After watching the Oscars Sunday (a.k.a. getting highlights the next day because I passed-out somewhere in-between the awards for “Best Sock-Puppet in a foreign-short” and “Best Sock-Puppet Designer in a foreign-short”) it’s obvious that “make-up calls” aren’t exclusive to sports – they’ve made their way into the movies, too.

A make-up call in the sporting world occurs when “a referee makes an obvious mistake in penalizing a team or a player, and in an effort to rectify the irreversible screw-up, said referee arbitrarily hands-out an equally bad or worse penalty against the opposite team or player.”

Awarding “Best Picture” to The Departed and “Best Director” to its maker, Martin Scorsese, was a monster make-up call.

Starring Jack Nicholson (all-around bad guy), Matt Damon (bad guy pretending to be good guy) and Leonardo DiCaprio (good guy pretending to be bad guy), The Departed was an average mob movie at best. The plot had potential, the ending was pleasantly unpredictable, and the violence – not action – was definitely on par with Scorsese’s previous mob classics (i.e. Good Fellas and Casino). But two and a half hours of unconvincing and underdeveloped characters (giving everyone heavy and phony Boston accents doesn’t make them complex, it makes them annoying), pointlessly loud and vulgar dialogue (two unrelated conversations about menstruation, for example), and too many “Can you hear me now?” filler scenes spent talking on or looking at a cell phone made this one hard to enjoy.