hen Chris Rock walked onstage to host the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday night, he got a standing ovation just for being there – an encouraging sign that the establishment-heavy audience was eager for a show that was fresh and irreverent, with a whiff of the future. That illusion lasted less than five minutes. All those Oscar voters in the audience weren’t amused when Mr. Rock started taking some mild jabs at the industry, as he did with an early joke that called Jude Law a second-rank star.

By the end of the evening, Sean Penn was jabbing back with the pompous comment that Jude Law “is one of our finest actors,” a humorless, self-important moment he seized before announcing Hilary Swank as the all-too-predictable best-actress winner for “Million Dollar Baby.”

The Rock-Penn showdown, and the mini-sweep of top awards for “Baby,” create a perfect snapshot of the dilemma the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences faces: it knows it ought to move into the 21st century but hates the idea.

Mr. Rock’s presence alone suggests that the Oscar people know they have to shake things up, if only to compete with the long parade of televised awards shows that now precede it and take such a huge bite out of the Academy Awards’ distinctiveness and glamour. But the tepid response to even the slightest irreverence from the host, and the affection for the old-fashioned “Million Dollar Baby,” send a more powerful message: the academy prefers to remain entrenched in the past, clinging to its former glory.

That attitude also helps explain why this year’s show was even duller than usual. Mr. Rock, probably our funniest comedian, is no fool; he knew better than to try to turn the Oscars into the Chris Rock Show. His few attempts to put his mark on the event fell flat, most conspicuously with a filmed routine in which he interviewed black moviegoers who loved the dopey Wayans brothers comedy “White Chicks” but hadn’t seen best-picture nominees like “The Aviator” or “Finding Neverland.” The segment, suggesting that the Oscars are out of touch with a huge swath of moviegoers, hit what is probably the academy’s biggest fear, and landed in the audience with a silent thud.

Because Mr. Rock offered few improvised lines, his best moments came from his deadpan delivery, like introducing “comedy superstar Jeremy Irons,” but you don’t need Chris Rock for that. He was soon trapped in the straitjacket of a deadly format, which takes the Oscars too seriously for their own good and has undermined promising hosts like David Letterman and Steve Martin. Why would anyone have expected anything different, when the program’s producer, Gil Cates, had offered the same old moribund show 11 times before? The very idea of Gil Cates and Chris Rock discussing comedy sounds like a “Saturday Night Live” routine.

And with “Million Dollar Baby” winning three of the four biggest prizes – best picture, Clint Eastwood’s for director and Ms. Swank’s for actress – the awards themselves hint at how happy Oscar voters are to linger in the past. The film may be about a woman boxer, but it is shaped by a pure retro sensibility. It’s a throwback not only to 30′s-era boxing movies but also to other Oscar-winning films about underdogs, like “Rocky.”

“Million Dollar Baby” is, essentially, “Rocky” with a tragic ending, the kind of familiar movie it is easy for the academy to embrace. (The grumbling from some advocacy groups about the film’s theme of assisted suicide never got much traction.) But in the future the enthusiasm for such an unoriginal film may seem as inflated as the Oscar for “Rocky” does now.

The most original film to gather a handful of nominations this year, “Sideways,” went the way of another fine, innovative movie, “Lost in Translation,” which in 2003 was also nominated for best director and best picture and, like “Sideways,” won only for its screenplay. The fate of “Sideways,” like the choice of Mr. Rock as host, says that the academy will let in a breath of fresh air, but quickly close the window before an actual breeze comes in.

But the Oscars desperately need to escape the aura of déjà vu. After the Golden Globes, the Broadcast Film Critics Awards, the Screen Actors Guild Awards and others, television viewers have already seen Ms. Swank thank Clint Eastwood and her boxing trainer, more than once. They’ve seen Jamie Foxx win best-actor awards for “Ray” and have even seen him get teary when thanking his dead grandmother. Not only were there no surprises in the major categories, there was none of the contagious emotion that winners sometimes display. How could Ms. Swank and Mr. Foxx not have expected to win? Even the obligatory trickle of tears down their faces seemed more of a prophecy fulfilled – or maybe relief – than a genuine expression of emotion.

