The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, which puts on the show, doesn't admit it, but the tweaks are born of a concern about one thing and one thing only: TV ratings. The academy makes a mint each year off the broadcast, traditionally one of the year's biggest shows. But the trend line for viewership has been heading downward for more than a decade. The academy's not in the poorhouse or anything; it can still charge an ever-growing premium for advertising, of course. But the show's not cheap, either, and those declining ratings are a very real indicator of the once fabled awards show's fading glory.

Here's the academy's biggest, and growing, problem: The movies winning Oscars are movies that nobody has heard about -- and, as a result, nobody is tuning in.

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Wolf Blitzer looked into the camera to tell us earnestly that the head of the concert promotion company had told them that Jackson was in "tip-top shape," and that he'd passed a health exam "with flying colors."

Funny how an impossibly pampered 50-year-old guy in top-top shape could just keel over dead.

We're supposed to live in an Age of Paparazzi. Isn't it curious how stars nonetheless manage to die right before our eyes?

They do it with our complicity.

Born not just to celebrity but to stardom, Michael Jackson never knew what it was like to live normally, or even behave normally. He was drafted into the family's musical act, the Jackson 5, while in elementary school, and taken to Motown records. He was taught how to live a manufactured image at the feet of Berry Gordy, who was quite good at such legerdemain.

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Espinoza was stating the obvious: Fugitives don't get to dictate the terms of their case. Polanski, who had pleaded guilty to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl, was welcome to return to America, surrender, and then petition the court as he wished. Indeed, the judge even gave Polanski more than he deserved, saying that he might actually have a case. "There was substantial, it seems to me, misconduct during the pendency of this case," he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. "Other than that, he just needs to submit to the jurisdiction of the court."

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In that context, it seems like no big news that you can see some rock stars in "The Last Waltz," recently released in theaters and just out on DVD. Its technical claim to fame is based on the fact that it was shot in 35mm. The group the film is about -- a band called just the Band -- were once somewhat famous but dropped out of sight around the time the movie was filmed, in 1976, and haven't been heard much of since. And the music they made -- today you'd call it Americana, or alternative country -- is as unfashionable a genre as you can imagine, the success of the yuppie coffee-table CD that is the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack notwithstanding.

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In the mechanical or structural sense, the modern era has its areas of precision. But these are most often hidden with a patina of sparseness or repetition, as in our great skyscrapers. There are technicians, sometimes acclaimed, at work in film (Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott) but they are emotionally crude and too often manipulative. Indeed, the modern age has come to make us view technical brilliance in the arts a bit suspiciously. Why? Are our artists today just not detail-minded? Do they lack the patience, the imagination, to work on such a precise level? Is detail on that level just not part of contemporary culture?

On the other hand, it's possible that the people in previous eras looked at Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, or gazed on a Bernini statue, and simply took it for granted.

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The entrancing wonderment of Elton John's career is this utter ordinariness. At the beginning he made a name for himself being himself: He recorded albums full of courtly, pleasant songs far removed from the acid rock tropes of the day. He was polite and unassuming, and worked hard and persevered in a state of beatific (if sometime agitated) self-doubt. The outlandish costumes and ferocious stage shows that came later were merely a way to compensate for this humility, and not disappoint fans.

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Why watch?

That question, of course, rings with an almost perfervid urgency here at "Survivor" recap central.

But let us make a case. There is an interesting dynamic to "Survivor" that people don't notice. Like a (very) slowly evolving species, the contestants on the show have consistently demonstrated a molasses-like but dogged ability to learn from past seasons, and past mistakes.

They're competing for $1 million. What excuse do viewers have?

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A case in point is unfolding in the Samburu group, one of the two tribes battling it out in a Kenyan wildlife preserve this time around.

Last week, we saw a generational rift unfold, as the four older members of the group -- Frank, the rigid weirdo; Teresa, one of those nice older women; beefy Carl, the dentist; and Linda, the fortysomething cancer survivor -- acted industrious and sensible and the younger ones sat around doing what younger people do: Nothing, basically.

