I’m refusing as a matter of bedrock principle to watch any of the red-carpet Oscar bullshit. But I’ll be doing the usual live-blogging starting….uhm, 56 minutes from now. A little more than 70 or 75 minutes from now we’ll know if Seth McFarlane is the new Johnny Carson…or not. The show is expected to last three hours and 40 minutes, and perhaps a bit longer.

All I ask for is a surprise or two. Please. I don’t believe for a second that Amour‘s Emmanuelle Riva has any kind of shot at winning Best Actress but it’ll be sorta kinda cool if it happens. (But it won’t.) David O. Russell winning Best Director and/or Best Adapted Screenplay would work just fine. (Ang Lee winning for Life of Pi won’t work.) Robert DeNiro winning for Best Supporting Actor will be welcome…check.

I tweeted this morning that if Best Picture Oscar could have been re-balloted this morning through some sort of instant quickie technology, Argo might not win. There’s a real sense out there that the Academy mainstream has blown it once again by “going for the softie” in the tradition of The Artist, Chicago,The King’s Speech, Driving Miss Daisy, Around The World in Eighty Days, etc.