February 25, 2008 - "SNL" Casts Obama and Looks Forward, While the Oscars Hands Out Awards and Looks Backward

Under unusual conditions and tough deadlines, both ABC's Oscar telecast and NBC's Saturday Night Live presented solid shows over the weekend. Both benefited greatly from their smartly chosen guest hosts - Jon Stewart and Tina Fey, respectively - both of whom were returning to familiar territory.

But it was mostly that the shows were there at all, rather than sidelined or crippled by a writers' strike, that mattered the most. The Oscars and SNL weren't just good. They were good to see.

Just seeing Jack Nicholson on his usual Cheshire cat perch, enjoying and encouraging everyone in front of and around him, made the 80th annual Academy Awards telecast more enjoyable than it would have been without him. As for host Stewart, at least one of his one-liners was a home run - when he complimented eventual supporting actor winner Javier Bardem, in No Country for Old Men, for "combining Hannibal Lecter's murderousness with Dorothy Hamill's wedge cut."

One of last night's time-eating Oscar innovations, planned in case the strike was still on and the actors were absent, turned out to be welcome in any event - and ought to be an annual tradition from now on.

Prefacing the reading of the nominees in the categories of leading and supporting actor and actress were montages of previous winners in those categories. It was wall-to-wall glamour, excitement and fun, and put each new winner in an instantly understandable and valuable context. Even the montage showing a few seconds of each Best Picture winner since Wings nabbed the first one in 1927 was fun.

And back on Saturday Night Live, the speed with which the cast and writers turned Thursday's Democratic debate into Saturday's satirical fodder was very impressive - more so than the jokes themselves, which, in the opening skit, were a little less than sharp.

That skit did, though, introduce the comic who would be playing Barack Obama: Fred Armisen. He had little to do in this first appearance - not even one smile - but Armisen, who for years has brightened SNL with a pitch-perfect Prince, doubtlessly will evolve his Obama portrayal into another color-blind comedy classic.