This year’s ceremony, by contrast, opened with a pair of dancers in angel wings reenacting the neoclassical sculpture Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, which was created about 100 years before the invention of the lightbulb. The show then ran through a psychedelic tribute to a bygone Italy, a sort of live highlight reel of hundreds of years of civilization, rendered bonkersly but quaintly: Color-saturated Roman centurions marched solemnly in line with people dressed as moka pots; visual gags celebrated pasta, paparazzi, the film La Dolce Vita. At one point, the great composers Verdi, Puccini, and Rossini appeared in bobblehead proportions, like the guys who run the bases at Minor League baseball games: history turned into a cartoon, very literally.