The first item is from the Huffington Post. Written by Andy McDonald, it is a fill-in-the-blanks template for the acceptance speeches made by those who win Academy Awards.

It is available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/18/oscar-acceptance-speech-mad-lib-photo_n_6708368.html?ncid=newsltushpmg00000003

It goes a long way toward clarifying why the red-carpet interviews have become almost as interesting as, if not more interesting than, the awards ceremonies themselves. No matter how canned the red-carpet banter is, it isn’t as formulaic as the acceptance speeches.

The second item is an eight-item quiz from Salon that requires readers to distinguish the sources of comments on prominent but politically and culturally controversial films from the last several years.

The quiz has been developed by Peter Finocchiaro and Colin Gorenstein. On each film, there are four comments drawn either from the Hollywood Reporter’s “Brutally Honest Oscar Ballot,” which is a collection of uncensored opinions by the predominantly White male voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, or from more randomly surveyed critiques offered by Right-wing television and radio personalities.

The quiz is available at: http://www.salon.com/2015/02/22/oscar_voter_or_right_wing_pundit_can_you_

tell_the_difference_quiz/

Although it is undoubtedly a selectively constructed exercise meant to illustrate the difficulty in distinguishing very similar shades of bias, it does very pointedly suggest that Hollywood is not quite the bastion of Progressivism that the Far Right has long characterized it as being.