Sesame Street Has Your Oscars Alternative Programming in the Form of…Oscar

Not sure you want to watch the Academy Awards this weekend? Why not try a little Sesame Street and Oscar the Grouch instead?

There are a myriad of reasons why someone may not want to watch the Oscars. After all, it is a really long awards show that has plenty of padding and usually some not-so-great jokes. In fact, one might even say that awards season can make you…grouchy. Sesame Street understands this. That’s why, for the past week, they’ve been updating a special Oscar Week playlist.

Before you start to wonder how Sesame Street could parody movies like Moonlight, you might want to check the star of the videos.

Completely unsurprisingly, it’s Oscar the Grouch. Today’s upload is a ’70s throwback song, “Swamp Mushy Muddy:”

Swamp Mushy Muddy sounds like an excellent place for people who’d like to complain about the Oscars (sorry, the Academy Awards) to go.

And then, in the great tradition of Sesame Street parodies that work far better than they should, a sketch entitled “Grouch Eye for the Nice Guy” went up yesterday:

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is actually coming back with the help of Netflix, so this actually seems like the perfect time to bring this video back.

For an extra retro video, Sesame Street even has footage of the original Oscar the Grouch, in his less-well known orange form:

The description of the video even has an explanation for why Oscar’s now green:

"“Back in the very very first season of Sesame Street, Oscar the Grouch was orange, not green! Can you believe it? After quite some time of living in a trashcan and not bathing, enough moss and mold built up on Oscar and he became green! It doesn’t quite matter what color Oscar is or was, he’ll always love trash.”"

It makes perfect sense, and of course Oscar wouldn’t stop loving trash. We won’t stop loving Oscar, either, especially when we think he might be far more interesting than those little gold statuettes.

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Sesame Street will also air four new episodes in March, although none of the descriptions in an e-mail press release mention Oscar.