2008 Oscar host Jon Stewart gives his take on Sunday's awards -- including the evening's most bizarre moment, when Oscar winner Roger Ross Williams appeared to be interrupted by Grimace during his acceptance speech.

More Daily Show Oscar parody after the jump.

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Many across the media and entertainment spectrum were shocked at this week's announcement that Variety had laid off its chief film critic Todd McCarthy after 31 years at the paper. Roger Ebert summoned a more appropriate emotion -- he was pissed.

I flew home from the Oscars to find half a dozen e-mails awaiting with the same unbelievable message: Variety had fired its chief film critic, Todd McCarthy. Its spokesman was hopeful Todd and its chief theater critic, David Rooney, who was also fired, could continue to review for the paper on a free lance basis. In other words, Variety was hopeful that without a regular pay check, McCarthy would put his life on hold to do a full-time job on a piecemeal basis.

Todd McCarthy reviewed films for Variety for 31 years. He was the ideal critic for the paper -- better, we now realize, than it deserved.

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"Everyone is pretending she's a part of show business... and she's never gonna be in another movie... it's so sad... you just want to say to her, listen honey, now you got a little money in the bank, go get yourself thin."

Of course, fat actors have been working in Hollywood since the film industry began. But they're usually white and male, the sort of folks Stern prefers.

Michael Moore's documentary Capitalism: A Love Story is released today on DVD. And the filmmaker just reported via Twitter that it's only available at the world's largest retailer online.

Moore writes:

Orange alert! Wal-Mart retaliates? They just put "Not sold in stores" up on their site: http://tr.im/RcUM Wow. That didn't take long.

Wait - is that a list price of $29.98?! Is that American? Jeepers.

Moore followed up with:

Just asked 1 insider why WalMart is saying "Not sold in stores" but still selling it online. Reply: "Because they hate Amazon more than u!"

Flattr? We like that it sounds like a verb and it means money. Here's the website.

It's an interesting idea. Nice analogy of cake for starving content creators. Ahem.

David Lidsky, editor at Fast Company alerted us to this via his Twitter feed:

Interesting, skeptical it'll work. Seems too passive. Just another button to ignore.

Cake!

Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere

The Onion has made our eyes water today. It totally happened.

Add another Oscar critic to the pile. Kazutaka Sangen, the mayor of the Japanese city of Taiji -- site of the Oscar-winning documentary film "The Cove" -- took to the media yesterday to attack the film's victory in the Best Documentary category at the Oscars.

"This film has mistakes of fact," he said at a press conference. "I'm surprised that it won the award even though its content is not truthful."

The Cove documents the mass slaughter of dolphins for meat, which is then sold to the Japanese market under the guise of whale meat.

Variety reports that Sangen's press conference may also have had something to do with The Cove's upcoming Japanese release -- which will happen this summer by Medallion Media.

But Sangen said, "(Theaters) with common sense will call off screenings. We intend as a town to tell the truth about the dolphin fishery, both domestically and internationally."

Yoshinobu Nisaku, the governor of Wakayama Prefecture, in which Taiji is located, said, "Criticizing this business, which has been contributing to the livelihood of Taiji for a long time, with incorrect information and one-sided value judgments, is not the way of a gentleman."

Teaser for the latest film by the Upright Citizens Brigade, released today on iTunes.

It wasn't a popular choice, but the Academy is not apologizing for excluding Farrah Fawcett from the Oscar ceremony's tribute to the recently deceased in the filmmaking community. From E! News Online:

"I would not say that it was an oversight," Leslie Unger, spokeswoman for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, tells E! News. "No matter how carefully and how conscientiously people address who is included, there are people who just simply can't be."

But why was someone like Michael Jackson, with a far skimpier film resume than Fawcett, whose film roles earned her both Golden Globe and Spirit Award nominations?

"In any given year there will always be some people that other people think should have been included and that there's more justification for one person versus another," says Unger. "It is impossible to include everybody."

Other notables left out of the memoriam were Bea Arthur, Ed McMahon, Henry Gibson, and Captain Lou Albano.