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In this way, the film is similar to Lynch's "Lost Highway," his cinematic scud missile of 1997. In that film, the 40-something Bill Pullman languishes in a locked prison cell. He then, without explanation, turns into the 20-something Balthazar Getty and is released from prison, and the movie goes off on a new story tangent. That was just one puzzling development in a film whose plot was regularly described as a Möbius strip by reviewers.

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The footage was the same stuff shown to the world film community at Cannes earlier this year. It begins with director Peter Jackson sitting in a horse-drawn cart with the noted actor Ian McKellen as Gandalf, the trilogy's towering wizard. Jackson apologizes for not being at Cannes but says he hopes viewers like the following scenes.

Jackson, the New Zealand director of "Heavenly Creatures" and "The Frighteners," has helmed perhaps the most ambitious film production ever undertaken, filming both "Fellowship" and its two sequels, "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King," with a reputed $300 million budget and a cast and crew of 2,500. Actual filming began fully two years ago. The studio plans to release the chapters over successive Christmases, with the first coming in December and the others following in 2002 and 2003.

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"It's like going to hell for 35 minutes. It's hot, it's uncomfortable and nothing good's going to happen while you're there," Clarence says.

He's talking about the weekly "tribal council" -- in reality, it happened every three days when the show was filmed, back in September -- the two tribes, the Boran and the Samburu, face going to each week. At the council, someone gets booted off the island ... er, tossed out of the outback ... um, asked nicely to leave the Kenyan nature preserve.

We remember that in the second edition of "Survivor," the one in Australia, one of the tribes, the Kucha, was a lean and mean fighting machine. The other, the Ogakor, were sort of feckless and unkempt, had a sex maniac named Jerri who made all the boys nervous and distracted, and couldn't win a challenge to save their lives. The only thing that saved the Ogakor in the end was when the leader of the Kucha, Mike, the psycho alpha male who killed a baby pig with his bare hands, fell into a fire and burned himself. After that the Kucha caved and eventually became extinct.

But for now, in this, the third season of the show, the Boran are looking positively Ogakorian.

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By disconnects, I mean that the story Cross tells us reorients us to what was important about Cobain's life and his death. In a couple of ways it's different from what we thought -- or were, in effect, led to think -- at the time.

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Yes, it was the U.S. Senate setting aside hours Wednesday morning to allow each member two minutes to pontificate on a resolution condemning the destruction of the World Trade Center. The thought of a parade of bloviating politicians at a time like this -- "Take that, terrorists! We, portly pork-barrellers all, shall take a podium against thee!" -- was nearly too much to bear. But mercifully the cable channels soon turned away. It was a subtle editorial call, but it seemed to be deliberate. Hours later, a CNN reporter noted that the senators were still talking -- here he paused for a meaningful silent half second -- "though the resolution has already passed."

For the first days of this dusty, jittery aftermath, the cable channels were virtually indistinguishable, and together they felt bloviation was not appropriate. They had real bravery and real people to film and to talk to: dust-covered survivors, grim rescuers and a lancingly on-point New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Indeed, with the exception of live footage of the president or Giuliani, it seemed like anything the channels broadcast was paired with transfixing, continuous footage of two planes hitting two buildings.

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Today they were reduced to heaps of rubble after one of the worst catastrophes in U.S. history. A pair of jetliners crashed into them Tuesday morning -- at precisely the points at which they would do the most damage, according to architectural experts. The impacts created fires and, ultimately, brought about the collapse of both buildings.

Why did the buildings collapse?

According to Gregory Fenves, a professor of Civil Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, the planes weakened the buildings' structures at key points. Fenves, working on information gleaned from preliminary TV reports, stressed that he was speculating. He said that if the planes had hit the structures higher, they could have merely damaged their tops; if they had hit lower, they would have been up against the enormous weight and resistance of the base of the buildings.

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In their own worlds, they are each stars, after a fact: He's a big-wheel Democrat in Modesto and Fresno, two overlooked cities in California's Central Valley, and a ladies' man of no little ingenuity; she is no doubt destined for the hall of fame of helmet-haired interviewers, and besides that married to sometime TV host Maury Povich, one of the few people in her profession she looks positively classy standing next to. (In the strange calculus of celebrity news coverage, their marriage makes them by an order of magnitude more worthy of notice.)

