if i were an Oscar voter

The Academy Awards are Sunday night, and here is where my votes would go:

Best Picture: I liked all the nominated films for Best Picture, but this is the order in which I would rank them: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, The Reader, and Frost/Nixon. I'm a little surprised that I'm picking Benjamin Button ( a Brad Pitt movie, of all things), especially since Milk and Slumdog Millionaire are so great, but I think it's the one that is best overall. Slumdog Millionaire will, of course, win this category, but I'm thinking that it won't look nearly as good five years from now as it does now, especially with all that "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" stuff ( a TV show that I hate).

Best Actor: Sean Penn in Milk. He's amazing.

Best Actress: a tough category. Kate Winslet is great in The Reader, and she will win, but how can anybody be better than Meryl Streep in Doubt?

Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. Of course.

Best Supporting Actress: Amy Adams in Doubt.

Best Director: Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire.

Best Adapted Screenplay: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Best Original Screenplay: Milk.

If Slumdog Millionaire wins everything, I'll be disappointed but unsurprised.

And Hugh Jackman is the host on the awards show this year?.. a non-comedian??

****
A later note: Hugh Jackman was great!

will work for food

For me, it's easy to lose perspective this time of year... I get kinda weird when I work long hours day after day... A couple nights ago, I was bleary-eyed and goofy when Jerry picked me up at the office... It was late, and I was starving and on the verge of crabbiness (and you've never seen me crabby, I'm sure)... "Where should we go to eat?" Jerry asks, trying to accomodate... I feel the need to drown my sorrows in something greasy, so I say, "I'm really in the mood for Psycho Suzie's!" So he drove me over to Psycho Suzie's, where I ranted at him about my day until the cocktail started taking effect and the sausage-and-mushroom pizza arrived at our table, and suddenly life was good again.

Meanwhile, there are all those people out there suddenly without jobs, and I'm wondering where that will all end... More homeless people?.. Believe me, you don't want to be homeless in Minnesota in winter. Target Corporation and Best Buy are headquartered here in Minneapolis, and even they are laying off significant numbers of corporate staff. So for now, I guess I won't complain about being overworked.
****
Didn't watch the SuperBowl this year (Arizona? Pittsburgh? halftime show?.. who cares?), went to a movie instead (Frost/Nixon). Still need to see a couple more Oscar nominees, The Reader and Benjamin Button, maybe The Wrestler and Doubt if I don't run out of time.
****
Just finished reading a good book, Polanski by Christopher Sandford. Not the best biography I've ever read, but I enjoyed it very much -- Who has had a more dramatic life than Roman Polanski?
****
Am I missing something, or what is the big deal about Michael Phelps smoking some pot? Where's the loyalty, Americans? This guy won eight Olympic gold medals! Let him have some fun!

#100

I realized that this is my one-hundredth blog posting since starting Et Maintenant? in August of '07. As I sit at my computer here on Blogger.com, often with a blank brain, I still try to keep in mind the book Jon gave me, Nobody Cares What You Had For Lunch, and make an effort not to be too mundane or at least to keep the mundane relatively interesting. Sometimes I get reactions, often I get silence.

At my book group this past week (which I hadn't attended in a couple years but was happy to get back to at least for a visit), there was some discussion of blogging. My friend Barb was putting in a good word for my blog, and others were saying they can't imagine putting thoughts in blog form for the whole world to potentially see.

What the heck, I enjoy it anyway. I doubt that many strangers stop by this blog site and pay much attention to it.

The site I don't really understand is Facebook. I do have a Facebook page, due to peer pressure I guess, but I don't get the overall point of it, especially the "What are you doing right now?" part. Barry, in the book group, said his wife is on Facebook and must have too much time on her hands because she puts things on there like "Right now I'm having a Coke".... and of course that comment goes out to all her Facebook "friends", who I'm sure are thrilled that she is having a Coke....

Others are very into Myspace. My sister Joan (who is recuperating nicely from her ankle break, thank you) has favorite Myspace sites that she checks almost day, like Lindsay Lohan and other celebrities and controversial characters. I don't do Myspace. You can only read what a Myspace member has to say if you are accepted by them as a "friend".. and I'm sure I couldn't emotionally handle a rejection if I asked to be somebody's Myspace friend and got no response!

