Republican Debate Feb. 25 and The Oscars Feb. 29

I'm not sure which I found more dispiriting in the past week, the most recent Republican debate or the Oscars.  Politicians and movies both seem worst than ever.

The Feb.25 debate was a depressing spectacle,, with Trump, Cruz and Rubio calling each other "liar," Kasich on the sidelines defending his long record in Congress and as the governor of Ohio, and Ben ("can somebody please attack me") Carson more out of it than ever, saying that we should "examine the fruit salad of their lives" when considering Supreme Court nominees.  Meanwhile, there is almost no "debate" about the issues, the only disagreement being how much one can accomplish on the first day in office:  tearing up the agreement with Iran, bombing ISIS back to the Stone Age, defunding Planned Parenthood, getting rid of those obstructionist environmental regulations, abolishing Obamacare.  Some of this might have to involve the Congress, however, since all the Republicans agree that President Obama has been too dependent on "unconstitutional" executive orders.  As usual no one had any useful suggestions to replace Obamacare --  health empowerment accounts and letting health insurance companies sell across state lines would not help those who are too poor to afford insurance -- and unions were again conspicuous in their complete absence.

As for the Oscars:  the debate about diversity tended to obscure the fact that most movies today look as if D.W. Griffith had never lived.  The only positive spot  in the whole tedious evening was the Oscar for best music to Ennio Morricone for Tarantino's The Hateful Eight.  Morricone was given an honorary Oscar in 2006, when he was 78, but he defied the tradition of death, which usually follows the honorary Oscar, and stuck around to win the genuine article.  Morricone has scored over 500 movies and TV shows and, of the ones I've seen and heard, C'er una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968) is the best; it might even be true that director Sergio Leone made the film to fit the score that Morricone wrote! Film scores have never gotten the attention they deserve but I am sometimes influenced to watch a movie based on who did the music (in my more more purist days I preferred no score, as in the films of Ingmar Bergman).