I know this because when I lived abroad I didn't often have access to English-language programming. (And my comprehension of Chinese and Arabic is beyond lousy, which makes foreign sitcoms a lot less funny.) When I returned to the States for a few weeks, I was a little shocked. I still remember my jaw hitting the coffee table during American primetime. "What did he just say?!" I asked a friend after a TV character dropped various verbal bombs and used Christ's name in vain. "I must be hallucinating! They can't do that!"

"Knowing you, you probably are hallucinating about something, but not about the language," said a supportive friend. "They can say just about anything they want to on TV now."

Gone are the days of more effective FCC censorship—and a recent court ruling against tight regulation of profanity on live TV is discouraging.  What's more discouraging, though, is the fact most people aren't outraged by it. So when I read this quote from NBC contributor Susan C. Young, I nodded my head in agreement—and with some sadness:

I have to disagree with her on one point, though. Going back really can happen—maybe not on a cultural level, but on a personal one, at least. Because if I'm not mistaken, the remote control is not controlling us. If any desensitized souls want to experience the same level of shock I did when I returned to the States, it's available at their fingertips. It's called the "off" button.

I wanted someone—whether an individual or a family—to do a media fast for, ideally, a month. That means no television, video games, social texting or networking, movies, or Internet usage beyond what is required for work or school.

Why am I doing this? Well, I was forced to go without media several times in several foreign countries, and the experience taught me a lot. Lack of Internet connection, TV, movies, and even electricity caused me to look elsewhere for entertainment, news and, at times, companionship. I learned so much about myself and God that I had to write about it.

I've tried to recruit people via social networking, face-to-face conversation, e-mail and phone calls. Everyone thinks it's a fabulous idea. But no one is willing to do it. Even when I told them they could cut the fast in half—give up electronic media for just two weeks—I still didn't get any takers.

I wonder why.

Yes, having no media access might feel strange, and maybe even isolating, at first. Yes, it could initially feel like an inconvenience. It might even cause boredom during the first couple of days. But aren't a few digital hunger pangs worth it in order to learn about how media truly affects you in ways you're not even aware as you're swimming in it?  Isn't it OK to abstain for only 14 days to gain insight into your family dynamics or personal habits and, possibly, change them for the better?

This crude presentation didn't do any favors for the films it cheered (The Twilight Saga: New Moon) or the soon-to-be-released flicks it advertised (Grown Ups). Shackled with all the sleaze, lame jokes and low-ball shenanigans on hand, nothing looked appealing.

The network's execs have been making statements of late about changing to fit the times, keeping tabs on today's youth culture and becoming more socially aware. But if that's the case, the Movie Awards hardly felt like an event that's in tune with today's youth. Instead, it seemed like a gig run by fiftysomethings who never grew out of a frat house mindset when it comes to what they consider chuckle-worthy.

What am I talking about, you ask?

Well, if you missed the show (and I hope you did), here a just a few of the gags you can be glad you didn't witness: a "Kiss Cam" segment that prodded celebs to smooch and focused on Jonah Hill and Russell Brand in an open-mouthed make-out session; Steve Carell joking about "s‑‑‑ting" himself; Katy Perry auditioning for the role of Miss Cleavage 2010; an award recipient accepting his trophy on behalf of himself … and his genitals; an awkwardly staged girl-on-girl lip-lock between Sandra Bullock and Scarlett Johansson; Tom Cruise trying once again to revive his image, this time by dirty dancing in a fat suit; and a camera zooming in for a close-up of Christina Aguilera's crotch, which was emblazoned with a flashing neon heart.

Get the sense of things?

The one serious moment in the broadcast, when young actor Tom Felton expressed genuine gratitude for his "Best Villain" award (for his role in the last Harry Potter pic), was rudely upstaged by Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell hanging overhead and cussing a blue streak.

And they weren't the only foul-mouthed guests. Everybody was dropping the f-bomb. In fact, the crudities got so profuse and frequent that they became the biggest "giggle" of the night. But not everyone was laughing.

"The more craven bits, far from selling the films, often just drew attention to how creatively bankrupt they really are. Is someone actually more likely to see Grown Ups after watching [Adam] Sandler, [David] Spade et al. trot out their lukewarm shtick?" asked the L.A. Times entertainment blogger Steven Zeitchik. "It's probably not an accident that the biggest conversation piece from last night wasn't about a film but about the frequent swearing."

In fact, the last acceptance speech of the night, by New Moon cast member Peter Facinelli, was filled with so many f-words that the censors only caught about half of them.

The broadcast's dearth of anything that might be called creative or inspiring was underlined by Kristen Stewart's acceptance of her "Best Female Performance" statute for New Moon. She looked bored to tears in every camera shot we'd seen of her during the evening and appeared almost embarrassed to be walking up onstage. "I guess I agree with you," the actress mumbled after receiving her award. "Twilight is awesome. Woo."

