Best Picture

Nominees: Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, A Serious Man, Up, Up in the Air

Will win: Avatar
Should win Inglourious Basterds.

The 10 nominee thing is dumb because the Best Director category reveals who the real ‘top 5′ are. But now District 9, which was a pretty great movie, gets a “Best Picture nominee” sticker on its DVD case. So there’s that.

I haven’t seen An Education, Precious or A Serious Man yet. Of the remaining choices:

• I am a fierce defender of Avatar as being a film that’s nearly flawless in execution. Sure, the story is kind of dumb as fuck, but everything else just works so well. It wasn’t my favourite movie of the year, but I’m not opposed to it winning. It’s an achievement that deserves recognition.
• The Blind Side was, come on, just dumb. One of those movies that I’d be quite happy to regard as a nice little bit of holiday season fluff, except now it’s got award buzz so I have to actively dislike and root against it.
• District 9 was totally great and a lot of fun. I liked both the accents and the metaphors. And that gun that blew stuff up.
• The Hurt Locker was a great movie. Well-paced and well-acted. This kind of movie isn’t really my thing, though. I almost wrote that I don’t like war movies, but I’m about to heap a bunch of praise on Inglourious Basterds, so that wouldn’t really be accurate. There is just something about this kind of war movie that doesn’t totally work for me. But whatever. Well made! An achievement!
• Inglourious Basterds was kind of like Avatar in that I was pretty sure I was going to dislike it but ended up with a grudging respect for it about mid-way through. But where that grudging respect only went so far with Cameron’s movie, Tarantino made me a believer. This was totally and completely great. It’s too bad they had to make the Brad Pitt-and-friends stuff the focal point of the marketing, because the real story in this one is the French cinema plotline. The ending with the fire and the shooting is absolutely the best thing I saw this year.
• Up – delightful. As always with Pixar flicks. But I did feel like it kind of came out incredibly strong out of the gate and then never really lived up to that promise, especially with the silly second half where the dogs fly airplanes and such. It’s a mid-level Pixar movie, behind The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Wall-E and maybe one or two others for me.
• Up in the Air was great filmmaking, and there’s a sequence toward the middle with the hotel party and the karaoke and the dancing that is phenomenal, but there was something about this that felt a little bit incomplete to me. It still might be my second favourite movie of the year, but it didn’t quite feel whole to me.

Best Director

Nominees: James Cameron (Avatar), Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), Lee Daniels (Precious), Jason Reitman (Up in the Air), Quentin Tarantino (Inglorious Basterds)

Will win: James Cameron Should win: Quentin Tarantino

I feel like the Best Picture and Best Director categories should generally go to the same film, so I’m sticking with that this year. Even though I think Tarantino is a tremendous douche.

Best Actor

Nominees: Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart), George Clooney (Up in the Air), Colin Firth (A Single Man), Morgan Freeman (Invictus), Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker)

Will win: Jeff Bridges Should win: George Clooney

I haven’t seen Crazy Heart but neither have most of the people voting for this category, and they’ll vote for Bridges because he is old and likeable and deserves to win for his whole body of work. It’s kind of lame reasoning, but it’s nothing new. And I do genuinely like Bridges so I’ll go with it.

My ‘should win’ pick with a toss-up between Clooney and Renner and I liked Clooney’s movie better so there you go.

Best Actress

Nominees: Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side), Helen Mirren (The Last Station), Carey Mulligan (An Education), Gabourey Sidibe (Precious), Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia)

Will win: Sandra Bullock Should win: Meryl Streep

It’s Bullock as a lock to win. Which is a blah choice but kind of fits with the whole phony idea that Hollywood will seem less sexist if they honour the few women who turn 40 and still get regular work.

Meryl Streep doesn’t need more awards but I actually thought her half of Julie & Julia was really good and almost made up for the other half being mind-numbingly awful.

Best Supporting Actor

Nominees: Matt Damon (Invictus), Woody Harrelson (The Messenger), Christopher Plummer (The Last Station), Stanley Tucci (The Lovely Bones), Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)

Will win: Christoph Waltz Should win: Chirstoph Waltz

There’s absolutely no doubt here. He clinched this in the first 10 minutes of the film.

