rob Marshall and, if not, Scorsese.  This will probably be interpreted as a Harvey Weinstein backlash.

Sure glad the producer of Chicago mentioned Fosse.

Yes, that was indeed Neil Ross serving as the male announcer.  (The lady was Randi Thomas.)  I am delighted, not only because Neil is a friend and colleague but because he and Ms. Thomas are real announcers.  Last year, the Oscars went for celebrities (Glenn Close and Donald Sutherland, as I recall) instead of picking someone who has dedicated their career to the form.  I thought that was a bit of a slight to an important Hollywood craft.

You've been hearing Neil for years in cartoons, commercials, promos (he's the voice of the Game Show Network) and he really does it all as well as it can be done.  If you want to hear him in action, his demo can be accessed online over at his website.

There's a new hotel in Vegas called The Cannery Casino.  I haven't been there yet but I have been to their website.  If you hate sites that play music, stay away.  Theirs plays a catchy theme song that's been running through my head for a couple of days now.  So only go there if you want to have a catchy theme song run through your head for days.

The VH-1 series Where Are They Now? is covering actors who have played super-heroes. including our pal Judy Strangis.  It's the episode that airs on Monday and several other times in the coming week.  Consult, as the saying goes, your local listing.

Here's this week's plug for my forthcoming second volume of old columns about the comic book industry.  It has the shocking (to some) title of…