As I write this, it's Oscar eve. Just like Christmas eve, only more exciting. At least to my wife Nora and me. In fact, our primary celebration of Christmas is going to the movies, preferably a movie where things blow up. A festival of bright lights if you will. It's not really the contest aspect of the thing. Most years we see a significant number of the nominated films. This year, we haven't seen a single one of the movies nominated for a major award. A lot of the movies look wonderful, especially Juno, but we just haven't gotten around to it. One reason is that we keep upgrading our home theater - most recently with an upconverting DVD player. I can honestly say that our viewing experience is every bit as satisfying as a trip to the movie theater... ...with one obvious exception. There's something tribal about sitting in an audience of strangers, being moved by the same story in our own ways. It can be startling to have the same experience, including those rare occassions...though not as rare as you might think...of rising in a spontaneous ovation at the end. The main reason we no longer experience that is, quite simply, that we don't live within walking distance of a theater anymore -- one of the great pleasures of living in the city, but not enough to outweigh the much greater pleasures of living just a tad further out. The other reason we don't go to movies as often is Netflix, but that's for another blog post. We love the Oscars because we like being surprised. Last year, it was the appearance of Pan's Labyrinth, a movie with a luscious look. The REAL surprise for us was the film that won in the Foreign category was Children of God. It featured an amazing performance by Clive Owen, who has become one of our very, very favorite actors, and by far our favorite performance in Michael Caine's long career. We're thrilled that ridiculous musical numbers are gone -- reason enough to be glad that Billy Crystal isn't the host. Instead, we love presentations like the short film by Errol Morris that I wrote about here. We've also been caught off guard by the musical performances by real musicians. For example, the Oscars were where we first heard Elliot Smith. (This is in contrast to the travesty of 1984, when, instead of Phil Collins, the original performer, the Academy had Ann Reinking perform it instead. The Academy apparently didn't know who Phil is.) Another rare pleasure is seeing people earn long-desrved rewards. Last year's Martin Scorcese win, as well as Speilberg's win for Schindler's List, were as much awards for earlier films as anything else...and there's nothing wrong with that. (re: Scorcese, I wrote about that award last year, praising the third Oscar for his editor, Thelma Schoonmacher...while also arguing that Scorcese may not have been as overlooked as one might think.) I don't really go in for predictions anymore. It's not because I don't go to as many movies. Magazines like Variety and Entertainment Weekly, as well as their excellent websites, are among the sources that give us all we need to track momentum, which is ultimately more important than quality. And seriously, when have either awards or box office had anything to do with quality one way or the other? That said, there's one race I'm especially interested in. Kevin O'Connell has this year been nominated for his TWENTIETH nomination in the Sound Mixing category. EW has been waging a campaign on his behalf since last year. It would be really cool if he won. Even though most of this post doesn't have much else to do with this year's awards, I'll still swing by for an update. Otherwise, it's Oscar and me and Nora, joined this year by her sister Roxanne and their mother, all tuning in more for this than we do for Christmas. | 