So I stick with my blog, which is apparently there for the world to see, friend or not, and I'll head into the next hundred posts. Try to contain your excitement.
****
Our book group selection, by the way, was The White Tiger (the 2008 Man Booker Prize winner) by Aravind Adiga, which we all liked. It's a novel about India, life in the lowest of castes, definitely not a book that would prompt you to buy a plane ticket to India however. For me, reading it was a good companion experience to seeing the excellent new movie, Slumdog Millionaire, also about dirt-poor Indians, which, unfortunately, no one else in the group had seen yet. (I'm on my annual mission to see all five of the Best Picture Oscar nominees -- have so far seen two of the five.)

see the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet

I'm just kidding about the Chevrolet, of course (Been there, done that!)... I'm a Volkswagen man through and through. And gas is too expensive for people to be taking the long road trips those old Chevy commercials used to glamorize, although I admit I like road trips (If I'm the one doing the driving). I also admit I'd rather take a trip to Europe right now, like we used to, but -- hey! -- the dollar is worth practically nothing against the Euro these days, which makes everything over there super-expensive. So it seems like a good time to "see the USA"!

Plus, at some point recently I decided I should see all 50 states sometime before I'm dead, and I still have these ones to visit --

--- Northeast: Maine and Rhode Island.
--- South & Southwest: Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma (I should add Tennessee to that list, since technically I've only been to the Memphis airport).
--- West & Northwest: Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, and Alaska.

So that's 14 states left to experience.

Jerry somehow has a couple of vouchers from Northwest Airlines -- anywhere in North America, $99 round-trip for each of us, must be used by the end of this month. So over this past weekend we put together a four-day trip to Alaska later this month.

And I've been itching to get back to New England for some time now, so we are starting to plan a trip up there for the middle of September. I'll make sure we swing through Maine and Rhode Island.

... and what will be the 50th state, if I make it that far?... Might that feel weird to be done with them? :-(

*****

Just saw the new Batman movie.... Not bad!

Lupie's and special effects

I've been hanging out with my sister Nancy at her home in North Carolina the past several days, the trip delayed from last month. We've sorted through piles of paperwork and financial details and accomplished quite a lot in a short time. Last night, we were mostly finished with all that and drove up to Charlotte, about a half-hour north of here, a city I've flown into several times but have never really seen, and we drove around the inner core, the downtown, got a flavor of it (It felt a lot like Indianapolis to me). Saw where the Panthers and the Bobcats play. Ate at a fun hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Lupie's.

This morning, our brother Davy, the brother that lives in Shanghai, called and gave me a few laughs, and after that Nancy and I went to a movie. She wanted to see the new Indiana Jones movie, and, since I tend to avoid special-effects movies these days, I had very low expectations, but I ended up liking it more than I thought I would and maybe more than Nancy, who had high expectations, did. Don't go out of your way to see it, though.

Flying home tomorrow morning. Getting together with Jon and Tom in the afternoon for Father's Day. Watching the Tony Awards tomorrow evening with Joan, who has seen several of the nominated plays, and Jerry, of course.

Maybe back to North Carolina in a couple months.

alternatives to Orff

It was a space-cadet weekend for me. I think I was a bit over-medicated.

I had planned on being at Nancy's in North Carolina over the weekend to help her out with some stuff and have some good quality brother-sister time. For some normality, we even had tickets Saturday night to attend a concert by the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, which was doing a violin concerto by Mendelssohn and Carmina Burana by Karl Orff.

None of that worked out, though. Instead, I spent Saturday night at home in Minneapolis drifting off on the sofa while watching a couple of early-40s films on Turner Classic Movies -- Now, Voyageur (Bette Davis) and Since You Went Away (Claudette Colbert). There's nothing like a couple of extreme melodramas to complement some nice hallucinations.

