In what may be the most bizarre deployment of reportorial "talent" I can recall, Time Magazine allowed Joe Klein and Mark Halperin to opine on Oscar fashion for fifteen separate lackwitted pages on Time.com. But there was much to learn!

• Shawl collars remind Klein of bar mitzvahs. So do Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill. So do the Coen brothers. Basically, these pictures of celebrities are enough to send Klein into a whole big identity crisis. It's like a Stardust Memories that you sleep through twice as hard.
• Halperin, on Diablo Cody: "Crisp make-up highlighting her peaches-and-cream appeal." I confess, I find this vaguely creepy.
• Klein, on same: "She's a great writer, which is all that matters." As if he would know!
• Halperin:Clooney::Obama Girl:Obama. "Perfect, perfect, perfect. Crisp, finely fitted tux, with snow-white shirt and a classic bow tie to die for. The man knows how to groom. Sunny, bright, and loving life."
• Klein, on Marion Cotillard: "Anyway, she looks like a completely different person from the frail, ferklempt Piaf she played on the screen." I know! It's almost as if Cotillard was using some sort of CRAFT to play an entirely different person!
• Klein wades into the stream of consciousness sans waterwings: "Tilda Swinton looks wonderfully professorial, no magisterial, in that dress. I mean, how cool is she? Cool enough, I'd guess, to change her name from Matilda ... Reminds me of (Ir)ving Rhames, also very cool. That's velvet, no? ... Or maybe something that looks like velvet? Black velvet with that red hair. I'm such a sucker for women like that." So there you have it: Joe Klein is way into shock-headed, androgynous swingers!
• Klein on Helen Mirren: "It's wonderful that her career survived Caligula." Did Caligula kill anyone's career? The careers of Peter O'Toole, John Gielgud, and Malcolm McDowell all actually happened, didn't they?
• Spike Lee brings out the studio publicist in Halperin: "A Hollywood original, aging gracefully and always true to his style--fun, funny, clever, and Brooklyn. Spike strikes again."

Viewers were thankfully spared one of Halperin's patented videos in which the ex-Noter dresses up like the serial killer from the I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise. As for Klein, this was, I believe, his first turn at the Oscar red carpet, so it will take eight more trips to Tinseltown before he haughtily reminds us how difficult it his for him to make sweeping generalizations.