Out of the west trailing clouds of fury there comes a man on a pale horse. His name is Bostwick, and hell follows with him.

David Rockwell said he wanted “more intimacy, less multiple layers of lamé.” What we got were ginormous curtains and seizure-inducing multiple video screens. More intimate? Less flashy? Nope, and nope.

Interestingly, this year people really went out of their way to acknowledge the set—Hugh Jackman applauded it, and someone else (who? I forget) included the designers (not by name) in his acceptance speech thank yous. So people dug it in person, but on TV it was a different story.

The podium was alright. It had a Water Cube-style pattern of cells, kind of a techno-fied bio-mimicry. That’s hip these days, right?

The giant curtains were nice and epic, but included big tassels that looked like some kind of Blair Witch effigy or a hanging mummy, dangling back there in the shadows behind the presenters. Hella creepy and vaguely reminiscent of the award itself (Dustin Hoffman called it “a man with no genitalia holding a sword”). Was that intentional?

Then there was the crazy video wall that they used to honor the year’s dead with a salvo of head shots and film clips. The film crew tried to capture the scale of it by swooping the camera around the screens instead of just showing one of them. A video of videos? I’m still dizzy. Rockwell should’ve gotten my favorite Oscar winner, Resul Pookutty, the Slumdog sound mixer to tone things down. Remember his speech about turning the cacophony of Mumbai into art as pure as “the universal word,” Om? “A word preceded by silence, and followed by more silence.” Ahh…. That’s more like it.