Click the “Children’s Letters to Raven-Symone” category at the right for previous entries, which give a fuller background. The basics: Kids and stupid adults think that if a Web site mentions a famous person, the site must somehow be connected to that celebrity, and they write in, asking for the famous person’s e-mail address. Tired of being pestered by inane requests, I made up a fake e-mail address for Raven-Symone and posted it here, with a clear disclaimer explaining that it was fake. Predictably, people used it anyway.

Now, of course, the e-mail address has spread. I suspect that most of the people who write to it now did not find it here on EricDSnider.com, but on some other site, perhaps on Raven-Symone message boards or chat rooms or wherever it is you kids hang out nowadays. Those people can be excused for thinking it’s a viable address, as they did not see the context in which I posted it. So we don’t mock their letters for being mis-sent. We mock them only for being illiterate and hilarious.

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No “Snide Remarks” today, on account of I didn’t write one. But as consolation, let me offer you the hilarious shoulder of “Wondermark” to cry on. It is a comic strip in which the artwork comes from 19th-century book illustrations while the jokes are distinctly modern. And it is funny.

Wow, was everyone off on their Oscar predictions. Yeah, we got most of the big ones right (Scorsese, Mirren, Whitaker, Hudson, etc.), but everything else was all over the map.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” wins three — the second-highest total of the night — yet fails to win Best Foreign-Language Film, which seemed like its most obvious victory.

“Dreamgirls,” which led the Oscars with eight nominations, got only two wins. Three of the five Best Song nominees were from “Dreamgirls,” yet it still managed to lose that category.

“An Inconvenient Truth,” which everyone figured was a lock for Best Documentary, did indeed win that award. But it also won Best Song, thus putting it ahead of the much-ballyhooed “Babel,” which got only one prize all night long. Poor “Babel.” Poor, crappy “Babel.”

There were surprising upsets (Alan Arkin over Eddie Murphy for Best Supporting Actor; “Happy Feet” over “Cars” for Best Animated Feature), but there were some comforting sure things, too. Helen Mirren is gorgeous, classy, and supremely talented; we should give her awards any chance we get. Martin Scorsese has finally won an Oscar, which helps to right a lot of the unbalance in the universe.

And though “The Departed” wasn’t the best film of 2006 — I’m not even sure it was the best of the five Best Picture nominees — it’s likable enough that we can be happy with its winning the big prize. I know people who didn’t see “The Departed,” and I know people who weren’t blown away by it. But I don’t know anyone who actually disliked it, the way a lot of people have disliked certain past Best Pictures (“Crash,” “Titanic,” “American Beauty,” and “The English Patient,” to name a few). We can feel good about “The Departed.”

Most of all, I am happy about this: I correctly predicted 13 out of 24 awards. That’s not very good, but it’s better than my friend Chris Clark, who routinely outguesses me but who this year only got 11 right. SUCK IT, CLARK!

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As for the show itself:

I’m browsing around the Interwebs, and I’m discovering that I seem to be in the minority for liking the show! In fact, I thought it was one of the most diverse and entertaining broadcasts of recent years. I liked the opening montage of nominees, I liked the dancers making silhouettes of movie images, I liked the medley of movie sound effects as created by a choir of humans, I liked the song by Will Ferrell, Jack Black, and John C. Reilly, and I liked carefully watching Jennifer Hudson’s breasts to see if they would fall out of her dress. (Beyonce, meet Be-ouncy.)

All that stuff was slightly different from the norm, a little creative, a little vaudeville-variety-show-Ed-Sullivan-y. I didn’t love everything about the show — still lots of dull tributes and special awards and so forth — but overall, I came away from it with positive feelings. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it was the seven doughnuts and one liter of Diet Dr Pepper that I consumed over the course of the broadcast.
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The winners:

Picture: “The Departed”
Director: Martin Scorsese, “The Departed”
Actor: Forest Whitaker, “The Last King of Scotland”
Actress: Helen Mirren, “The Queen”
Supporting Actor: Alan Arkin, “Little Miss Sunshine”
Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson, “Dreamgirls”
Original Screenplay: “Little Miss Sunshine”
Adapted Screenplay: “The Departed”
Cinematography: “Pan’s Labyrinth”
Editing: “The Departed”
Foreign-Language Film: “The Lives of Others”
Documentary: “An Inconvenient Truth”
Animated Film: “Happy Feet”
Makeup: “Pan’s Labyrinth”
Art Direction: “Pan’s Labyrinth”
Sound Mixing: “Dreamgirls”
Sound Editing: “Letters from Iwo Jima”
Visual Effects: “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”
Costume Design: “Marie Antoinette”
Original Score: “Babel”
Original Song: “I Need to Wake Up,” from “An Inconvenient Truth”
Animated Short: “The Danish Poet”
Documentary Short: “The Blood of Yingzhou District”
Live-Action Short: “West Bank Story”