The most distinctive attribute of the decade's big movie stars is that many of them have come from television, where they were groomed and polished their craft. We are not talking about one or two TV stars that made it big in Hollywood. We are talking about a group of performers who, singly jointly, have come to dominate American film comedy of the l980s. As alumni of the Second City revue companies or NBC's Saturday Night Live, they wrote, produced, and starred (in different capacities and different combinations) such popular films as Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes, and National Lampoon's Animal House and its variants.

In “Sunshine Cleaning,” the naturally beautiful and sexually alluring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt play downtrodden sisters, Rose and Norah Lorkowski, stuck in New Mexico in the middle of nowhere, trying to make a living—and regain their sense of self-worth.  To make a living, the entrepreneurial Adams proposes that they start a business, Sunshine Cleaning,” which boils down to cleaning the mess (blood, brains, and guts on the walls) left after people commit suicide—for different reasons. (See Review).

The tendency to deglamorize naturally attractive ladies and stars is as old as Hollywood itself. 

Arguably, some of the best acting this year was in ensemble driven films, such as “Doubt,” “Frost/Nixon,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,”  “Revolutionary Road,” “”The Dark Knight.”  Yet, the studios behind these films decide which individual performers to promote in their Oscar campaigns.   Year after year, the thespians of large-ensemble pictures are entirely ignored because the Academy doesn't know what to do with ensembles.  The only organization that formally acknowledges the importance of collective acting to a film's overall impact is the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), which has a separate category for Best Ensemble.

Despite high hopes and many promises, the Oscar show last night was just a middling affair, a ceremony that demonstrated above all the nearly impossble task of reenergizing the creaky old format of the vet kudocast.