[Some might think I’m unqualified to weigh in on the Academy Awards because I think almost every movie would be better if it were shorter, i.e., if there were less of it, but when I was 15 and obese and had divorcing parents and not a friend in the world and was living in a suburb of Los Angeles and my ambition was to write screenplays, I set my alarm for 5 in the morning just so that I could watch the live press conference announcing the nominees for the Academy Awards—that’s how much I cared.]

1) Everything is better with bacon. I went to a dinner party tonight and I brought kale with garlic and bacon. The dishes had to be related to a movie up for best picture, and the movie I got assigned was Munich, and my dish needed to be a vegetable side dish, and… well, think about it for a minute. A vat of cooked, flavorless carrots? (It’d be authentic!) But internet research reveals that kale — a hardy, bitter, delicious member of the cabbage family — has done quite well through the ages in Germany: there are delicious recipes from the northern German city of Bremen involving kale that date to the 16th century, and even though Munich is a southern city, one figures they are close enough, that the influence was most certainly felt. As far as bacon and Germany are concerned, the Federal Statistical Office keeps track of how many pigs there are in Germany. Try to guess. Just think of a number. You won’t guess high enough. Here, I’ll put the answer “after the jump” (click on “Continue reading ‘Some Thoughts on the Academy Awards’” at the bottom of this post to see the number of pigs there were in Germany as of May 2005). Anyway, kale with garlic and bacon is incredibly delicious and the recipe is here. (My tip: use peppered bacon.)

2) Bows on dresses look weird.

3) John Travolta’s hair transplant looks weird.

4) Meryl Streep is the best actress we have.

26.8 million pigs.