• I don't like seeing all these candidates for the Democratic nomination. I want to see the party nominate no one because if Trump ran unopposed, he'd lose in a landslide.

This is sad but probably inevitable. The Samuel French Theatre & Film Bookshop is closing at the end of March. The company's business has shifted largely online so they're shuttering the physical retail store on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.

I am probably a microscopic but real part of the reason as I haven't set foot in there in twenty-some years. But it was an interesting place to browse, usually among young actors and actresses looking for something that might boost their emerging careers: A play to be in, a scene to use for auditions, a book on acting, etc. I have several shelves of books that came from Samuel French. It was a good place for writers, too.

This Wednesday on your favorite Internet talk program, Stu's Show, there will be many topics but two main ones. One is televised award shows like the Oscars and Emmys and why they seem increasingly irrelevant and unwatched. What, if anything, can or should be done to change that? The other topic is Second-Generation Cartoon Voices — the folks who've taken over speaking for Bugs Bunny, Yogi Bear, Fred Flintstone and other ongoing classic characters.

Stu's guests to discuss these topics and others will include Bob Bergen, who's now the voice of Porky Pig and who also sits on the Board of Governors of the Television Academy, and there's also one other guest whose name I forget. Oh, right: It's me. I will be on the show and since my friend (and the show's host) Stu Shostak and I disagree a lot on these topics, it might just turn into a wrestling match with body slams and hair-pulling. If you're squeamish, don't watch.

Or you can just listen to it tomorrow. Stu's Show is simulcast on Roku TV if you wanna watch it, or various radio-like sources if you just wanna listen. It starts live at 4 PM Pacific Time (7 PM Eastern) and will run at least two hours, maybe three. Go to this page to find out the various ways to tune in.

Also, let me remind you that this coming Sunday, March 3, our friend Shelly Goldstein is doing her extraordinary one-woman show at the Catalina Bar and Grill. Well actually, it's one woman plus a guest performer (Mark Arthur Miller) and a pianist but the one woman is so entertaining that it feels like she can do it all by herself.

The show is called "How Groovy Girls Saved the World" and it's about sixties stars like Petula Clark, Lesley Gore and Mama Cass. Ms. Goldstein will favor us with tunes made famous by those ladies as well as her own smart/funny song parodies.

It may well sell out so if you're thinking of getting tickets, get 'em now at this link. What ever happens happens at the Catalina Bar and Grill, located at 6725 Sunset Boulevard, a couple blocks east of Highland in Hollywood. I'll be there among the smart people. Hope they don't notice me and toss me out.

Jim Warren was a very colorful publisher of not-very-colorful magazines. He's the guy who brought us Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, Famous Monsters of Filmland and many others. Depending on your age and who was in charge of those magazines when you read them, they could have been very important to you. Even at their lowest points, they stood way above most of the imitations…and boy, did they have imitations.

A lot of very talented people passed through those pages and one could make the case that, of all the publishers trying to appeal to the tastes of a certain youthful audience back then, no one had a better "read" on what the customers wanted than did James Warren. At the very least, you could argue that no one did as much with such low budgets as James Warren.

His story has been captured well in a new book by our friend Bill Schelly. Bill is a superb researcher and chronicler, and I was startled by how much he discovered about his subject that I didn't know. Warren, like so many other publishers back in the late fifties, was trying to replicate the lifestyle and financial success of Hugh Hefner without the funding. He wound up making his mark with monsters, not bunnies.

That's the tale Bill tells, along with Warren's revolving door of editors and the challenge of being a little guy on a big newsstand. If any of that sounds of interest to you, order a copy of James Warren: Empire of Monsters. It sure was of interest to me.

Sorry about the short notice. Today on Steve — which is what they call Steve Harvey's talk show — one of the guests is our pal, Disney Legend Floyd Norman. It airs at 2 PM in Los Angeles and different times in different climes.

Hey, remember the great game show, Numberwang? I posted a number of episodes like this one a few years ago and in each one, contestant Julie suffered a humiliating defeat. You'll be happy to hear that Julie's gone on to bigger and better things. Sunday evening, she won the Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role. She now calls herself Olivia Colman, presumably because she was so embarrassed by losing at Numberwang. Maybe they can bring her back now for Celebrity Numberwang…

The 'net is awash with criticisms of the Academy Awards telecast, the show so many people love to hate each year. The overall reaction was way better than expected and the ratings were up a tad from last year. I'd be curious to know if that was because more people tuned in or because more of those who did tune in stayed 'til the end.