The most unexpected moment in an acceptance came when the 74-year-old Mr. Eastwood thanked his 96-year old mother, who was sitting in the audience. As he said when accepting his best-director award, he had watched Sidney Lumet, who is 80, receive the career achievement award and “I figure I’m just a kid.” Mr. Eastwood was as charming as ever, and seems to be as creatively alive; great for him. But in the backward-looking world of the Oscars, the idea of a 74-year-old kid is awfully close to the truth. That’s the joke that should have hit a nerve.

he was an internist by training, but privately I always called her the eye doctor.

Ask her about any of her patients, and the answer would come back starting with “I.” How was Mr. Jones? “I got him to start taking his insulin, and I’m working on his cholesterol.”

Mr. Smith? “Wonderful. I fixed up that anemia, and I got him to Weight Watchers.”

Mrs. Brown? “I finally got her mammogram done.”

All medical information was subtly refracted, worded to reflect the doctor’s role as prime mover and chief puppeteer. Health and illness might be considered random evolutionary events elsewhere; her practice was clearly ruled by intelligent design.

When her patients did well, she beamed with pride. When they did badly, she was full of excuses. They had ignored her advice or somehow misled her. She had to make sure you understood it wasn’t her fault.

I think of her often now that we are apparently heading straight into an era when doctors will receive report cards for their work. Are we are all now destined to become something like her?

Past efforts to grade doctors have been clumsy at best. The names on all the “Best Doctor” lists tend to reflect old boys’ networks rather than actual merit. Internet sites posting doctors’ credentials let consumers weed out true miscreants, but not evaluate the remaining multitudes.

But far more precise rankings lie just over the horizon, with doctors publicly graded and paid by the good results they achieve.

Medicare announced the first such program this winter: a pilot “pay for performance initiative” will reward large group practices with bonuses for keeping their elderly patients vaccinated, their cardiac patients properly medicated and their diabetics well controlled. It is only a matter of time before individual doctors are similarly ranked and paid.

Any attempt to improve the quality of medical practice deserves a shot, and this idea seems as reasonable as any. Still, it is bound to jar the doctor-patient relationship slightly, altering it just as subtly as the eye doctor’s peculiar syntax altered the truth.

All doctors suffer from that “I” disease to some extent: the success of the enterprise depends on it. Most, though, retain some necessary emotional distance as well – not only distance from tragedy and suffering, but also from the innumerable humdrum snafus, habits and idiosyncrasies that invariably stand between people and their health. When we start getting scores in health maintenance, that distance will be hard to maintain.

The prospect of a report card in my future always reminds me of a diabetic woman from my past. She spent the year after her divorce sitting on her couch eating ice cream straight from the carton. Her medications went untouched. She still came in to see us quite a bit, but she refused to be weighed, refused to have her blood pressure measured, refused antidepressants, refused to see a psychiatrist. Her blood sugar ran so high the lab invariably called us in a panic. We tried everything; nothing worked.

I felt terrible for her, but had anyone been grading me on my management of diabetes that year, I would have felt even worse for myself because I would have flunked. She would have brought me right down with her. With my reputation (or a cash bonus) at stake, would I have done better at taking care of her? Or would I instead have begun to hate her for bringing down my “diabetes” grade and lowering my income? Would I eventually have told her just to stay home until she could behave, so at least my failure to make her better was not so visible in the record? Would we have lost her trust then for good?

Eventually the patient pulled herself together and got her sugar back under control. She thanked us for all we had done for her in the interim. We thought we hadn’t done much, and certainly the quality mavens would have agreed. But sometimes quality of care transcends the usual markers.

