2010 ceremony: “Worst. Oscars. Ever,” said movie critic Peter Howell in the Toronto Star. “Yes, I know I’ve said this before. But the Academy keeps coming up with new lows.” Hosts Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin led a show that “was a desperate attempt to look hip,” and, at three-and-a-half hours long, it “wasn’t the longest Oscar broadcast ever, but it sure felt like it.” In fairness, “I should qualify my rant slightly. This wasn’t the worst Oscars ever, it was the worst Oscars broadcast ever.” They did pick the right winners. Still, in the spirit of one of the year’s most popular films, I wish we had “our own avatars to watch the show in our place, saving us from having to endure it ourselves.”

2009 ceremony: In a piece titled “The Worst Oscars Ever,” The Daily Beast’s Lee Siegel said the “show was an embarrassingly contrived spectacle that only served to prove how insecure Hollywood is about its own future.” Hoping to re-establish “cultural relevance they used to” have, the organizers “desperately seized on a whole new format.” It was a “disaster,” to say the least. “No wonder the show’s main sponsor was JC Penney, who it seems is embarking on an ad campaign to rebrand itself from a downscale discount outlet to an upscale discount outlet.” The night concluded with the airing of trailers for some upcoming films, which “was like watching a nervous breakdown.”

2008 ceremony: “[A]ll in all, it was The Worst Oscars Ever in the History of Hollywood,” said Nikki Finke in LA Weekly. It was the lowest-rated, partially “because this was really the 11th-hour Oscars” thrown together “after the sudden and unexpected settlement” of the writers’ strike. Putting on a show with just two-weeks notice is tough, and it showed. Most of the time, host Jon Stewart “just stood there uncomfortably, searching for a few words to say.” But this “debacle” wasn’t all Stewart’s fault. It’s about the movies, and No Country for Old Men took home top honors. Would it really “kill the academy to include crowd-pleasers” like action films or comedies? “Usually, academy voters are painfully out of touch with the tastes of the American public. Now the show is a pathetic anachronism too.”

2007 ceremony: “This was the most tedious Oscars show ever,” said Rolling Stone‘s Rob Sheffield. There’s a lot to complain about here. “Dumb montages. Dumb comedy bits. And sorry, but after two speeches by Al Gore, several speeches about him and a Melissa Etheridge song,” I’d had enough. “Christ, Al, would it have killed you to just win Tennessee?” Spare us, please.

Does that make Jon Stewart‘s 2006 show the best ever?

Last month Fathi penned a piece for the NYT about how Iran journos were fleeing the country in droves and we noted that “judging by the byline on the dateline (Toronto), the NYT’s own journalist in Iran may have been part of the mass exodus.” Turns out she was. The Toronto Star has picked up the story.

Understandably, Fathi didn’t want to insert herself into the story. In fact, it’s a story she never wanted to write. But in many ways, hers is the story of Iran’s recent spiral into lawlessness and, perhaps worse, hopelessness. It’s also the story of how, with depressing regularity, Canada is becoming a safe haven for the world’s exiled journalists. It’s not easy monitoring events from 10,000 kilometres away. But covering Iran from Toronto is still easier than it was in Tehran when Fathi was holed up in her apartment, watched by security agents, her phone and Internet connections compromised.

The article also details the circumstances that lead to Fathi’s departure from Iran:

Fathi was the last Times reporter left on the front lines as activists and dissidents were rounded up, interrogated and tortured. Among them was another Iranian-Canadian dual national, Maziar Bahari, Newsweek’s reporter in Tehran until he was picked up in late June at the height of the unrest. Bahari, 42, was released a month ago after his family posted bail. He remains in exile in Britain.

And who can forget the torture and death of yet another Canadian dual national, photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, in Tehran in 2003, which has strained bilateral relations ever since. Against that backdrop, Fathi took the warning signs seriously. A surveillance team took up position outside her family’s apartment, as Basiji thugs and Revolutionary Guard enforcers wrested control of the streets from idealistic protestors.

Whenever there were protests, “I kissed my children” before going out, Fathi told me. Later, one of Fathi’s old government sources alerted her that a sniper would take her out if they could ever identify her in public. “I stopped going out … I was practically under house arrest.” One day, the surveillance team followed her husband and children in four vehicles, then cut him off suddenly and approached their car. It was time to go.

Hard news comes at a hard price, and with the departure of Fathi (among many others) it would appear that both the public and major news outlets are now even more dependent on the sort of citizen journalism we saw last June for first hand accounts of life in Iran.