A few Oscar questions

1) What is the definition of 'adapted' such that Borat was an adapted screenplay? Yes, the character and shtick existed in another medium, but I wouldn't think that was sufficient. On the other hand, if one thinks that the movie was a complicated piece of performance art then maybe it was enough-- the shtick is the heart of the matter, whereas for most movies there needs to be a novel or a play with a plot and a number of characters before it's an adaptation.

2) I love Melissa Ethridge. But, good god, the song at the end of An Inconvenient Truth made me burst out laughing-- ridiculously over the top in its earnest preachiness, even with my standards for such things already having been battered by the movie I had just watched.

3) Ah, the wacky foreign language film rules and category. How entertaining is it that Water is the entry from Canada? Or that Best Picture nominee Iwo Jima can't be a foreign-language nominee because it doesn't have a non-US sponsoring country?

4) Surprised to see how little award business The Good Shepherd has done. I have the vague sense that The Departed, Blood Diamond, and The Good Shepherd were competing for the same oxygen, and that The Departed has ended up sucking most of it up. I wonder whether Matt Damon had a nominee's worth of votes, but they got split between Departed and Shepherd.