Rewarding doctors for good outcomes may well work out fine. Still, I can’t quite forget the edge in the eye doctor’s voice when she spoke about patients who weren’t doing quite as well as she would have liked. A real dislike hid behind all her cheery disclaimers. Her failures, as she saw them, badly interfered with her self-image. She wanted nothing to do with them.

Of course, when she and all the rest of us are prodded to pursue good outcomes with grades and merit bonuses, we will all still have our failures. Will we have the strength to stand by them, or will we just tell them all to stay home?

andscape architects have long felt sidelined or devalued by their architectural brethren. But as the boundaries between the two professions slowly dissolve, it seems that landscape designers are advancing some of the most potent visions of how blighted cities can be revived.

“Groundswell,” an exhibition opening tomorrow at the Museum of Modern Art, sets out to showcase the results of this gradual shift. Spanning nearly two decades of contemporary landscape design, this wide-ranging show surveys 23 projects – from plazas to waterfront parks to large-scale urban renewal efforts. The picture that emerges is of one of the most fruitful periods in landscape design in a century or more, with visions that range from the hyperreal to the atavistic. (Minimalism makes an appearance, but when it does it seems like more of a warning than an inspiration.)

If the show has a subtext, in fact, it is a forthright desire to come to terms with the postindustrial landscape, in particular with its legacy of violence and decay. Many of the projects seem to have been plucked from a list of man-made horrors: the site of a terrorist bombing, a war-torn city center, poisonous dumping grounds and industrial wastelands. The show’s underlying optimism is rooted in the power of landscape design to act as a healing agent.

Yet one of the show’s strengths is that it never preaches. Even the most toxic landscapes are envisioned as part of a broader cycle of decay and renewal. And all are explorations of communal memory – an attempt to openly engage that dark history rather than cover it over.

Of these, the most lyrical is the stunning Igualada Cemetery on the outskirts of Barcelona, which opened in 1996. (Adding to its resonance, it was one of the first important commissions for Enric Miralles, architect of the new Scottish Parliament, who died of a brain tumor at the age of 45 in 2000.) A drawn-out processional path carves down into the earth; tombs frame the path on either side, embedded in the cemetery’s canted concrete retaining walls.

The aim is to draw you deeper into the realm of memory. But it is also about forgetting: built in a decrepit industrial zone on the outskirts of Barcelona, the cemetery offers an escape from the relentless pace of modernization into a more intimate inner world. The asymmetrical arrangement of the paths is an antidote to regimentation of a culture modeled on the assembly line.

The relationship between excavation and memory resurfaces in Gustafson Porter’s “Garden of Forgiveness ” in central Beirut, a district that was virtually obliterated during Lebanon’s 16-year civil war. The project, currently under construction, offers some of the show’s most haunting images. The garden will rise amid ancient and medieval ruins that were uncovered during the restoration of the central district. A series of terraces step down to the newly excavated site, which is divided by an old Roman road. The ancient foundations will frame smaller gardens within the park, planted with indigenous fauna.

Like the cemetery in Barcelona, the project evokes a spiritual journey. The exposed ruins suggest the excavation of the city’s shared memories; the gardens, healing. In both projects, the earth is imbued with sacred meaning.

That approach is in striking contrast to that of designers who fervently embrace the artificiality of our postindustrial world. Of these, the most innovative may be the Schouwburgplein (1996) in Rotterdam, a plaza by West 8 Urban Design and Landscape that draws inspiration from the eeriness of the city’s industrial waterfront. The plaza’s surface, raised slightly above the surrounding streets, is paved in a pattern of wood slats, perforated metal and heavy-duty rubber. A row of mechanical “light masts,” inspired by the massive cranes along Rotterdam’s piers, line the project’s northern edge, their muscular steel arms gliding up and down like oil pumps.

By raising the plaza just above street level, the designers enabled light to filter down into levels of parking underneath the plaza – a further reminder that you are not on solid ground. But the plaza is also a stage for reflecting on Rotterdam’s gritty history. A major port in World War II, the city was blasted by British and American bombers during the German occupation. Its industrial piers, modern housing blocks and generic shopping strips are emblematic of the postwar city.

