The Envelope, Please: The movie “Nomadland” about a shattered American life last night swept the Oscars winning Best Picture, Director, and Actress. Frances McDormand won Best Actress for the third time.
  Anthony Hopkins won Best Actor for The Father in an upset. He said he’d been asleep in bed when it was announced.
  The late Chadwick Boseman, the brilliant flash of an actor who died of colon cancer at age 43, had been the favored for his role in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” in which he portrayed an inspired young horn player in the 1920s thwarted and cheated by a white music producer. Boseman made the movie knowing his health was in serious danger.
  After a year in which the theaters were closed but the movies went on, Hollywood carried on last night with its annual orgy of self -congratulation staged at a Covid-safe distance of anywhere from six feet to a remote thousands of miles from the party at LA’s Union Station.
  In other highlights, Chloé Zhao, who directed “Nomadland,” became the first woman of color, the first Chinese woman and the second woman ever to win the Academy Award for directing.
  Best Supporting Actress went to Yuh-Jung Youn for playing a cantankerous grandmother in “Minari,” the film about a Korean family that transplants to America. Little known here, she’s considered the “Meryl Streep of Korea.”
 
Viral News: With 140 million Americans  having received at least one vaccine shot, millions are skipping their second Covid-19 dose, the CDC reports. More than five million people, about 8 percent of those who got a first shot, have not returned for their second, the CDC reports.
  In Michigan, the state weathering the worst coronavirus outbreak in the country, hospitals are filling with adults younger than those taken ill in the first wave last year. Doctors are seeing lots of people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. It appears that the younger crowd are getting out there and mixing it up again, passing along the virus.
  In Baghdad, the explosion of an oxygen tank in a Covid ward caused a fire that killed 82 people, many of them patients. And in India, now facing a terrible second wave of infections, the government has ordered social media to take down posts critical of its handling of the pandemic. India ranks fourth in the world for pandemic deaths.
 On the upside, the European Union is set to allow fully vaccinated Americans travel to EU countries this summer. 
 
The Truth of It: President Biden over the weekend became the first US president to describe the Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians early in the last century as a “genocide,” risking US relations with a vital military ally.
  The Turks murdered Armenians in several waves, but starting at the outset of World War I and continuing until 1923, they killed 1.5 million people. Talk to anyone with Armenian heritage and it’s like it happened yesterday. They have not forgotten.
  With the exception of Ronald Reagan and now Biden, US presidents have dodged the issue that’s so important to people with Armenian heritage for fear of upsetting the Turks.
  Peter Balakian, a Pulitzer-winning professor at Colgate University who’s written about the Armenian genocide told NPR’s Scott Simon that no US president has had the courage to take this on in the ay Biden did, “And it’s significant also because the Turkish government campaign of denial has been so protracted, so extreme, so persistent over the course of so many decades that there has to be redress to this kind of persistent dishonesty and corruption.”
 
The Spin Rack: The US military commander in Afghanistan has begun the final withdrawal of US troops from the country. Asked whether Afghan troops are ready to defend against the Taliban, Gen. Austin Miller said, “They have to be.” — The Indonesian navy found the remains of its missing submarine on the sea bottom off the coast of Bali. It was broken in three piece and all hands are presumed dead. — Arizona Republicans are conducting an audit of the 2020 presidential vote in their state, which many diehards still think was stolen from Donald Trump. “We hold an audit,” State Senator Eddie Farnsworth said at a Judiciary Committee hearing. “And then we can put this to rest.” — The little helicopter on Mars made its longest flight yet, a round trip of about 330 feet in 80 seconds.
 
The Obit Page: The British former newspaper reporter and copy editor John Richards, who was labelled the “bulwark for the apostrophe,” has died at age 97.

  Reaching a point of exasperation with common errors and technological speed overtaking grammatical precision, in 2001 Richards founded the Apostrophe Protection Society. His statement of purpose said, “The apostrophe deserves our protection. This poor defenceless creature is indeed a threatened species.”
  Among his gripes were apostrophes in plurals such as “menu’s” and “banana’s” and a gratuitous apostrophe in the possessive of “it,” as in “the dog licked it’s paws.”
  Ultimately overwhelmed by misplaced apostrophes in press releases, signage, television supers, and everywhere the English language is mangled, Richards gave up and closed the society in 2005.
 
The Winner Is: Political analyst Jeff Greenfield posted his list of Oscar gripes in advance of the show:
 
-“It’s like watching paint dry.”
– “I miss Chris Rock.”
– “Maybe they should nominate a movie somebody saw.” 
– “I miss Billy Crystal.” 
– “Like I really care about ‘Best Sound'”
– “I miss Johnny Carson.”
– “The Globes were better.”
– “I miss Bob Hope.”