Her underwhelmed reaction spoke volumes.

Mom says she had to bite her tongue to keep from saying, "Well, Mrs. Mudd, I hardly think you're the one to question me."

Ha. But I digress.

I was the only Meredith I'd ever known until I was 19 and went to the East Coast. Nowadays the name is fairly common—but not nearly as common as Isabella and Jacob, 2009's most popular baby names.

Jacob and Isabella have been popular for years, of course, but there was a spike in Isabella's popularity this year, and some experts say it was because of the Twilight series. It seems the werewolf and gloomy teenage girl may be impacting new parents.

What's more, the name Cullen, the prime player in Stephanie Meyers' vampire books (and, maybe more importantly right now, movies) rocketed up 297 spots in the past year and is now the 485th most popular baby name. That is definitely a Twilight effect.

I can see it now: a kindergarten classroom full of 10 brooding Bellas, eight hairy Jacobs and one Cullen who shimmers in sunlight. But hang in there, Cullen! At this rate when you turn 19, maybe just your sparkles will turn heads, and not your name.

Without fail there are young children at the R-rated film screenings I attend as a Plugged In reviewer. At Repo Men—a sci-fi/action flick that has so much blood, violence and sexual activity that no adult should see it either—there were three young kids there with their grandmother. The oldest was probably about 6.

After the movie, I asked the older woman, "Wow. Should they have seen this film?" She replied, "Oh, they're used to that sort of thing. It won't affect them much."

My tongue is still bloody from biting it.

Occasionally, I challenge someone who believes such things. And if I'd had a chance to address it that night, I might have reminded this woman of the research done on children who watch such content:

Youth exposed to violent images have a much greater likelihood of behaving inappropriately, or even violently, with peers and adults.

Children who watch adult content are more prone to underage smoking and drinking. Such content also increases sexual behavior among adolescents.

R-rated content causes a spike in children's sensation-seeking behavior—apparently because real-life seems boringly slow when compared to onscreen drama.

The Centers for Disease Control have found that violence is the second leading cause of death for young people between the ages of 10 and 24, with 5,686 youth murdered each day. Now consider the senate judiciary committee that found an average American child will see 200,000 violent acts and 16,000 murders on TV alone by age 18. A steady diet of R-rated films would push those numbers up dramatically.

So, madam moviegoer with grandkids, I'm sorry, but you're wrong. And I hope your family and others don't have to pay the consequences.

It's time to begin Plugged In's official live blog of the Oscars. Our red-carpet invites must have gotten lost in the mail this year, so we'll be watching it on television, just like you are, and writing about whatever seems news- or noteworthy to us. Please feel free to add your comments as we go along, and we'll try to address them on the fly. All times are U.S. Mountain Standard. Refresh your browser window to see our latest comments.

6:19 p.m.

Paul Asay (Plugged In Associate Editor): So I've torn open the bag of Doritos you brought, Steve, cracked my first Mountain Dew and am all ready for the Oscars--and Plugged In's first foray into the world of on-the-fly blogging. And what a night it will be, don't you think?

Steven Isaac (Plugged In Editor): Hmmm. I see here that by averaging the durations of the last 25 Oscar telecasts, subtracting 3 hours and then dividing by 2, we'll be done here in exactly 7.42 hours. Are we going to take nap breaks or just keep chugging soda all night?

Paul: Soda, Steve, soda.

Steven: Fine. But I'm not doing the Dew with you. I'm an old-school, straight-up Coca-Cola man myself.

Paul: OK, since nobody's paying us anything for all these product placements, why don't we get started with the most important question of the night: What'll take home Best Picture?

Steven: Blue is the new gold this year. No question in my mind that it'll be Avatar all the way. The whole point of this year's Oscar changes (10 nominees for Best Picture among them) is to make regular folks start thinking the Oscars are relevant to them again. And a whole lotta regular folks have seen Avatar. And most of them have loved it. Plus, the Academy voters do not want to antagonize the Na'vi. They've seen what happened to those surly earthlings.

Paul: True. Thing is, though, I don't think it's that great of a movie. I mean, wasn't it just sort of Dances With Wolves under a different moon? I'm thinking The Hurt Locker's going to take it. Gritty, taut, compelling ...

Steven: And quite a bit more foul than Avatar, if I remember your review correctly. (Not that that ever stopped Oscar from loving a film before.)

Paul: No it didn't.

Steven: Looks like they're done with their red-carpet dress-examinations and interviews. The theme music's coming up. We're under way, everybody.

6:33 p.m.

Paul: Wow. Those are quite the outfits. Getting off to an interesting start, I'd say, with Neil Patrick Harris.

Steven: And why wouldn't he get things rolling with a dope reference?

Paul: Oh, and they just talked about Woody Harrelson being high. Hmmm.

