Dubbed the most international Oscars in years, Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony shall be remembered, at least by this writer, as one of the most culturally ignorant on record. In a major faux pas that’s sure to agitate tensions between player haters China and Japan just that little bit more, the Awards announcer, upon hearing William Monahan’s name read from the envelope for Best Adapted Screenplay, proceeded to broadcast to millions of viewers worldwide that he had just won for writing The Departed, a remake of *Japanese* film Infernal Affairs. Japan, with their strongest representation at the Oscars in Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi and Letters From Iwo Jima, lucked out elsewhere, but got to steal Hong Kong’s thunder on the night, while the dunce notion that all Asians look and some the same perpetuated like a bad smell. What really stunk though was Al Gore’s green campaign amidst all the gold, lobbied egregiously by interns Leonardo DiCaprio and Melissa Etheridge, who also got to sing her Oscar-winning song “I Need to Wake Up” to a PowerPoint presentation. The problem isn’t the serious concern made over global warming; it’s the duplicity of an industry built on consumption and excess, and its choice to publicly come clean on the one night it blows out on every conceivable expense. Punctuating the absurdity even further was DiCaprio’s role in all of this, the star of Blood Diamond on stage in front of an audience where any number of gowns could have been adorned with Sierra Leone bling. The real winner of the evening was Martin Scorsese, who got a statuette handed to him on a plate for a film that’s far from his best. No one doubts for a moment that it’s long overdue and thoroughly deserved, yet the triumph doesn’t quite match the picture in this case, given there are at least ten other films in the Scorsese oeuvre that better his last. Rolling with the punches, the Academy also voted The Departed Best Film, shoes Babel, Little Miss Sunshine and Letters From Iwo Jima could have easily and more adequately filled. Of course this is the Oscars, and it’s all about taking turns. Now you know why they present every award as “The Oscar goes too...” instead of “And the winner is...”.—Tim Wong