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February 27, 2005

So, Oscars recap: The Aviator evidently lost quite a bit of steam between the Golden Globes and now, because while it was handed a bunch of conciliatory minor awards (editing, costumes, blah), it didn't earn the Picture/Director split I thought it would. (It did get Supporting Actress with Cate Blanchett, though.) Scorsese gets shut out again, but honestly, good. While the Oscars have historically been big on "make-up" awards - Pacino in 1992, Denzel in 2001, Russell Crowe in 2000, Return of the King winning everything it was nominated for last year - I've never really approved of that concept. The Oscars should be like what the Heisman Trophy should be - the best performance of the year in question. Unfortunately, sometimes it turns into what the Heisman often turns into, which is a career award. Scorsese winning Best Director this year would have been yet another case of that. Did he get "robbed" in 1980? Perhaps. Did he get "robbed" again in 1990? Again, perhaps. But it's not Oscar's job to "right past wrongs" by handing out awards at indiscriminate times; that just means someone else gets "robbed" and the cycle is only going to continue. Of course, Eastwood already has a Best Director Oscar for Unforgiven, so robbing him would have been theoretically "okay" if you want to use that kind of logic, but the fact is this: Million Dollar Baby was much better than The Aviator, and Eastwood's direction had a lot to do with that. So I'm glad that there wasn't a split, even though I thought there would be.
Apart from that I did pretty darn well on calling the major awards, which either means I paid more attention to all the pre-Oscar awards this year than usual, or the categories were just kind of boring. A quick recap of my post of January 27 shows that I was right about both Screenplay awards (and also that Sideways' win for Adapted would be consolation for winning nothing else), as well as Actor (like that was hard) and Actress. My "will win" was wrong for Picture, Director, and both Supporting acting awards, but it should be noted that that was written before both the SAG awards and the DGA awards. My picks in Leah's Oscar pool included Eastwood for Director and both Blanchett and Freeman, so really the only major award that I got wrong was Best Picture. Hooray that Freeman won, by the way - he was great, and since he deserved the Best Actor for Shawshank it's nice to see him get some love finally. Thank God he was good in a good movie, though, so it can't be called a make-up award.

As for the Oscar party - would you believe this was the first time I'd seen Leah since November 10, 2002? (I only know the date because it was at the UIUC-hosted TRASH Regionals, incidentally.) Somewhat surprisingly, to me at least, she looked almost exactly the same, though she asked me if she looked skinnier than before and I would have to say that that is indeed the case. She also gave me back a book on Woody Allen of mine that she had had for who knows how long - quite possibly more than three years, which is hilarious. In any event, it was good to see her again. Hopefully our next meeting will take place after less than a two-year gap.
Alma came to the party with me and then we came back and watched an episode of CSI I had sitting in the TiVo from two weeks ago that we had missed. A rather sedate but generally pleasant evening, and I love that we can do things like that. Alma, baby, you're everything to me.

February 26, 2005

To update last week's two notes, we've had a good amount of preliminary interest in the tournament challenge. Bear in mind you've got until Selection Sunday to sign up, but that's no reason to wait. The consensus so far has been to play for the cash, so you should not sign up if you're going to stiff me (or more accurately the eventual winner) on the standard five-dollar entry fee. Otherwise, do so.
As for the Beatles list, it has now made its way down to the cusp of the Top 40. The entire list can still be viewed starting here; I suspect some people would prefer this link, which takes you to the page starting with #80 that begins the most recent addition to the list.

February 19, 2005

   Holy hell. I don't really know why it's been so long - an astonishing 22 days, to be exact - since the last update. I guess there hasn't really been much worth talking about. I haven't seen any movies in that time period (the first couple months of the year are pretty generally a wasteland) and not much else has gone on. To partially make up for the dearth of updates, I present to you a couple of things:
    1) the official announcement that the BigFlax.com NCAA Tournament Challenge will indeed return for its fifth consecutive year. Get on the bus today! E-mail me to sign up; when you do, please inform me of whether or not you would like to play for a fabulous cash prize, and if you would, sell me on how you won't be a slacker in sending me the entry fee.
    2) Those of you who have been reading this site for a while may recall that I used to do a Beatles countdown every year where I ranked the top 40 songs (the 2002 version may be found here). Well, now I'm going to do myself quite a bit better. That's right, it's all 182 songs the Beatles wrote and recorded between 1963 and 1970, ranked by me! I know you're just salivating at the thought. The countdown begins now.

There's more! View last month's updates.

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This page last updated: Monday, February 28, 2005 08:24:25 AM