Oscar post-mortem

The nice thing about having a blog is that you can write things on it that people would tell you to shut up about if you actually tried to talk to them about, like how you did on your Oscar picks. Providing you don't fall asleep now out of sheer boredom, if you're looking at the blog, you're stuck with finding out how I did.

Of the 24 categories, I picked 14 correctly. That was good enough to squeak by in first place in the pool at my classmate's Oscar party, where two people had 13 correct,. As a result, I walked home through the snowstorm with a cool two dollars -- a 50 cent ante times four people. My Oscar dorkiness has some limits, so I don't save ballots from past years, but I believe that's right around or slightly below my yearly average, since I don‘t think I‘ve ever gotten less than half right.

In the major categories (picture, director, the four actors and two screenplays), I was seven for eight, picking Eddie Murphy over supporting actor winner Alan Arkin. I think Eddie should have won, but maybe those stupid "Norbit" ads really did hurt him. In general “think will win” picks corresponded well with who I wanted to win. Helen Mirren, Forest Whitaker, Jennifer Hudson and Scorsese were all great.

I’m happy The Departed won best picture, since the other two “front-runners,” Little Miss Sunshine and Babel, I didn’t care for. Babel was sort of dull and seemed like it thought it was making way more profound points than it was, and LMS was just vastly overrated. I can’t believe it was even nominated. It made me laugh, but I thought it was just a bad movie, a 90 minute sitcom spiced up with “edgy” material (a heroin-snorting grampa and a suicidal gay Proust scholar are quirky, but not good filmmaking). If it had won, which I’d heard predicted, I would have lost it.

I think I may have liked The Queen a bit more than The Departed (I’m the only one), but two of my favorite films weren’t nominated for best picture: United 93 and Dreamgirls -- too depressing and too frothy and joyous respectively, I guess.

I thought the show and Ellen were fun, if you can look past the stupid montages and dance numbers and other filler. One montage I missed the introduction to, and I couldn’t even tell what it was about -- there was shots of the Klan, Muhammad Ali, Saving Private Ryan...can anyone tell me what the heck that was? Anyway, I’m beyond judging the show on it’s merits -- it’s the Oscars, I’ll always watch it no matter what.

Last year, I managed to see every blessed movie in every blessed category, except for one of the foreign films which hadn't yet been released in the U.S., and the shorts, naturally. This year, with much less time but the advantage of living in New York, I was able to see 25 of the 43 nominated films, (minus the shorts). I actually saw all but four nominees in the major eight categories (for the record, I missed Volver, Notes on a Scandal, Pursuit of Happyness, and Children of Men). If you care.

And now, in the height of narcissism and navel-gazing, here’s the list of actual winners and how my picks matched up. I’m really doing this for my own amusement...I can’t imagine anyone would actually be interested.

*CORRECT* Best Picture: The Departed

*CORRECT* Best Actor: Forest Whitaker for The Last King of Scotland

*CORRECT* Best Actress: Helen Mirren for The Queen

*INCORRECT* Best Supporting Actor: Alan Arkin for Little Miss Sunshine (I picked Eddie Murphy)

*CORRECT* Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson for Dreamgirls

*CORRECT* Best Director: Martin Scorsese for The Departed

*CORRECT* Best Original Screenplay: Little Miss Sunshine

*CORRECT* Best Adapted Screenplay: The Departed

*INCORRECT* Best Cinematography: Pan's Labyrinth (I picked Children of Men)

*INCORRECT* Best Editing: The Departed (I picked United 93)

*CORRECT* Best Art Direction: Pan's Labyrinth

*CORRECT* Best Costumes: Marie Antoinette

*INCORRECT* Best Score: Babel (I picked The Queen)

*INCORRECT* Best Original Song: An Inconvenient Truth, Melissa Etheridge("I Need To Wake Up") (I picked Beyonce's song from Dreamgirls...I guess three nominations in one category canceled each other out)

*CORRECT* Best Makeup: Pan's Labyrinth

*CORRECT* Best Sound Mixing: Dreamgirls

*CORRECT* Best Sound Editing: Letters from Iwo Jima

*CORRECT* Best Visual Effects: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

*INCORRECT* Best Animated Feature: Happy Feet (I picked Cars, which I really liked. I didn't
see Happy Feet, but I don't see how it could not be annoying)

*INCORRECT* Best Foreign Language Film: The Lives of Others (I picked Pan's Labyrinth, and given all the other awards it won, it's pretty shocking it didn't win here. But Lives of Others is great.)

*CORRECT* Best Documentary Feature: An Inconvenient Truth

*INCORRECT* Best Documentary Short: The Blood of Yingzhou District

*INCORRECT* Best Animated Short: The Danish Poet

*INCORRECT* Best Live Action Short: West Bank Story (I'm not sure I've ever picked the shorts right, since I never see them...)

Phew. And now, I can get on with the rest of my life.

Oscar weekend...with an Oscar winner!

Bear with some geeky backstory before I get to the geeky news. Last year around this time, I wrote a fluffy little story for the Gazette about a real-life Oscar statuette that's on display at the Smith College archives. It belonged to Nancy Hamilton, a 1930 Smith grad who won it in the Best Documentary category in 1956 for her film "Helen Keller in Her Story." Because I'm a total Oscar dork, I asked the photographer covering the story with me to take my picture with the statue (which didn't run in the paper, thankfully). The library made me wear gloves because all the gold plating was starting to wear off, but it was still awesome. As every winner says in the post-Oscar press conference it really is "much heavier than I expected! (At the bottom of this page, there is a photo of Helen Keller herself holding the same Oscar.)