Usually, the initial tune-in is indicative of how much people care about who wins and about how interested they are in what the host will do or say. This year, the latter was probably how interested they were in how the show would go without a host. But I do think interest in the actual awards is like 90% of it. (When this year's show started, by the way, my first thought which I almost Tweeted was that someone said, "Let's do it without a host and turn it into the Grammy Awards!" But before I could send that, Tina Fey and friends came out and it turned back into the Oscars.)

Anyway, the measure of how many people stay with it until the end is more a measure of how much they enjoyed the show. Whether the Academy and ABC try this format again may have something to do with that statistic.

Seems to me that even some of those who dumped on the ceremony had to dig deeper than usual to find things to bitch about. My friend Ken Levine took his annual snarky slam and halfway through it, I thought he was going to have to go after the uniforms on the valet car parkers to find things to insult.

As usual, a lot of people didn't like who won in some categories and they take it out on the telecast. Not having seen it, I have no idea if Green Book was deserving of Best Picture but I'll go out on a limb here and say it just might have gotten the most votes. A lot of those complaining about that seem to think the Academy should have done something to prevent such a travesty. I know how they feel. During the last presidential election, I thought CNN's coverage was atrocious, especially that part where they announced Donald Trump had won. They should have crowned Hillary instead. Since when do we let the actual votes get in the way of putting on a good show?

Segueing from the Oscars to Donald Trump — as all topics these days must — the guy in the Oval Office is interpreting Spike Lee's call to "make the moral choice between love versus hate" as a racist attack on Trump. Hey, why miss a chance to fire up your base to think you're fighting off those evil non-white people? As Jonathan Chait notes…

In theory, a president could listen to a call for making the moral choice of love against hate and doing "the right thing" and interpret it as an endorsement — or, at minimum, a nonpartisan statement. Trump processed it as a personal attack.

Chait also notes that bashing Lee from reading from notes was a callback to the claim that Obama was too dumb or ill-informed to not use a TelePrompter, even though of course he often spoke without one. Trump uses one too and he oughta use one more often…but then he doesn't care about getting things right.

But of course, the Stanley Donen clip they should have shown on the Oscars was not a scene from Movie Movie or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or Two for the Road or even (arguably) the best movie musical ever made, Singin' in the Rain. They should have shown Mr. Donen accepting his honorary Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1997 Academy Award ceremony…

Folks are complaining (of course) about certain names being omitted from the "In Memoriam" reel on the Oscars. We're going to be discussing that this Wednesday when I guest along with Voice Actor Bob Bergen on Stu's Show. I'll tell you shortly how to tune in and view what I expect will be a brawl with chairs being hurled and general mud-wrestling. My view is that, yeah, it's unfortunate but not worth the outrage that some folks (e.g., the host of Stu's Show) have about it.

The big omission so far among the outraged seems to be the great director Stanley Donen, who died the other day. I'm reasonably sure that there is a firm deadline for inclusion in the montage: You have to die by such-and-such a date or wait 'til next year…and Mr. Donen merely missed the deadline. But that doesn't mean I can't salute him here.

When the Oscars do, they'll doubtlessly stick in a clip from Singin' in the Rain or they could even opt for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or Two for the Road or several other films. I would go for the little noticed Movie Movie, which disappeared from cinemas in about the time it takes to say "Movie Movie." Here's a moment from that fine, funny film. That's George C. Scott as the producer of a 1930's Broadway revue and Barry Bostwick as his accountant…

Here's my verdict on this evening's host-free Oscar ceremony: From the standpoint of the folks who produce the telecast, this is about as good as the show can be.

When we think back on past memorable moments from ceremonies, what are we remembering? Well, a lot of what I recall are times when some win and acceptance speech provided a great, emotional few minutes…like Peter Finch's widow accepting for her deceased husband or Jack Palance being so charming in his thank-you remarks.

