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We realize there's only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today: Ann Curry heroically steps on all of Sacha Baron Cohen's lines, how Oscars become Oscars, and Jimmy Fallon's Pearl Jam tribute includes one terrific joke.

We're not the biggest fans of Sacha Baron Cohen when he's in ambush mode -- we always feel vaguely like we're about to have a heart attack -- but we enjoyed his in-character phone call to the Today show this morning to protest the non-banning of his Dictator character from Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony. This was largely due to the contributions of Ann Curry, who clearly wasn't happy about having to pretend she was talking to someone other than an actor trying to promote a movie. She was a bad sport, but in an interesting way. And we're pretty sure she ended the segment early after Cohen made a not particularly bawdy joke about his character getting a lot of ladies pregnant. Whatever the talk show equivalent of shut defense is, that's what Curry did to Cohen. [NBC]

An ambush comedian we do enjoy is the Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, who went to the Golden Collar Awards, an aggressively pointless new awards show to honor exceptional performances by dogs in film and television, and acted like Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. It was the highlight of a strong week of material on Conan. [Team Coco]




We like videos about how desirable and iconic objects are made, particularly when they include shots of the object fully formed, but missing a key element like paint. So we enjoyed seeing how Oscars are made at a factory in Chicago, where they spend the bulk of their existence in a non-gold-plated state. [Time]

You can add Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder to the ever-expanding list of singers Jimmy Fallon can sort of sing like. Like most of these Fallon musical bits, how much you'll enjoy this one (which is vaguely about Jeremy Lin, because he's in the news) relies largely on how much you enjoy the work of the original performer. We enjoy Pearl Jam, so we thought it was pretty terrific. Added bonus: the song is called "Jeremy (Lin)." Perfect. [NBC]

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