I don't care how old school or new school you are, that 'And' he used is 100% redundant and it's at the start of a PARAGRAPH which makes it even worse. Terrible. Horrible! I don't think I can associate with him anymore.
What's more miraculous is that anyone here is even willing to associate with you after that abomination of a soup thread.

Also there's no grammatical rule against redundancy. The sentence "I'd like to say 'thank you' on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we've passed the audition" is entirely grammatically correct, despite being quite redundant.

As for the topic, yes, I usually use the Oxford comma, unless it creates ambiguity to do so (and I'm not too out of it to notice said ambiguity).