Fine…but the producers of the show don't make that happen. It's just like we can remember a thrilling moment in a baseball game when some batter hit a game-changing home run or an outfielder made an impossible catch and an even more impossible throw to home. Again, great…but the folks who covered that game and brought it to you on TV didn't make that happen.

Or we remember the Academy Awards show when some movie or star we dearly loved snagged a totally-unexpected win. That was thrilling but guess what? The producers of the show can't make that happen. They don't sit around and say, "Y'know, the show gets really dull around the two-hour mark. Let's give the Oscar for Best Sound to someone no one expects who'll thank all his dead relatives in an adorable way."

They have this problem: The awards are the awards and the winners are the winners. I don't know how you could give an award for Best Cinematography any faster or any other way than they did this evening. Some presenter has to make an entrance. He or she has to say something. They have to read the nominees. They have to announce the winner. The winner has to make his/her way to the stage and you have to give them time to say something. Then they have to exit and you get on to the new award.

It's simply going to take X minutes…and as we've just seen, people would get real angry if you tried to save 45 seconds and said, "Hey, let's give that one during a commercial break and just show the acceptance speech when we come back."

Getting back to our baseball analogy: If nothing happens in the third, fourth and fifth innings, it's beyond the telecast producers' power to make those innings interesting. And don't even think of editing them out.

There have also been some memorable times on Oscar shows because a host was very funny or because someone whipped up an incredible musical number using one of the nominated songs. But with the songs, the producers of the show are stuck with whatever's nominated and most of the nominees the last few years have not lent themselves to spectacular presentations. They're songs we almost never hear anywhere but in the films and we sometimes barely hear them in the films.

And while some hosts have been great, what this evening's show demonstrated is that maybe it ain't worth the risk of having one. It's not a necessity. A host tonight would have added 15-25 minutes to a show that was too long without one. If he or she wasn't funny — as some usually-funny folks haven't been in that tough, tough room — all the host does is make a long show longer.

I think we should stop viewing the Academy Awards (or the Emmys or the Tonys, etc.) as big variety shows and start thinking of them more like sportcasts. It's the televising of a game…and sometimes, games are boring. And sometimes, your favorites don't win and there's nothing the producers of the telecast can do to change that except maybe cut out the padding. They did that tonight and got a much better show than most folks expected. If you think they didn't, tell me what they could have done that was within the producers' power to do.

Not having a host is working out better than anyone expected. Now, if we could just get rid of all that envelope-opening and the giving-out of awards…

The female voice you hear introducing everyone is Randy Thomas, who has been part of more awards shows than Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep and Bob Hope combined. She's great at it and someday, someone else will introduce someone else who will present an award to her.

On the 'net, I see a lot of folks on the web complaining about "politics" on the Oscars. I haven't heard a lot of that in the show, though admittedly I've been fast-forwarding here and there. I have two responses to that complaint, one being that a lot of the films being honored are political. If you produced a movie about some grand racial or gender-related injustice and it won and you had your 45 seconds (or however long they get) to speak to the world, you could talk a bit about that injustice or you could thank your agent. What's it gonna be?

And maybe I'm too cynical about these things but I don't see most of the folks complaining about "politics" complaining if the "politics" matched their own viewpoints. They might have a valid point if they'd just admit that's what bothers them.

On with the show…

This is from a Jeff Ross, who I assume is neither the TV producer Jeff Ross, nor the stand-up roastmaster Jeff Ross…

You've been in comics long enough to have worked with guys from comics' first generation like Jack Kirby and Dan Spiegle. You were part of the next generation like Marv Wolfman and Len Wein. And now you've seen one or two other generations of guys and gals who got into the field after you. I don't know how many generations you'd call that but I got to wondering what you see as the primary differences between them. And what do you think they all have in common?

Ooh. Good question, Jeff. I'll answer it but I reserve the right to amend or add-on to the following answer if I think more about it.

Off the top of my head, I would say that the thing they all have in common is or was the desire to create work that an audience might want. Creative people are motivated to create. Those of us who could draw wanted to draw and if we could make a decent living at it, great. Same with those of us who could write. That seems like a silly, obvious answer but in fifty-some-odd years of intermingling with other folks who create(d) comics, I have seen so many of us bond over this common motive.

