While You Were Thanking the Academy

Two years ago it was pageboy, this year it's high-and-tight. My how styles change quickly.

"The Hurt Locker" triumphed during last night's Oscar ceremony, taking the big Best Picture and Director awards, Best Screenplay (orig.), best Editing, and nods in two sound categories. "Avatar" didn't go home empty handed, but Cameron & Co. probably figured on beating "Up" by more than just one statuette.

Meanwhile, you know how sometimes there are more technical awards that they don't bother to present in prime time? Where a 30 second montage will do just fine thank you? Well it's a little known fact that during THAT awards ceremony they show a montage of the awards deemed too dorky for the technical crowd.

The envelope, please ...

• Best Pitcher: Pfizer apparently wants Ratiopharm, and wants it bad. How bad? Let's just say Jeff Kindler wasn't hanging out along the Bayern/Baden-Wurttemberg border for kicks on Friday.


• Best Foreign Language FlimFlam: Merck KGaA has "indeed a few ideas," Reuters reports that the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung reported. Acquisitions "are part of our strategy." In other news, the sun rose in the east.


• Best Drug Biopic: Everything you ever wanted to know about where Sutent comes from, courtesy Bloomberg.


• Best Use of Clinical Acronyms in a Supporting Role: Roche and Biogen Idec said this morning that they were halting certain trials of the Phase II ocrelizumab in RA (where it has been tested in trials called SCRIPT, FEATURE, FILM and STAGE) and lupus (BELONG and BEGIN). A DSMB determined that the safety risk (death from serious infections) outweighed the benefits in these populations, though trials in MS are ongoing.
  
• Best Reason to Keep In-Licensing: AstraZeneca said its first-line metastatic CRC hopeful Recentin was effective but did not meet its primary endpoint in the first of two pivotal trials. AZ hoped the drug would prove non-inferior to Avastin in the Phase III Horizon study in terms of progression-free survival. A second Phase III in glioblastoma should read out in the first half of 2010.


• Best Scoop: Our colleagues at OverTheCounterToday supplement your biopharma diet with consumer medicine goodness, and on Friday, revealed that Sen. McCain was withdrawing his support for the bill he introduced to significantly tighten regulatory requirements for dietary supplements.