Rather than ignore the past, the architects draw inspiration from it. The gentle rocking of the light masts offer relief from the frenetic pace of urban life. The plaza’s vacant surface evokes the barren piazzas of an Antonioni film. But instead of urban alienation, the mood is one of intense intimacy, an unexpected silence carved out of the city’s core.

Other projects embrace the artificial just as ardently. The sensuous, undulating lines of Foreign Office Architects’ design for a waterfront park in Barcelona, completed in 2004, could have been inspired by Miralles’s earlier work. But the project’s heavy concrete retaining walls, which are meant to evoke sand dunes, have a hard-core industrial aesthetic. Like West 8′s urban plaza, they fit comfortably into their postindustrial context.

Similarly, Field Operations’ model for a proposed park at Fresh Kills in Staten Island is a witty nod to the site’s function as landfill for city waste for more than half a century. The model’s delicately etched surface, decorated with pins marking the park’s various activities – golf, kayaking, horseback riding, soccer – is neon green, as if it were glowing with the poisonous ooze trapped underneath. It’s hauntingly beautiful.

Such an approach may seem a bit dark in comparison with, say, the lighthearted Pop imagery of Alsop’s design for the city center of Bradford, in northern England. A response to the population declines in old manufacturing cities, the project brims with social idealism. The plan includes tearing down the city’s abandoned center and replacing it with an urban park, which will act as a mixing chamber for the city’s racially divided neighborhoods.

There are also lesser works here – too many to mention. The minimalist designs, in particular, tend toward the drab, especially when they adhere to the rigid formalism that was a hallmark of much 1980′s landscape architecture. (Peter Walker William Johnson & Partners’ design for Keyaki Plaza in Saitama City, Japan, looks ominously like its current design for ground zero’s memorial park.) Yet in their rigid allegiance to the grid, these projects are a useful foil to the more adventurous work.

As a whole, the show, organized by Peter Reed, a MoMA curator of architecture and design, signals the refreshing debate that is emerging over how best to deal with the legacy of Modernism. These designers, many still in their 40′s, are less apt to judge that past in black-and-white terms than to extract its neglected beauty. What is more, they accept that violence and decay are an inescapable part of urban existence.

Beyond their aesthetic range, these projects resonate because they are such deeply felt responses to contemporary realities. This is urban optimism without blinkers.

Correction Appended

THE total box office for all five best-picture nominees on Sunday’s Oscars is so small that their collective niche in the national cultural marketplace falls somewhere between square dancing and non-Grisham fiction. But if this year’s Oscars are worthless as a barometer of the broad state of American pop culture, there’s much to learn from the hype spun by ABC and the motion picture academy to seduce Americans to watch even if they can’t distinguish Clive Owen from Catalina Sandino Moreno. The selling of the Oscar show is the latest indicator of the most telling disconnect in our politics: in the post-Janet Jackson era, “indecency” is gaining in popularity in direct proportion to Washington’s campaign to shut indecency down.

Hollywood can read the numbers. Once the feds vowed to smite future “wardrobe malfunctions,” the customers started bolting the annual TV franchises where those malfunctions and their verbal counterparts are apt to occur. An award show sanitized of vulgarity and encased in the prophylactic of tape delay is an oxymoron. And so the Golden Globes lost 40 percent of its audience in January on NBC, the Grammys lost 28 percent of its audience this month on CBS. The viewers turned up instead at the competing “Desperate Housewives” on ABC, where S-and-M is the latest item on the carnal menu. Though this year’s Super Bowl didn’t have to go up against that runaway hit, its born-again family-friendliness also took a ratings toll; the audience in the all-important 18-to-49 demographic fell to an all-time low. The viewers perked up only for a GoDaddy.com commercial parodying a Washington “Broadcast Censorship Hearing”: TiVo reported that the spot’s utterly unrevealing “wardrobe malfunction” gag was the most replayed moment from any of the game’s ads, much as the Jackson-Timberlake pas de deux that inspired it was the TiVo sensation of the year before.

