Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?

Catherine Zeta-Jones ["Zzzzzzeeeeta"!] hosted SNL tonight. Her opening monologue, which God knows really needs hi-def screen captures, had her dancing to a number whose premise was that she wasn't worried about screwing up on live TV, because, no matter what happens:

No matter how I do tonight
Sweating out here under the lights
They Can't Take My Oscar Away!

If I blow my jokes and trip and fall
That's OK and that's because
They Can't Take My Oscar Away!

OK...repeat on this theme a few times, remove tearaway dress revealing leotard, tapdance in a full body shot, bring on chorus boys. Fine.

But then...

If I accidentally swear
And let a [shhh!] loose on the air
They Can't Take My Oscar Away!

And you know, considering that news came out this week of Charles Rocket's recent suicide, I think that was a pretty ghastly thing to put in. Either nobody, at any point, realized the connection -- but isn't that only really plausible if the entire staff, from Lorne Michaels on down, had been replaced with people who were 20 years old? -- or nobody cared.

And, mind you, I'm the guy who laughed until I couldn't breathe at the following sketch, a fake commercial for the Butt Cancer Treatment Center, which recommends that if you're a man over 30 you should "get your pooper checked". So you see it's not that I have a stick up my...well, so you see.

Incidentally, Charles Rocket turns out to have a more interesting history than I realized; see this from Jim Emerson, who blogs on Roger Ebert's site.

UPDATE: Rocket at least got one of those still photos with birth-death dates, at the end of Weekend Update.

UPDATE 2: Did somebody say screen captures? (The first two make it seem like she's doing "If I Were a Rich Man"; she is, in fact, tap-dancing.)








- posted by Don Porges @ 10/23/2005 01:07:00 AM |