Steven: Off-color jokes and recognitions for big stars are always the order of the day each year as the Oscars get started. So much so that Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin's gag about a threesome probably went virtually unnoticed in most homes watching right now. But on a positive note, they made fun of the fact that movies are so often made based on video games!

6:48 p.m.

Paul: Oh, that Christoph Waltz leaves with the first Oscar (for Best Supporting Actor). No surprise there, but I hear he was incredible. You saw the film, Steve?

Steven: Incredible performance in the middle of an incredible film ... in quite a few ways, artistically but also as it comes to some pretty extreme violence, too.

Paul: I was kinda rooting for Christopher Plummer ... overdue from The Sound of Music. But I think Quentin Tarantino should get some sort of an award just for his chin. It's pretty impressive.

6:58 p.m.

Paul: Best Animated Film. Up wins. That makes me happy. I'm feeling so ... up! As if my house was being pulled into the sky by balloons! In a great year for animated films, this was still the best of the bunch. 'Course, Fantastic Mr. Fox was pretty impressive, too.

7:10 p.m.

Steven: We talked a bit earlier about some of the negative content included in this year's Oscar open, and didn't really have any time to talk "shop." So I want to register the fact now that that was one of the lamest opens I've seen in years and years. Martin and Baldwin can be really funny when they want to be and when they have good writers (the subject that's just coming up right now on the screen). But this just didn't cut it.

Paul: But on the up side, these awards are cruising right along. We might be outta here in 15 minutes or so, don't you think? And I think Tina Fey's hair looks nifty.

Steven: The Hurt Locker wins its first of the evening for Original Screenplay.

Paul: Hurt Locker, 1, Avatar, 0.

Steven: And about Tina's hair. It looks very, very much like my wife's hair looked in 2001. So I'm not so sure it's as cutting edge as Tina might think it is.

Paul: I'm just jealous when I see anyone who still has hair.

7:19 p.m.

Paul: The John Hughes salute is pretty nostalgic. I think I saw every single one of his films when I was a kid. That was before I became a Plugged In movie critic and therefore far more discerning, of course.

Steven: The burner from The Breakfast Club was everything I never was in high school. I was shy, nice and cared about everybody. That guy did none of those things ... on the surface. But on the inside he was more like me than I knew back then. Must be a lesson in that somewhere--and I hope its not that I was a closet burner.

7:28 p.m.

Paul: Just noticed the ratings box on the screen. It's TV-14 with a string of letters after it. Kind of interesting that, for an awards show that's technically for the "whole family," the rating is fairly exclusionary. Would they be covering just in case something unforseen happens? Or does it address some of the plunging necklines? Hmmm.

Steven: Or did they know going in that they were going to push a few boundaries?

Steven: Best Animated Short goes to a film that looks like it tweaks commercialism in society. Isn't it about time for an ABC commercial break?

7:39 p.m.

Paul: Love Ben Stiller as one of the Na'vi. Shouldn't he be taller, though?

Steven: This is the funniest thing all night. Clean, clever, self-aware. Can't say as I'm a huge Ben Stiller fan when it comes to his movies, but this is great.

7:52 p.m.

Steven: Geoffrey Fletcher won for Adapted Screenplay for Precious. My immediate response to his halting acceptance speech: You're not drawing a blank, like you think you are. You're the realest guy that's been on stage yet.

7:59 p.m.

Paul: The big categories haven't seen a surprise yet. Mo'Nique has nabbed Best Supporting Actress for her role in Precious. And, I must say, it's richly deserved. She played an absolute monster, but she still managed to give the character just a bit of heartbreaking humanity. It was a brutal role in a worthwhile but brutal film.

8:20 p.m.

Paul: Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner are up, talking about how horror "doesn't get the respect it deserves." A good montage, but I got to say, the scariest thing I've seen tonight was George Clooney's glare.

Steven: Why is it that we like to be scared by movies? We can disagree with the usefulness or morality of horror films all we want (and we do!) but it's indisputable that people adore jump scenes and creepy blades for fingers on mad men (from Freddy to Edward Scissorhands). Sin nature? Or just thrill-ride silliness? It's something Christians have been grappling with for as long as movies have been trying to scare us--and long before that.

Paul: Yeah, pretty interesting. It's something we do a fair amount of talking about at Plugged In. Man, after seeing the complete montage, I think I know what that TV-14 rating was for ... nothing like seeing aliens jump out of people's rib cages and centipedes crawling into people's mouths to make an Oscar ceremony complete.

Steven: And now they're on to the next thing: an award for sound effects. There's something that makes a huge difference in horror movies. Because if you've ever watched a scary movie with the sound off, you know that it's usually more funny than scary. We all really respond to sound.

8:27 p.m.