This is why the people bringing you the Oscars have done everything possible to imply that Sunday’s show will be so indecent that even the winner of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award may let loose with a Dick Cheney expletive. Rather than chase away MTV and its fans from the festivities as the National Football League did after the Jackson fracas, the academy hired as its host Chris Rock, a three-time MTV Music Video Awards M.C. Mr. Rock, as brilliant at P.R. as he is at comedy, ran around giving cheeky interviews making the outrageous charge that the Oscars might have a gay following. Matt Drudge took the bait and assailed the comedian for indecency. Mr. Rock was soiling “the classiest night in Hollywood,” he said on Fox News, by taking “a lewd route … to the gutter.”

The motion picture academy’s marketers couldn’t have said it better themselves. They know a lewd route is the yellow brick road to Nielsen nirvana. Gilbert Cates, the Oscars producer, had already been putting out the message that he opposed the show’s tape delay as “dangerous to society.” The academy’s executive director, Bruce Davis, elaborated to Lola Ogunnaike of The New York Times: “I like to hear that people are nervous, because that means you’re more likely to watch.” Last Sunday Mr. Rock was billed by Ed Bradley on “60 Minutes” as a “nontraditional host” who is “not afraid to offend” and whose “comedy is still as profane and uncut as ever.” Two hours later came the pièce de résistance: Mr. Rock in an Oscar-show promo spot on “Desperate Housewives” fondling the Oscar statuette (in all its gold nudity) and declaring, “You won’t believe the halftime show!”

It’s all a hoax, of course. ABC has merely shortened last year’s seven-second tape delay to five seconds, and viewers already annoyed that the Oscar telecast is pre-empting “Desperate Housewives” may have further reason to complain when they learn that any profane comedy or liberated cleavage will be seen only by the swells at the Kodak Theater. Next year may be another story. In a little noted report in Variety earlier this month, the academy got ABC to forgo a contract stipulation requiring a tape delay in future Oscar shows. Further ratings tumbles ensure that the war against tape delays will be taken up in earnest by media giants eager to preserve their profit centers. Already the networks are mulling a court challenge to the constitutionality of the decades-old Federal Communications Commission decency standards. The rules are so loosey-goosy it’s hard to imagine how the networks could lose.

The signs are everywhere that the indecency campaign is failing anyway in the months since “moral values” supposedly became the unofficial law of the land. To see how much so, forget about the liberal Hollywood of Oscar night and examine instead the porn peddlers of the right.

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox, always a leader in these hypocrisy sweepstakes, made pious hay out of yanking the second scheduled broadcast of the GoDaddy.com commercial after its initial Super Bowl appearance. But Fox Sports promptly plastered the “GoDaddy girl” alongside Playboy bunnies and other pinups on its “Funhouse Fox of the Week” Web site, where every adolescent teenager could ogle it to his libido’s content. No less a bellwether is the decision of Adelphia, a cable giant known for its refusal to traffic in erotica, to change its image radically now that its moralistic founder and former C.E.O., John Rigas, has been convicted of looting the company. Shortly after President Bush’s inauguration Adelphia acknowledged that it is offering XXX, the most hard-core porn, to some subscribers – a cable first, outdoing even the XX porn on Mr. Murdoch’s DirecTV in explicitness. “The more X’s, the more popular,” an Adelphia spokeswoman told The Los Angeles Times.

As Jake Tapper reported on ABC News, Adelphia is a big Republican contributor. Its beneficiaries include Rick Santorum, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania who has likened homosexuality to “man on dog” sex, a specialty item that his campaign donor might yet present some day. Sift through the Center for Responsive Politics’ campaign contribution site, and you will also find that Fred Upton, the Republican point man in the Congressional indecency crusade, is one of the many in his party (President Bush among them) raking in contributions from Comcast or its executives. Comcast subscribers are awash in porn. In Mr. Upton’s own Kalamazoo district, its pay-per-view networks have offered such hard-core fare as “Young, Fresh & Ripe” and “As Young As They Come No. 8″ even as the congressman put the finishing touches on the penalty-enhanced Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2005.