Feeling more normal today. We'll see what happens next.

another acid flashback

Yeah, I'm kidding, I never dropped acid. But I do find it easy to time-warp back to 1968 as if there'd been no in-between times. The past week, I was reading Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris, a new book about the dramatic changes in American filmmaking in the 1960s. It makes its points by focusing on the five 1967 Best Picture Oscar nominees from each of their conceptions several years earlier to Oscar night in April 1968. Two of the nominees, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, were cutting-edge masterpieces, nothing like Hollywood had seen before. Two, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Doctor Dolittle, were more standard, old-Hollywood stuff. One, the eventual winner In the Heat of the Night, was somewhere in the middle. This book, Pictures at a Revolution, was great, one of those books that I honestly didn't want to see end, a book made only for time-warp freaks and history-of-film buffs. Because it pitted old-Hollywood against new-Hollywood, it was one of the most interesting Oscar races ever, certainly the one that I've ever had the most interest in, and I remember it well -- being so disappointed, in my case, when The Graduate didn't win. Looking back, ah - April 1968 - it seems like a fine time, a "more innocent" time, as they say - hence my time-warp tendencies. Then I realize that the Oscar ceremony that year was just a day after Martin Luther King's funeral and only a couple weeks before I was drafted into the Army for two years, facing an immediate four months of intense jungle training and Vietnam potentially looming over me. Maybe not such an innocent at all. Maybe there are no innocent times.

can't decide

Well, we saw the last two Best Picture nominees, and I have to say I've never had this much trouble deciding on a favorite. These last two, Atonement and There Will Be Blood, both of which I had low expectations for, were very good movies, so I'm thinking that any of the five nominees could win Best Picture and I'd be okay with it. I usually have somebody to at least root against. OK, let's see. Maybe I'll pick Juno, which I enjoyed the most and would see again, as my favorite, even though it's the kind of small movie that is generally just happy to be nominated. Then there is Atonement, which to me was way better than the Ian McEwan novel (and when have I ever preferred a movie version to the book?). And of course I like the Coen brothers. And George Clooney. :-(

My other (selected) picks: Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood; Best Actress: Julie Christie for Away From Her (I love Julie Christie); Directing: the Coen Brothers for No Country for Old Men (they should have won for Fargo); Best Supporting Actor: Tom Wilkinson for Michael Clayton; Best Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton for Michael Clayton; Best Original Screenplay: Diablo Cody for Juno (she wrote it here in the Twin Cities at coffee shops); Best Cinematography: Atonement.

Anyway, I'm glad that self-imposed pressure is off for a while. No more movies for a while. But I might be seeing three plays next week.

no movies for old men

In our annual quest to see all five Oscar Best Picture nominees, we went to see Michael Clayton the other night and No Country for Old Men last evening. They were both pretty good (as all Best Picture nominees should be), but is it me or are movies getting harder to watch? My mind might be going, but it seems like so many movies are not so easy to follow. Who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, what the heck is going on? No Country for Old Men is also super-violent, in a Coen Brothers sort of way, but after you see a few people get shot in the throat, you learn when to look away from the screen. Neither of these are movies to relax to.

Two more to go.

Juno, Junot and Juneau

Mainstream movies have generally gotten so bad, or at least not suitable enough to my taste, that movies aren't really as much a part of my life as they used to be. One thing I try to do, though, for which I have no good explanation, is see the Academy Award Best-Picture nominees before the Oscars are announced. That gets a little harder every year, but I keep doing it. So when the Best Picture nominations were announced a couple weeks ago, I was a little dismayed that I had seen none of the five, which means I have to see all five by February 24th... Plus the event might be really a letdown if no stars show for the award show because of the current writers' strike. Oh well!

So Jerry I went to the see the first of the five the other night -- Juno, which turned out to be a wonderfully funny and well-written little movie.. I say "little", meaning no stars, very little budget, so no chance of winning the big prize... But see it! You'll like it! The other films to see before the 24th: No Country for Old Men, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, and Atonement. Stayed tuned!

Meanwhile, when not working or going to the movies, I've started reading a very good 2007 novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. I've found very few goods novels the last couple years, so this one is a good find (although, actually, I'm only on page 60 so far).

and I hate to do something so stereotypically Minnesotan as mention the weather again, but this morning after walking (somehow surviving) to work this morning, I checked the temperature and it was -13 with a -32 windchill. At that same moment, it was 9 degrees in Juneau, Alaska, with a -6 windchill. Sounds like a vacation spot to me!