Michael Jackson redux, robots and Oscars

• Michael Jackson, part 2: It's hard to explain, for those who weren't impressionable teens in the 1980s, how utterly everywhere MJ was there for a few years. "Thriller" was in the air, inescapable, in a way that pop music doesn't quite penetrate these multimedia days. I couldn't hum a Kanye West song today to save my life, but in 1983 my brother owned a red Jackson zipper jacket, the cassette of "Thriller" was played every time more than two people got together in a room, and everyone had to try to moonwalk at least once. Nobody these days has an album that stays at #1 for weeks, months. Even parents knew the songs. Even if I really liked Men At Work and Prince a bit more, MJ was in the air, always.

What was interesting was the reaction in the newsroom Friday – one journo, when I told him the first reports came over the wire that Jackson was hospitalized, reacted with "Good. I hope he's dead." A few people gasped when news of the death came out but they were all 30somethings like me. Another in his 20s couldn't see what the big deal was. Journos are a hard-bitten cynical lot so the jokes started circulating almost immediately too. The few folks who actually seemed shaken up by the news were kind of laughed off. Again, as I said Friday, I'm by no measure a huge Jackson fan, but I can't ignore the impact he made on my and everyone's lives, just through the strange and singular story of his existence. Of course we're all well and sick of the Jackson memorial coverage (this is why I get almost all my news from newspapers and online; I can't stand television's incessant need to babble and fill the airtime with vapor), but in the end, you can't deny the sudden death of the creator of the best-selling album of all time is news.

• TEN nominees for Best Picture? No, I don't quite get what the Academy of Motion Pictures is thinking by doubling the nominees for best picture starting next year. Six, sure, maybe eight I could see, but this just seems like a shameless grab for ego, ratings and dollars rather than any sense of the Oscars actually failing to reward the finest in film. I don't think you're suddenly going to start seeing more obscure indie movies nominated. They saw "The Dark Knight" make zillions, realized they didn't nominate it and the Oscars had lousy viewers.

• No, I don't plan on seeing "Transformers 2" any time soon. I did see the first one and I guess I liked it OK at the time although I've never felt any need to watch it again. It's a shame to hear this one relies on a lot of crude and bawdy humor, as it'd be nice if they made a movie my Transformer-obsessed 5-year-old could watch. But it's great fun reading the eviscerating reviews this one is getting – the New York Times gets the word "cretinous" in the very first sentence, while Roger Ebert has a marvelous essay contrasting the "painful" movie to other far better robots in film. I agree one of the more irritating things about director Michael Bay's design is its sheer frenzy; I can barely tell where these robots' faces are supposed to be. Another reviewer's quote which perhaps is a wee bit over the top: "It represents every single vile, puny thing that's wrong with the United States." Worse than "Paul Blart: Mall Cop"?

Michael Jackson 1958-2009

Good god, what a morning to work in a newsroom. There was a lot of last-minute shuffling, rearranging and shock as there is only when the biggest news stories happen. There is no charge like it and despite my occasional grumblings about the state of journalism in 2009, it's a hell of a place to be when big things drop. Michael Jackson is one of those stories, and while we'll all get well and truly sick of the endless tributes, analyses and blathering over the coming days, his sudden death is an event, capital "E."

I'm still processing the fact of Jacko's sudden death -- but my first instinct is to call it a tragedy in the big old broad Shakespearean sense. He may have been a freaky creep, and I can't say I was a gigantic fan, but he was a creature warped and created by many others, by greed and by abuse and in the end I can't help but feel a little sorry for the guy, who hadn't really had the chance of a normal life since his bullying dad heard him sing for the first time. Like Elvis, who he will be compared to a lot, he was chewed up, and weak, and was no innocent, but his story is still a sad and all-too-common one. He mutated long ago into a carnival freak, and while the actual death is a shock, can anyone say they really expected this eternal boy to make it to his 60s and 70s?

Like pretty much any pre-teen in 1982, I listened to "Thriller" a heck of a lot, and have to admit that even now when I hear the familiar thump-thump of "Billie Jean" or the unfaltering drive of "Beat It," it gets my pulse up a bit. Jackson's early chipmunk-voiced boy rock didn't do much for me, and around the time of "Bad" he fell victim to believing he was some kind of twisted messiah, but "Thriller" -- well, despite all that's happened since there is a reason it sold a bazillion copies. For someone with such a big, universal voice and sound once upon a time, it's sad to see him ending so very small.