Taking A Stab at Oscar

For whatever reason, I spend way too much time thinking about the Oscars.  I started paying attention to the Oscars for the first time in 1992, after Silence of the Lambs had swept the major awards and I was able to watch in on HBO.  I think it was the first time that a movie I liked (and by liked I mean gave me nightmares) was respected by the Academy and rewarded with multiple Oscars.  My family was not into the entertainment industry – my parents never watched the Oscars or really cared about them…I can probably count on two hands the amount of times I remember my parents going to a movie theatre when I was a kid.  So, it was kind of random that I succumb so easily to Oscar fever.

There are countless Oscar blogs out there now that follow every morsel of Oscar-related media – I spend way too much of my time reading through them – but I still formulate my own predictions based on a secret equation.  I’ll never tell.

And so, here are my entirely-too-early-to-ever-be-accurate predictions for Oscar nods.*

Best Picture

1. The Dark Knight
2. Milk
3. Slumdog Millionaire
4. Australia
5. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Best Director

1. David Fincher – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
2. Baz Lurhman – Australia
3. Danny Boyle – Slumdog Millionaire
4. Christopher Nolan – The Dark Knight
5. Jonathan Demme – Rachel Getting Married

Best Actor

1. Sean Penn – Milk
2. Leonardo DiCaprio – Revolutionary Road
3. Brad Pitt – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
4. Frank Langhella – Frost/Nixon
5. Mickey Rourke – The Wrestler

Best Actress

1. Merly Streep – Doubt
2. Kate Winslet – Revolutionary Road
3. Kristen Scott Thomas – I’ve Loved You So Long
4. Anne Hathaway – Rachel Getting Married
5. Angelina Jolie – The Changeling

Best Supporting Actor

1. Heath Ledger – The Dark Knight
2. Philip Seymour Hoffman – Doubt
3. Michael Sheen – Frost/Nixon
4. Josh Brolin – Milk
5. Robert Downey Jr. – Tropic Thunder

Best Supporting Actress

1. Kate Winslet – The Reader
2. Viola Davis – Doubt
3. Amy Adams – Doubt
4. Marisa Tomei – The Wrestler
5. Penelope Cruz – Vicky Cristina Barcelona

*I have seen exactly four movies on this list, at this time.

Sign This

OK, so I’ve been woefully neglecting this blog, yet again.  I didn’t want to get caught up in the political maelstrom of the past several months with ineloquent blog posts.  I’ll be brief by saying that I’m less of a cynic today than I was yesterday.

On to this post.  I’ve been awed by sign language for most of my life.  When I was a kid, we would learn sign language for Sunday school choruses (we had a resident ASL teacher who came to my church) every once in a while.  In elementary school, our big chorus performance one year was “Love in Any Language,” complete with the signing (I was a featured signer).  We had a copy of The Joy of Signing and Beck and I would try to learn ASL in bits and pieces.  Like most childhood fascinations, it was brief.

I did learn the ASL alphabet enough to cobble together the odd sentence now and again.  When I was an anxious teenager, you might have seen me “finger spell” now and then…it was my weird, nervous habit that popped up out of nowhere.  I would rapidly spell out my thoughts to calm myself down, especially in situations where I was really nervous.  Think Thing from the Addams Family.  If you never noticed, I was slicker than I thought.  If you did and never said anything, thanks, you are a true friend.

Sometimes I have trouble sleeping (shocking for someone with anxiety), and waiting for Ambien to kick in I watch youtube videos.  I usually stick to live performances of artists that I really like, or old school music videos.  Somehow tonight, I got sidetracked into a whole youtube subculture.  The awesomeness I stumbled upon is signing to music.  You may not find this particularly interesting, but it provided hours of entertainment for me tonight.*

Below, some of the highlights:

 

*I also spend way too much time watching college a capella groups perform r&b and classic rock songs on youtube…but that’s a whole other post.