I watched the Oscars last week, hoping something would surprise me. I think that's what I was waiting for. Four hours of TV, which I sandwiched with an episode of Buffy (the one where she kills Angel to save the world) and then, later, an episode of Angel (where the main characters were people I'd never seen before because Angel was at the bottom of the ocean). I didn't have much else to do. I was in the middle of Santa Clara. Silicon Valley. A ghost town of huge, empty office buildings. Somebody needs to tell this town the economic recovery is happening, because they don't seem to get it.

But, even though I loved Return of the King (the best movie I've seen in the theaters since that movie came out), I really like competition. And I like to be wrong every once in a while. I wanted to run out with Bill Murray when he lost (and I really like Sean Penn, too--I'm conflicted by needs and wants and likes, I think), but there was no where to go. Just a couple of beers left from room service to wash away the feeling of being cheated.

It's like everyone is taking the low carb life seriously. Silicon Valley has trimmed their fat--leaving skeletons that used to house employed middle to upper-middle-class workers. They burned through their millions of dollars of venture capital, IPOs and stock options, leaving nothing left to feed the body.

The Oscars, with its trimmed "campaign" period, has become boring--even while they celebrated an almost four-hour epic war movie. Shouldn't there be some excitement, some joy anywhere other than New Zealand? I think that would take too many calories to produce, so we all settled for the less fat version of movie awards. It actually ended on time!

I frequent fast food places for lunch most days. At the burger places, they offer to give you the burger without a bun if you want to cut down on carbs. McDonald's is going to stop offering "Super Size" fries. This serving of fries contains about three potatoes and half as much grease. I theorized no one really eats the whole thing anyway, but apparently they do. Apparently they need a stop sign. But, it won't affect McDonald's bottom line because the next biggest size of fries will end up costing the same as the Super Duper Sized Fries used to.

This is a good time to talk about cutting fat. We're nearing the end of winter --just a week or so left. Instead of thinking, "This will keep me warm in the winter," when we look at our stomach, we start thinking, "I'm not gonna get laid if I don't get rid of this." Bread and potatoes are easy to blame for these bulges because the fat looks suspiciously like bread and potatoes.

Democrats have pretty much cut the fat in the primary campaign. Edwards, the last serious contender of Kerry, ran out of the ring after getting trounced in last week's Super Tuesday. While Sharpton and Kucinich are still around to push their message, the contest is done. Winter isn't over yet, but it's sure getting warmer.

And bloodier. Apparently what has been missing from religious films is blood and gore. While we could have seen it coming--horror movies are actually morality plays where the bad kids get punished (eviscerated) for being bad--no one thought buckets of blood were necessary for the Sunday Morning crowd.

Except Mel Gibson, who has excelled in creating gory martyr-pieces for quite a while now. My favorite Gibson movie is Payback, where a guy gets killed (almost), only to rise up and take out all of his enemies. Braveheart shows a man (played by Gibson) who dies for his beliefs (he actually does get eviscerated). I guess loving your neighbor only gets you so far in life.

I haven't gone to see Passion because I gave up religious films for lent. You have to make a choice, y'know. That and I know the story. I know what happens. Throwing blood everywhere, well, that's why I'll watch Kill Bill, Vol. 2, even though I know what's going to happen in that one too (I think Bill gets Killed--eventually).

So as I scanned the menu at the bar-b-que place last night (most of the dishes had the symbol--a down arrow--for low carb next to them), I realized this whole trimming the fat thing is just a way of justifying all the stupid things we do every day. No one, before now, would claim eating a lot of bar-b-que is actually good for you. But now all of that bad food is good. So we're not really changing, we're just redefining everything so what we thought was bad is actually good.

We don't really need to change, we just need to redefine everything to conform to our lifestyles. Sometime soon it will be proven that driving everywhere is more healthy than walking, and our "change" will be complete.

Matt Worley doesn't go for the burger-without-the-bun bullshit.