Paul: Another award for The Hurt Locker. Wow. I think that makes it Hurt Locker 3, Avatar 1. Steve, are you still sure Avatar's going to win Best Picture?

Steven: Well, sure, why shouldn't I be? Didn't the Na'vi get to vote for their own film? And an alien vote counts twice. They're just letting all the little guys win a few before gobbling up the big one.

8:35 p.m.

Paul: Jeto wonders whether we think the Paranormal Activity spoof clip was funny. It was! But not as funny as Ben Stiller's Na'vi impersonation.

Steven: Cinematography award goes to Avatar. So, Paul, that's one more for the blue team.

8:39 p.m.

Paul: James Taylor's playing for the annual "In Memoriam" segment. This is one of my favorite parts of the ceremony, as morbid as that probably sounds. Natasha Richardson, Karl Malden ... I feel the sudden need to get a tissue.

Steven: Um, I didn't know "In My Life" was supposed to be a sad, funeral-type song. My wife and I had this sung at our wedding!

8:50 p.m.

Steven: My daughter's in ballet. She'd love the dance montage if I dared let her watch a TV-14 evening of Hollywood hype! (She's 9.) Maybe it'll be on YouTube tomorrow.

Paul: Tomorrow? It's probably posted right now!

Steven: This is much better than the Vegas-style stuff at the beginning of the show. Nicely choreographed. Very expressive in a cool, old-school way.

Paul: I never knew you were such a dance nerd, Steve.

Steven: A dancing daughter has a way of changing a man.

8:55 p.m.

Paul: Avatar's pulled even with The Hurt Locker with its win in Best Visual Effects. Maybe you were right after all, Steve.

Steven: A half-billion-dollar production budget should buy you at least a Best Visual Effects award.

9:04 p.m.

Paul: Well, it looks like lots of you are pretty pleased with Up's win for Best Original Score. I completely agree. I just hear the first notes of that song and I just start thinking of Paradise Falls, talking dogs and balloons. And I can't help but smile.

Steven: The Cove has won Best Documentary Feature.

Paul: What a coincidence! Steve and I are wearing Snuggies here at Plugged In headquarters, too!

9:12 p.m.

Paul: You know, I don't think I've heard an acceptance speech yet that made me roll my eyes. Is this unusual, or am I just getting more tolerant in my old age?

Steven: The night is young yet--at least by Oscar standards.

As some of you may have heard, Focus on the Family (Plugged In's parent organization) will be airing a commercial during the Big Game this weekend. The ad—featuring former Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and his mom—has become a pretty big deal around here—so much so that execs have taken to wearing shoulder pads and doing chest bumps in the hall. Morning devotionals are sounding more and more like play calls ("Isaiah 26:12 … hike!"). And I'm expecting Dippin' Dots vendors to show up sometime today.

But if the Super Bowl ad has triggered a certain eccentricity on the Focus campus, it's made some folks positively apoplectic outside it.

I've not seen the ad. My boss has not seen the ad. My boss's boss has not seen the ad. Very few of us inside the building have seen it, much less outside our pleasant, cubicle-lined confines. Nevertheless, several groups have asked CBS to yank the thing.

"By offering one of the most coveted advertising spots of the year to an anti-equality, anti-choice, homophobic organization, CBS is aligning itself with a political stance that will damage its reputation, alienate viewers, and discourage consumers from supporting its shows and advertisers," read, in part, a letter to the network signed by a number of women's groups.

Sports columnist Gregg Doyel, who writes for cbssports.com, took a different tack: "If you're a sports fan, and I am, that's the holiest day of the year. It's not a day to discuss abortion."

The ironies, of course, abound. I mean, we're talking about a sporting event that features advertisements devoted to beer, scantily clad women and folks getting thwacked in the crotch.

"Objectionable, after all, is in the eye of the beholder," wrote James Poniewozik, television columnist for Time magazine. "It seems ridiculous to start saying that espousing religion … is objectionable in an ad environment of alcohol-pushing animals, slapstick violence and Danica Patrick's cleavage."

For a while, news-related searches for Focus' ad dominated Google. And maybe that's not too surprising since our media culture loves a good row. But my guess is that when folks actually see the ad their reaction will be along the lines of, "Wow. And groups were up in arms over this? An ad celebrating families?"

When I was a religion reporter at a Colorado newspaper, I covered Focus on the Family quite a bit. And I learned pretty quickly that some people love the organization and some people—well, don't.

Now, frankly, I can understand why some folks might disagree with elements of what Focus does: We don't shy away from wading through controversial waters when conviction calls and Scripture specifies. That's part of what the leaders here feel called to do. But back in the day, one of my sources told me something that feels pretty appropriate right about now:

"Focus is about as controversial as flossing your teeth."

And really, when it comes right down to it, that's how Focus perceives itself: a dispensary of oral hygiene tools—which might hurt a little at the time, but are designed to help and heal, not harm.