Chung and Condit deserve each other, even if we deserve neither. But to wish them away is to wish to exist in a different world, and to forget, for a moment, the mystery, perhaps a tragedy, at the center of the story.

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Not even the Farrellys understand this recipe themselves. After the serene "Dumb & Dumber," the grody but uplifting "Kingpin," and the uproarious sensation that was "There's Something About Mary," they have stumbled -- through one more they wrote and directed together, "Me, Myself & Irene," and two others they've written and produced, "Say It Isn't So" and "Outside Providence." All are typically blunt and intermittently funny, but each lacks some central life-force. It's possible that the Farrellys' next feature film. "Shallow Hal," will cauterize our funny bones again; it stars Jack Black as a womanizer who suddenly is able to see the inner beauty of women, rather than just their bods.

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The show is fun, black and intermittently engrossing. But it's difficult not to feel, as we watch, that we're being asked to participate in an experiment that hasn't quite jelled. The resulting failure is an interesting test of HBO's prime marketing challenge, which is to create must-see TV on a pay-TV channel. There are jackpots available, as proved by the success of "The Sopranos," which has become a cultural touchstone and a huge new audience draw for the network. But "Six Feet Under" lacks the obvious sex appeal of "Sex and the City" or the niche audience of something like "Arliss," the Robert Wuhl show about a sports agent. These shows indicate that the two things needed to build a pay-TV audience are quality and audaciousness. But "Six Feet Under" lacks both.

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Dylan turns 60 Thursday. Is he sad? Pathetic? Mighty? Indomitable? It's tough to tell. You can think about Dylan in any number of ways on any given day or at any given time. Start with the five verses of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," his first epic songwriting effort. It's a simple story: A guy gets up, goes out, comes back. What did you see? his father asks. The singer tells him. What did you hear? What are you going to do now?

In the decades since he wrote it, Dylan has retold that tale several times, with all sorts of twists -- it's the story of "Tangled Up in Blue," his most exhilarating love affair, and of "Isis," his most murderous one.

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Tony Soprano was born from between the legs of his vindictive, joyless mother, Livia; and he was caught, when the series opened, in the vise of several other women as well -- his dissatisfied wife, Carmela; his increasingly disdainful daughter, Meadow; his volatile 24-year-old Russian girlfriend, Irina; and his rather unconventional shrink, Dr. Melfi.

That opening shot summed up the show's mischievous intents and some of its limitations. Coppola saw the Mafia as a metaphor for American society; Chase sees it as a metaphor for the American family, a more insular (and less persuasive) construct.

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But like last year's edition, the way Tina eventually won was unpredictable -- and arresting in its implications.

The final immunity challenge was a fair one -- a mental memory game of trivia about the players' personal lives, not a physical test. It's also a game with humanistic implications: Who had taken the time to learn about his or her fellow survivors?

Tina had a fair chance at this game, and lost. Had Colby been playing for the sake of the money, he would have ejected her and taken his chances with the less likable Keith. He was obviously playing for different reasons, and that's what gave Tina the million.

Last year's moral was similarly cloudy. While everyone wheezed about how Richard Hatch's manipulations won the day (an impression the good corporate consultant himself has assiduously encouraged), Hatch actually wound up first via a series of flukes. His endgame rival, Kelly, won a grim and astonishing series of immunity challenges to keep herself in the game and force herself into the final two.

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In the mid-1970s, Joey Ramone, whose real name was Jeffrey Hyman, had a disgusting mess of a head of hair and wore colored sunglasses. He was so thin he didn't seem to have a chest, a butt or knees. And he didn't sing so much as bleat.

He was a rock star.

If you were a rock-loving youth in America's dreadful Sun Belt in the mid-1970s, the Ramones gave you your first taste of what a sensation was. They didn't know how to play their instruments! Were they rock, really? They were dumb! They were Nazis!

They were an affront to everything our heroes -- Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Bruce Springsteen -- stood for.

The band's first record, "Ramones," was a puzzle: Churning, uninterrupted guitar playing. A bass player who did nothing but hit the root note. And a singer with an impossible deadpan drawl of a voice who sang about death and drugs with virtually no nuance and could get excited only when the prospect of sniffing glue was mentioned.

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