Mary McNamara

When you pick up a novel by Anne Tyler, you can expect certain things. It will be set in Baltimore. It will follow families populated by out-of-step characters ranging from the slightly odd to the wildly eccentric, whose actions, or nonactions, are motivated by a need for love and tangible sense of self; this need is sometimes conscious, sometimes not.

LOS ANGELES -- In recent months the name Mary Tyler Moore has been bandied about with unexpected regularity bordering on reckless abandon. This is not just because she recently made her first TV appearance in many moons on pal Betty White's show "Hot in Cleveland" or because she proved at last month's televised fete for White's 90th birthday that she can still rock a white pantsuit or even because she is receiving this year's Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award tonight.

LOS ANGELES -- Every year, the networks trot out some show or other that revolves around a baby, and every year, I start counting the hours before that baby vanishes. Last year, it was baby Hope from "Raising Hope"; this year, it's baby Amy from "Up All Night." Five episodes into the latter, and creator Emily Spivey was already on flashbacks so we could experience the days leading to the birth. Pregnancy is, after all, much more interesting than new parenting because (and here's me pointing out an elephant in the writers room) babies are very boring.

The first 10 minutes or so of HBO's new epic fantasy series "Game of Thrones" are spent celebrating the glories of cable, i.e. bloody violence (beheadings, hacked off body parts, eviscerated guts steaming in the snow) and HBO sex (female semi-frontal nudity, non-missionary position intercourse and unnecessarily graphic sound effects.)

Unless you are a minor, you should not be deterred by any of this because "Game of Thrones," written and produced by David Benioff and D.B Weiss, quickly becomes a great and thundering series of political and psychological intrigue bristling with vivid characters, cross-hatched with tantalizing plotlines and seasoned with a splash of fantasy.

LOS ANGELES -- If you are a professional of a certain age and have not been asked to serve as a judge on a reality show in which folks attempt to leapfrog to success in your area of expertise, then you might want to think about getting new representation. For the record, when there's a show in which various producer wannabes compete for the next great reality series, count me in; I have just as many dangly earrings as Steven Tyler.

LOS ANGELES -- They played it safe, and who could blame them?

The 83rd Academy Awards opened with hosts Anne Hathaway and James Franco taking an "Inception"-inspired journey through the dreams of former host Alec Baldwin, dreams that turned out to be clips from nominated films into which Hathaway and Franco were inserted, in a rather astonishingly seamless way. The jokes ranged from the sublime -- "I loved you in 'Tron,' " Franco tells Jeff Bridges in "True Grit" -- to the ridiculous -- Hathaway's "dance of the brown duck" in front of "Black Swan's" Natalie Portman. But it was clever, colorful and suffered not at all from its merciful lack of song-styling.

For the rest of the evening, however, the two seemed to be following the directive to "first do no harm," as if they knew they couldn't score as big as Jimmy Fallon did with the Emmys but were determined to avoid becoming morning-show fodder like Ricky Gervais was after this year's Golden Globes. The result was a show that moved along, with a few draggy bits and high notes, like precisely what it was: a very long and fancy awards show.

"I REMEMBER NOTHING AND OTHER REFLECTIONS." By Nora Ephron. Alfred A. Knopf. $22.95.

It's good to be Nora Ephron.