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.

What was it, you ask? It was Johnny Depp, made up as the orange-haired, green-eyed, gap-toothed Mad Hatter—the character he plays in Tim Burton's reimagining of Alice in Wonderland.

Alice is the latest collaboration between Depp and Burton in a partnership that stretches back 20 years, to 1990's Edward Scissorhands. Since then, they've partnered on Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride and Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.  Burton's latest exercise in cinematic oddity purportedly has a budget in the neighborhood of $200 million.

Now, I know Depp and Burton are established commodities. But I have to wonder how many other people respond to that image the same way I do. Maybe I'm just drifting into old-age curmudgeon-dom, but this picture just freaks me out. Needless to say, I have no interest in seeing the movie … let alone taking the wife and kids.

How about you? Any thoughts on Burton and Depp's latest out-there exercise? Do you plan to see Alice in Wonderland or skip it, and why?

Sure,

But it was still enough to push the Martin Scorsese thriller to the top of the movie heap again, besting newcomers Cop Out ($18.6 million) and The Crazies ($16.5 million).

All three films are rated R, and all seem largely geared toward moviegoing men. Cop Out whittles that demographic into a narrower swathe—old-as-dirt moviegoing men like me who can still hum the theme music from Beverly Hills Cop if asked. (Axel F, anyone?)

If that's the case, they missed the mark—at least with me. The Kevin Smith-helmed Cop Out is an extended homage to the buddy-cop movies of the 1980s, only with fewer mullets and more swearing. It's a strange thing to pay homage to, frankly. I grew up in the 1980s, and I never felt any particular nostalgia for the genre. And even if I did, I'd want a better homage than this.

Major film studios apparently assume that children hibernate this time of year: Why else would they release movies—albeit three very different movies— that essentially target the same demographic? If families were prone to brave the cold, harsh winter and go see something, you'd think studios would make more money if they gave them something to see. Don't you think?

As it was, The Wolfman turned out to be a pretty icky mess—which, for me, was disappointing. I've always had an appreciation for old-school movie monsters: You know, Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the original 1941 Wolf Man. Granted, these classic Universal uglies were always primarily designed to scare the shoelaces off moviegoers, but they had a couple of interesting points going for them, I think.

For one, their power to scare was rooted in a pretty traditional moral framework. The Wolf Man is a great example: The werewolf in some ways resembles, as I said in my review, the beast lurking inside us all—our rage and lust and more animalistic instincts that we manage to keep kenneled most of the time. For Christians, these werewolves might serve as metaphors for our hardcore fallen natures—what humanity would look like without the saving grace of God.

Also, old-school horror flicks were almost devoid of gore. Sure, we understood the 1941 Wolf Man was probably eating people left and right, too, but did we actually see it? No. These movies, if made frame-for-frame today, would've garnered a PG rating, if that—perhaps downgraded from a G for "menace and excessive facial hair."

The new Wolfman, to its credit, carries forward some of the old Wolf Man's philosophical underpinnings, for what they're worth. But it ramps up the gore something terrible and thus becomes something monstrous itself. And frankly, it's not like the film demanded all that extra blood: The Wolfman felt like a film that really wanted to be a gothic, PG-13 creepfest—but someone had other ideas and turned it into Saw with whiskers.

The result was, as I said, pretty disappointing—and pretty confusing, really. I mean, if your presumed core audience consists of teens looking for a little scare, why ratchet up the blood and potentially keep some of them out? Lots of studies have shown that PG-13 flicks are far more profitable than R-rated films. It just doesn't make sense—like hiring Hugh Grant to star in the next Rambo movie.

Of course, if you're a guy making the choice, you also want a movie with a little something extra that will keep you from nodding off and ultimately receiving a well-placed elbow in the rib cage. (Not to mention … the look!) So what's out there?

I personally love North by Northwest. Sure, it's more "romantic adventure" than "romantic comedy," but Cary Grant is top notch. And he always packs plenty of wit in amongst the suave charm. Speaking of Cary, An Affair to Remember is a universal favorite. A little slow at the top, but the big finale is one of the best acted and directed romantic moments to ever hit the screen.

OK, how about some other classics you might not have considered: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur are both funny and wonderful. Ditto Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck in Meet John Doe. And lest you think I've been bribed by the Frank Capra estate, Casablanca is perhaps the best unrequited love tale out there. (And for you guys, Humphrey Bogart is gritty and Ingrid Bergman is stunningly beautiful.)

So, there are a few of my suggestions. Anybody else have a favorite pic to offer for the romantically needy among us?

A Nicholas Sparks novel-turned-movie first shocked me with its tear-duct-draining ability in Los Angeles when I saw The Notebook. At the end of the show, even grown men in the enormous, loudly sniffling audience were grabbing for tissues. Dear John is more of the same: a far-fetched, histrionic flick from the Sultan of Sap. (Sparks probably owns stock in paper products.)

This picture didn't leave me teary-eyed, though women were crying all around me. I was just really irritated with Savannah (played by Amanda Seyfried), who jilted her soldier fiancée, John (Channing Tatum), while he was deployed.

Nonetheless, after recovering from my blinding ire and others' sobbing, I learned something from this film: Visceral reactions are often worth reexamining.

When reviewing the movie, I had to look beyond my own emotional blinders. I had to consciously step back and reevaluate the positive content in the film in order to be fair to Sparks and his cast. To her credit, Savannah does stick with her man in the end—and, OK, it's not John, but at least she's made a commitment. And John's self-sacrifice and forgiveness, which could be called redemptive and somewhat Christ-like, are worth some reflection.

Now, these things aren't enough for me to say, "Run out and see this picture!" Frankly, you're probably better off not, especially if you have a head cold. But they were enough to make me reconsider my own predispositions. I remembered anew to step back and give the benefit of the doubt.

We've read stories on how celebrities influence us. We've read stories on how we're growing more obsessed with how we look. We've even read stories on how celebrities affect that obsession. But I've never read a story quite like this.

There's a woman in China (London's Daily Mail just calls her Xiaoqing) who desperately wants to reunite with her boyfriend. No news there, right? What's she doing ... sending him flowers? Texting him sweet messages?

Of course not. No, Xiaoqing plans to undergo a bevy of plastic surgery procedures so she can look exactly like Jessica Alba.

Seems her boyfriend has a thing for the Fantastic Four starlet, and he loved it when Xiaoqing would make herself look as much like Alba as she could. The boyfriend even bought Xiaoqing a blond wig to wear. But eventually, Xiaoqing decided she'd rather look more like herself, so she dumped the wig. And he dumped her.

Now Xiaoqing wants him back, and she's willing to undergo a slew of cosmetic surgical procedures to make herself into her beau's dream girl. Doctors say it's possible for her to get the look she wants, though not necessarily advisable. All those cosmetic cuts and incisions and stitches? It can be dangerous and it'll be certainly irreversible, they tell her.

No matter, Xiaoqing says.

"I'm not only doing it for my ex-boyfriend but for myself," she tells the Mail. "I am a psychologically weak person. I want to do something to challenge myself and build a strong personality through it."

Is there, perhaps, a tinge of irony here that she's going about this psychological overhaul by becoming someone else? And someone who played The Invisible Woman, at that?