The point of all that is to say that this year, I managed top that pre-Oscar close encounter by meeting (or at least being the presence of...) a real-life Oscar winner. And not some chintzy Best Editing winner no one's heard of, but the star of "Amadeus" and Best Actor winner for 1985, F. Murray Abraham!




"Murray," as those of us in the know call him, is starring in Broadway productions of those classics of Elizabethan anti-Semitism, "The Merchant of Venice" and "The Jew of Malta", both of which we saw for arts and culture class. ("Merchant" is excellent, "Malta" is performed as kind of a weird slapstick routine, but he's great in both.) After "Merchant" on Thursday, our professor arranged for us to meet up with the producer of the shows, Jeffrey Horowitz, at a bar across the street from the theater.

We had a really fascinating chat with Horowitz about the economics and politics of producing Shakespeare in New York. About halfway through, Murray happened to walk by and came over to talk to us for a few minutes. He recited some actor-y talking points about the magic of the theater ("the play you saw tonight will never be performed in exactly the same way again!") before heading off to meet his visiting son. Having just watched him for five hours over two plays, we were all appropriately star-struck. Here's a photo of him with Horowitz and our professor, Alisa Solomon (and my classmate Ann's hand holding the microphone).



Fellow Oscar fans, I say to you: top that! :) (Which you could do by meeting an Oscar winner who's been in a movie that anyone actually saw since getting the award, but no matter.)

More photos on our nascent class blog, including the whole lot of us in front of Keith Haring's famous (?) "Crack is Wack" mural in Harlem.

The Onion can read my mind

The Onion is never funnier than when it's about something you've done yourself. For that reason, maybe no one else will like this story as much as I do, but I think it could actually have been about me in 2003.

Former Editor Can't Believe Shit College Newspaper Is Printing

(For the record -- http://www.colbyecho.com/ )

Air Hockey!

About a year ago, my friend Kristen put an ad on Craigslist Boston looking for people to play air hockey with. A few people showed up the first time and she and her friends parlayed that into weekly air hockey sessions. The group started calling themselves Boston Air Hockey, since there weren't any other air hockey clubs in the city. Their motto: "Where even the winners are losers."

Once they began posting information online, this humble group of people who only kinda know how to play air hockey began sending shockwaves through the international air hockey community. Blogs as far away as Spain began talking up this new player on the air hockey scene. The beginning roughly translates as: "Boston, one more in the family. Only there is one more a more exciting thing for the air hockey explorer who to discover a new group of players: to see that it seems active and that it has future potential." (It's a pretty exclusive community.)

Word eventually got to Michael "Ricochet" Rosen, the U.S. Air Hockey Association's number-one-ranked player in New York, president of New York Air Hockey, and a former amateur air hockey world champion (according to his business card). He invited Kristen and company to Manhattan for a tournament against New York Air Hockey, which was held Saturday in a hole-in-the-wall bar in the East Village called Cheap Shots.

Never having been to an air hockey tournament before and wanting to show my New England pride, of course I went, decked out in a Red Sox hat and shirt (a few people came up to me and shouted "Go Yankees!"). It was way fun, and easily the most time I've spent thinking about air hockey in my life ever. Boston Air Hockey put on a good show, but the hard-core professionals from New York pretty much dominated.

They were really nice though, and so impressed that there was another upstart air hockey group. These guys really knew their air hockey -- like, referring to former world champions by their first names. I'm always interested to discover these unusual subcultures out there that no one knows about. And to support my friends' hilariously awesome hobbies.

Below are some pictures I took at the tourney. Here are some more from the official Boston Air Hockey site. (Note I'm not in the group shot because I don't play air hockey. Also, I was taking the picture.)

Kristen reacts to getting scored on.



Ricochet and James Scott Britton from Philadelphia in the final match.

Kristen and Gen talk shop with the New York guys.

The field of play.

Saco gets slammed

This is a long way to go for not much of anything, but I'm always interested to see Saco, Maine mentioned anywhere, even if it's to get ripped apart by anonymous internet babblers. So here goes. The New York Times runs a column called The Ethicist, where people write in with their moral dilemmas. A few weeks ago, they ran this letter from someone in Saco with the unusual name of Clement Daly (it's the second letter...but read the first one, too. It's totally appalling.)

Gawker, the New York gossip site, runs their own response to the column every week because they think it's so stupid. They call it The Unethicist, and run the same letters with, you know, opposite advice. They ran this response to Clement Daly's letter (again, the first letter about snowflakes is totally worth reading).

The column prompted these response in the comments section, in which the posters totally shit on Saco.

Promises Malibu Barbie says:
I've been to Saco, Maine. Like those undocumented Persians, most of the townspeople are inbred. There are good reasons why the state serves as inspiration for Stephen King.

JupiterPluvius says:
There are four or five different Clement families in Saco, according to Google. How I love rural New England, where, as Promises Malibu Barbie says, everyone's as inbred as a kitten-mill cat.

This is probably the most prominent forum in which Saco has ever been discussed. I'm so proud.