It would be a fabulous show. At 5, its a drag. Cutting two hours out of this thing isn't rocket science.

1. Cut back on ads a bit, the Academy goes to commercial faster than the NFL. Shameful greed that. An ad every 12-15 minutes is fine, one every 4-6 minutes is enraging.

2. GET RID OF ALL MUSICAL NUMBERS. Its a night about films- not music. The songs are merely one component of those films, no more important than all other components. Why don't we see 5 minute clips of each best picture nom rather than these painful song and dances? Wouldn't that make way more sense? Forget it, just get rid of the damn musical numbers altogether.

3. Take the number of montages celebrating Hollywood's past ....rank them in order of interest. Then show the top ranked montage first...and junk all of the rest.

It was nowhere near 5 hours. It started at 8 and ended at 11:48 eastern time -- I happened to look at a clock. And that included several minutes of red-carpet stuff at the beginning.

Plus one of the highlights (for me anyway) was the performance of "Falling Slowly". I do think that the "Enchanted" songs could've been mashed into a medley.

It started at 8:30, actually (the red-carpet show was a full half-hour special). So to get it to under three hours, as the original poster suggested, would be to trim a mere eighteen minutes.

This year, I wasn't so jazzed about the musical numbers, but depending on what's in store, I can look forward to them enough in certain years to want to keep them part of the show.

I am curious why they didn't have the spotlight scenes/montages from Best Picture nominees sprinkled throughout the night, like they usually do. That was strange.

I agree on Falling Slowly -- I'd looked forward to that performance and win all night.

There was plenty of other crap they could have cut out of that thing. The god-awful commercial for PriceWaterhouseCoopers comes to mind. What were they thinking?

Hey, at least they didn't go through the explaination of how they tabulate the votes. This year they just had a graphic during the closing credits.

Traditionally the musical numbers are supposed to be an entertaining reprieve from the mind numbing self-congradulations that are awards shows. Unfortunately, most of the music in movies these days are not that entertaining anymore.

The binocular and periscope montage rocked.

One thing to be said for the music: at least this year, the songs were relevant to the films' storylines, as opposed to a lot of recent years, when there are no true musical competitors, and the awards go to a song written for no more purpose than to play over the end credits and earn an award.

To get the time down, I would move the following categories to the non-broadcast awards where the more obscure technical categories are presented:

Short-Film Documentary

Short-Film Animated

Short-Film Live Action

This will sound harsh, but very people see them or will ever see them. And very few people actually care about them.

I would also combine Sound Mixing and Sound Editing into the same category. Do we really need two such similar categories in the big event? The nominees are usually nearly identical. How about just Best Sound and let the mixer and editor share?

I think this would save about 20 min (30 with commercials).

Sound Mixing and Editing are two totally different disciplines and combining them wouldn't work. (There are several places where you can find out the distinctions).

As for cutting the shorts, I like those categories. They hearken back to the day when shorts were much more common. Plus relatively short shorts were kind of fruitful....Lifted...Hotel Chevalier....the Disney one about your home entertainment system. Plus, you've got to respect and give serious credit to people who work so hard to produce art that not everyone'll see. They deserve their day in the sun, as much as Daniel Day-Lewis does.

Then let's shorten it to two hours. It's still too long.