It opens next week. I saw it, and here's the thing: It's unbelievably bad. O I'm telling you this because movie critics won't. So far all the early reviews -- all of them, from Variety to the Hollywood Reporter to Time magazine -- have been favorable. Why? Because while the movie critics of my long-ago youth were middlebrow snobs suspicious of populist entertainment, today's critics have turned into toadies. They are afraid of being on an audience's bad side, afraid that a movie they will pan might really strike a chord. Since it's a foregone conclusion that the final Star Wars is going to make a jillion dollars, the safe thing for critics to do is say nice things about it.

Despite moral watchdogs lamenting Hollywood's vile tendencies, the studios have actually been cleaning up their act. R-rated films, once the studios' mainstay, are on the decline, both in numbers and in lure. In the last five years, R-rated pics have dwindled from 212 in 1999 to just 147 last year.

Singer Alanis Morissette wore a "nude suit" on stage at Canada's equivalent of the Grammys to complain about censorship in the US.

Morissette, who was hosting the Juno Awards in Edmonton on Sunday, wore the cartoon-style bodysuit in protest at TV and radio censorship in the US.

"We can't show nipples on national TV," she said in relation to Janet Jackson's Super Bowl incident.

"I am proud to be able to stand here and do this," she told the audience.

"We live in a land where we still think the human body is beautiful and we're not afraid of the female breast," the singer said, after stepping out of a dressing gown to reveal her "nudity".

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"They're in an era when they're scared, when there's lots of fear," she said.