Dumbing-down TV

I was walking into a Sam's Club recently when I found myself surrounded by gigantic televisions, their  screen savers so large and vivid, I felt like Dorothy when she crossed the threshold from dreary black and white to the Technicolor of Oz.  

At their size, one of these babies could have been deadlier to the Wicked Witch than the house that dropped on her. 

Those are smart TVs, my husband informed me. So I thought, "What makes them smart?" "Does size have anything to do with it?" 

It does; big is smarter these days when it comes to TVs. That means my mother has one of the dumbest televisions around. It would look like a toaster next to the models of 85 inches or more I spotted at Sam's. 

Her remote doesn't do much more than turn the TV on or off. She also can't fast forward or rewind. She can't talk to it and request yet another viewing of "Terms of Endearment." She gets about four stations, including the Catholic channel; the latter allows her to follow services from home, kind of like Zoom mass without the communion wafers. 

But even a dumb TV cannot evade the Oscars. It's always been a tradition in my family to watch the annual and tedious parade of air kisses and hot-air acceptance speeches, then connect with each other to make fun of it. 

Viewing the Oscars is like attempting a long hike: Your step is light and ambitious at the start, but you get winded at the inclines and finally give in to exhaustion by resting your back against a tree stump and watching the others hikers pass by.

There are also endless commercials to absorb, only to return to the show and watch someone claim the Oscar for sound mixing or makeup. 

Avoiding the ads is among the benefits of a smart TV that can accommodate streaming. But without that, Mom regularly spends some commerial breaks in the bathroom. On Academy Awards night, she emptied her bladder as often as my dog lifts his leg to pee on someone's mailbox.

But she did stay awake for the whole show, otherwise she could not have offered the following critical observations.

"Her hair looks like hell" - uttered at least half a dozen times.

"Holy mackerel Andy" - a reference to the bosomy dresses whose bodices looked like shelves about to collapse from the weight of too many unread books. It's also an expression of my mom's whose origin I had to investigate online: It was more than once uttered by Amos, of Amos and Andy radio fame. 

"A lonely petunia in an onion patch" - meaning out of place. That would be Messi the border collie from the film "Anatomy of a Fall."  

"You can see her coming and going" - yet another reference to obnoxious clothing. Example: Ariana Grande, whose swirled pink dress looked like she was wearing inflatable swimmies on her lower arms.  

"He's a sight for sore eyes" - referring to Ryan Gosling as someone you're happy to see. Agreed. 

But as the show droned on, Mom and I realized there were a lot of celebrities there we couldn't identify. So we decided to go back in time with a familiar session of "Dead or Alive?" We play this often and not just for the Oscars. I can't resist resorting to Google and Wikipedia to find the answers.  

"Is Johnny Mathis still alive?" Not sure where this came from since he's not an actor, but yes.

"Did Audrey Hepburn die?" Yes, a while ago.

"Is Sidney Poitier still alive? No.

Here's one I questioned myself: "Is the streaker who ran across the stage at the Oscars in 1974 still alive?" No. 

(I thought of that one as John Cena and Jimmy Kimmel lamely tried to update that stunt at the current Oscars. It would have been better to show David Niven - a presenter then who is no longer alive, incidentally - uttering his suavely funny line about the streaker's "shortcomings."

By the time "Oppenheimer" won best picture, Mom and I had run out of questions. So we dragged ourselves to bed, along the way promising we wouldn't fall into the Oscar trap again next year. 

Who are we kidding? We'll be back - and so will the dumb TV. 

Microsoft