8:23 p.m.:  Those eco-sensitive paper products are kicking global-warming butt! It's freezing back here!

8:26 p.m.:  Something I just noticed: The other half of the Oscar program—the half I thought was unused—features movie quotes and pictures.

8:28 p.m.:  I still think the program is odd, if not confusing. Especially to me.

8:29 p.m.:  Do I smell a rat?

8:29 p.m.:  Nah, it's just a nearby reporter's plate of: shrimp, chicken pasta, meat-on-a-stick, egg roll and a deep-fried cheese stick.

8:30 p.m.:  The Oscars are on. Good. Nothing good was going to come of me staring at that mismatched pile of chow.

8:44 p.m.:  Host Ellen DeGeneres' joke about diversity goes over only so-so in the room. We members of the Oscar press aren't the world's most diverse bunch, not racially anyway.

8:46 p.m.:  A couple of "reporters" standing in the hallway applaud when Pan's Labyrinth wins for Best Art Direction. In their defense, maybe they had it in the office Oscar pool.

8:50 p.m.:  The show is off to a bang! I can't wait till the art director guy comes back here, so I can ask him...So, I can ask him...So, I can ask him...

8:51 p.m.:  ...Um, about what it's like to direct art?

8:58 p.m.:  I don't care who sees or hears me: If Click wins Best Makeup, and heretofore becomes the Oscar-winning Click, I am going to applaud.

8:59 p.m.:  That damn Pan's Labyrinth!

9:00 p.m.:  What's keeping the art director guy so long? Boy, you win one Oscar...

9:04 p.m.:  The art director guy (Eugenio Caballero) is finally here, along with cowinner Pilar Revuelta. But you know what? The moment's passed. I have nothing to say to him now.

9:08 p.m.:  I just thought of a question. I raise my card.

9:09 p.m.:  And I don't get called on.

9:10 p.m.:  I'll save the question for the Pan's Labyrinth makeup guy. Very eco-friendly, if I do say so myself.

9:18 p.m.:  I'm at the Oscars, right? Aren't there supposed to be movie stars and stuff?

9:19 p.m.:  I ring up the on-duty Academy librarian. Me: "Has the first acting award ever been presented so late in the show?" Librarian: "You know, I don't think I can answer that."

9:21 p.m.:  Upon further review, the librarian can answer. In 1973, she says, all four acting awards were held until the latter half of the show.

9:22 p.m.:  Boy, am I glad naps and dolls had me otherwise occupied in 1973.

9:23 p.m.:  Hey, an acting award!

9:24 p.m.:  The Pan's makeup people—David Martí and Montse Ribé—picked the wrong time to do a press conference. The right time would be anytime Alan Arkin isn't upsetting Eddie Murphy for Best Supporting Actor.

9:26 p.m.:  I can't do it. I can't ask the makeup people from Pan's Labyrinth if they were influenced at all by David Bowie's Labyrinth.

9:27 p.m.:  That's really more of a question for Guillermo del Toro.

9:33 p.m.:  West Bank Story, winner of Live-Action Short, was writer-director-producer Ari Sandel's master's thesis, he says. So, those you out there spreading rumors that it was his Ph.D project, stop it.

9:37 p.m.:  The Sound Editing winners from Letters from Iwo Jima—Alan Robert Murray and Bub Asman—are introduced as the Sound Editing winners from Flags of Our Fathers. All those Clint Eastwood movies sound alike.

9:46 p.m.:  A reporter asks the Sound Mixing winners for Dreamgirls about Kevin O'Connell, one of the Sound Mixing losers for Apocalypto—and one of Oscars all-time losers, now having been vanquished 19 times. "I just wonder what Kevin's trying to do out there by trying to get an award by using sympathy," an absolutely straight-faced Oscar-holding Michael Minkler says. "And Kevin's an okay mixer, but enough's enough about Kevin."

9:47 p.m.:  What?!

9:48 p.m.:  "I think he should just take up another line of work," the Oscar-gloating Minkler adds.

9:49 p.m.:  Huh?!

9:50 p.m.:  Minkler and his team are gone—no chance for a follow-up question.

9:50 p.m.:  I talk to the reporter who asked the question, checking to see if he heard what I heard. "He couldn't have been serious," the reporter says. "But that's what he said."