What I think was unique about the First Generation of Comic Book Creators was that they were all Depression-era kids or they grew up in a family that had been severely impacted by the Depression. They were all about making a decent living. They did not for the most part* think it was possible to ever get really rich doing comic books but you could raise a family and live to a ripe old age. Even better, you'd be doing it by doing something you liked a lot better than the alternatives open to you. You would never become famous and most did not ever expect to hear any applause from their audience…but it would put food on the table for now. Maybe — and this was a Big Maybe — you could luck into another kind of writing or drawing that offered more in fame and/or fortune.

*The asterisk in the previous paragraph was to note that a few — and of course, Jack Kirby was one of them — envisioned that it would become possible to become really rich in comics. Jack just wasn't able to manage it for himself.

The Second Generation of Comic Book Creators — roughly anyone who got in between about '65 and '90 — got in because they loved comics by the First Generation and wanted to be part of that world. The guys in the First Generation had loved newspaper strips and most of them accepted comic books as a reasonable, albeit less lucrative alternative to becoming Chester Gould. Still, the "making a sufficient living" goal was more vital with them. The Second Generation, being well aware of how unrewarded Siegel and Shuster and others had been, didn't expect riches but more of them thought they'd do comics until something more rewarding came along. Unlike Generation 1 though, they started in an era of conventions and fan publications so they expected and maybe craved more in the way of celebrity.

The Third Generation — everyone since — saw the Image founders and certain others get really wealthy and well-known. For many who work in comics now, it's a dual profession: Do the comics and do the conventions. They have more alternatives because if you're good enough to work for Marvel, you're good enough to work in many different fields. Some view comics as an entryway to Hollywood, gaming, etc. Some love the form and the ultimate goal is to do more in it and ride it to new levels. To too many, telling a story is less important than being noticed — and what better way to get noticed than to take comics (or just some established properties) somewhere they've never been before? We'll be able to write a better, more accurate overview of this generation around the time the next one displaces it.

This is a fast answer to a question that deserves some slower ones. You could, natch, carve the generations into four or five or almost any number.

I got into comics in roughly 1970 so I should be solidly in Generation Dos. But in my case, I never expected to get in, never expected to stay, never allied with one publisher, nor stayed anywhere long enough to get invited to most of the Christmas parties. By '75, I was making less than a quarter of my annual income from comics and it's largely stayed that way. I feel privileged to have known and worked with so many in Generation 1 but most of my friends are in Generation 2 and I'm not sure where to apply for membership in 3. Maybe I need my own Generation but Jack Kirby deserves one more. And Stan Lee should be made an honorary member of all three.

If you shop at Costco — as I did yesterday — this video will tell you something about their stores that you may not know. At least, I didn't know it…

In e-mails and forum posts, I've gotten a lot of response to my negative thoughts about Stan & Ollie, the new film that purports to tell us the story of the latter days of Laurel and Hardy. A number of folks have agreed with me, though some of them said something like, "Everything you said about the film is true but I enjoyed it anyway." That's fine. I'm not out to change anyone's mind about it. In a way, I envy those who liked it because a couple of hours of their lives were happier than the corresponding hours in my life.

And a couple of folks didn't get the fact that my displeasure was not all about how the film departed from the truth. I understand that movies do that, especially biopics. I love Yankee Doodle Dandy despite the fact that its storyline resembles George M. Cohan's actual life about as much as it resembles mine. I just didn't like the story that Stan & Ollie presented and thought it did not make The Boys look as good as anyone who knew them said they were.

I acknowledge my views seem to be that of a teensy minority. They occasionally are.

Unlike what feels like a lot of people on the Internet, I am fine with you liking a movie that I don't like or vice-versa. I do not understand why anyone thinks that opinions of books, TV shows, movies, pizza or anything need to be unanimous.

As you may know, my favorite movie is probably It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Note that I always say "my favorite," not "the best." I love the film in part because of what it is and in part because of what it meant to my life and in part out of love for the cast list. About four times a year though, I seem to run into someone on some forum who wants to argue that it isn't funny the same way they'd argue that the square root of 25 is not 11. If we've all learned nothing from the World Wide Web, we should at least have learned that whatever your opinion of something is, there are plenty of people out there who disagree. Why, there are even people who profess to like cole slaw.