Cheering Mr. Upton on is the Parents Television Council, the e-mail factory that Mediaweek magazine credits with as much as 99.9 percent of all indecency complaints to the F.C.C. in 2004. It is also quite a little fount of salacious entertainment in its own right. On its Web site, the organization’s tireless “entertainment analysts” compile a list of every naughty word used on television and invite visitors to “Watch the Worst TV Clip of the Week.” An archive of past clips – helpfully labeled individually by sin (“gratuitous teen sex,” “necrophilia”) – is there for your pleasure, with no requirement for the credit card number or membership fee that porn Internet sites use as a roadblock for children.

That politicians and public scolds like these have succeeded in the temporary laundering of live TV shows, and even “Saving Private Ryan,” is a symptom of the political moment. It won’t last long. The power of the free market, for better or worse, will prevail, and the market tells us that it is still the American way to lament indecency even while gobbling it up. This is the year that Sports Illustrated for the first time published the number for its subscribers to phone if they wanted to skip the swimsuit issue – and almost no one called. Sandra Dee really is dead, and no fire-and-brimstone speeches by James Dobson are going to bring her back.

But that does not mean that the indecency campaign is benign. Even if it barely slows the entertainment industry juggernaut, it inflicts collateral damage elsewhere – whether casting a chill over broadcast news or crippling public broadcasting by inducing it to censor even the language of American troops in a “Frontline” documentary about Iraq. The Parents Television Council may purport to complain about “The Simpsons,” which last Sunday presented an episode both sympathetic to same-sex marriage and skeptical of a Bible-thumping minister. (“If you love the Bible so much,” Homer asks him, “why don’t you marry it?”) But that’s a game; this organization knows full well it can’t lay a finger on Fox or its well-connected proprietor, Mr. Murdoch. The same anti-indecency forces, however, can and did set the stage for the new secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, to go gunning for a far milder evocation of same-sex parents in the children’s show “Postcards From Buster” on PBS.

Fresh from sending a cartoon rabbit to the slaughterhouse, Ms. Spellings will figure out ways to discriminate against real-life lesbian moms in other departmental policies that have nothing to do with entertainment. And she’s not the only administration official empowered by the decency crusaders to apply censorship to public policy well removed from the TV screen. No sooner were PBS’s lesbians sent to the indecency gulag than The Washington Post reported that the Department of Health and Human Services had instructed the presenters of a federally funded conference on suicide prevention this month to remove the words “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual” and “transgender” from the name of a talk heretofore titled “Suicide Prevention Among Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender Individuals,” thereby rendering it invisible and useless.

At least President Bush is now on tape saying he won’t “kick gays.” He leaves that to surrogates. It’s gay people and teenagers being denied potentially life-saving sex education who ultimately are the real victims of the larger agenda of the decency crusaders, which is not to clean up show business, a doomed mission, but to realize the more attainable goal of enlisting the government to marginalize and punish those who don’t adhere to their “moral values.” For its part, show business will have no problem fending for itself. My favorite moment in the whole faux Oscar controversy came on a “Today” show segment weighing the Drudge Report blast of Chris Rock. “Still ahead this morning on ‘Today,’ ” said Katie Couric without missing a beat as that report ended, “former teacher Mary Kay Letourneau is planning to marry the student who fathered two of her children.” America just can’t stop itself from staying tuned.

Correction: February 27, 2005, Sunday:

The continuation of a front-page column on Page 17 of Arts & Leisure today about the Oscars and indecency in popular culture includes an outdated reference to sexually explicit films offered on some Adelphia Communications cable systems. After the section had gone to press, Adelphia announced that it would stop carrying films classified XXX.