Best Supporting Actress

Nominees: Penélope Cruz (Nine), Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Crazy Heart), Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air), Mo’Nique (Precious)

Will win: Mo’Nique Should win: Anna Kendrick

Mo’Nique is another virtual lock to win, as none of the other nominees have much momentum. I’d give it to Kendrick as I thought her character was great and she did a good job acting like she was drunk. Plus I think she’s really attractive and that counts.

The Rest

• Best Original Screenplay should and will go to Inglourious Basterds
• Best Adapted Screenplay should and will go to Up in the Air and the acceptance speech will be hilariously awkard as the two credited writers hate each other
• Best Animated Feature will and should go to Up because no one else is yet in Pixar’s league when it comes to animated films
• Best Foreign Language Film is a wild guess with The White Ribbon
• Documentary Feature goes to The Cove

The rest are irrelevant, really – Avatar will win all the effects and sound categories (Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Art Direction, Cinematography). Make-up goes to The Young Victoria. Costume Design goes to Nine. The song award probably goes to Crazy Heart. Best score goes to Avatar because why not. And no one watches short films, animated or otherwise, but I’ll pick Logorama and Miracle Fish for animated and live action, respectively.

I’m not going to lie – my life got millions of times better when I just started letting my hair grow all over the place with no real regard for common decency. If you’ve got the genes for it, I recommend going for the gold like I have.

I’m not going to pretend like I’m suddenly going to start updating this thing again, but who knows. I didn’t think I’d be some twenty-something yuppie who drives a Mazda and is planning on buying a condo this year, but that happened. Things just happen. The only part of my life I can really control is the frequency of haircuts. And I really do hate those.

How’d he get in there? Can he get out? The answer is no. He lives there now and I will never help him escape.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is in it also. He sums up my feelings on the movie pretty well: “I think ‘Magnolia’ is one of the best films I’ve ever seen. And if anyone disagrees with me, I’ll fight them to the death.”

In any case, it has been my favourite movie for over a decade now! That is really impressive and shows consistency and gumption.

Other movies that once held my “Favourite Movie Ever” title include:

• Chasing Amy

Last Action Hero

• Quick Change
• The Secret of Nimh
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
• Network
• Home Alone
• Rookie of the Year
• Gross Point Blank

That’s a weird list!

So Dalhousie University, with is kind of the university I went to – but not in the sense that I graduated from there or applied there or, really, liked it all that much (it is complicated) — has a big advertising campaign going in Toronto right now. I saw this subway ad on the Bloor-Danforth subway line. Sorry for the crappy picture: I was doing my best to NOT make it look like I was trying to take covert pictures of those two dudes across from me.

“Quidditch, anyone?” the ad says. And then there are people dressed like Harry Potter. What the fuck, Dalhousie. You have a medical school. You’re one of the bigger universities in Canada. You’re part of the entirely fictional Canadian Ivy League. (Sometimes.) And you decide to spend money advertising the fact that there’s some club on campus that plays Quidditch? A fictional sport from Harry Potter? Can these kids even fly on their broomsticks? Or do they just run around with the stick between their legs making wooshing sounds?

Because the wooshing sounds would just push me right over the edge.

I don’t really love Michael Moore films or anything (except Canadian Bacon a little bit) but I hate the people who always crawl out of the woodwork after every one of his movies and pretend like they have all sorts of knowledge as to what constitutes a ‘documentary’.

Anyway, it’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever written on the internet if only because the reaction in the comments section was hilarious, and it still gets comments fairly regularly. (It’s a first-page google hit for “Lies in Sicko”.)

Today’s point of order: Christmas is kind of awesome and I dislike anyone who claims differently. This year, once again, I spent the holiday at my parents’ cottage near Minden Hill, Ontario. According to Minden’s website, ‘Minden Hills has hundreds of things to “see, do and experience”‘. This is generally true in a strictly literal sense, provided a heavy emphasis is placed on the ‘see’ part. You can see trees and rocks and etcetera. In the winter, these things are covered with snow. In the summer, less so. That sounds simplistic because it is.

It’s one of my favourite places ever.

I got lots of things for Christmas. My favourite gift is a small fridge designed for storing bottles of wine. The box calls it a “wine cellar” but that’s probably an exaggeration. It’s not underground. It’s in my kitchen. It is not a cavernous room with many shelves and bare brick walls. It’s a 3-foot-high black box with a digital read-out.

I’ve been wanting to become more of a wine guy for several years. Of all the ways to get drunk regularly, being into wine seems like the most sophisticated. Someone who stocks 4,000 cases of beer in his basement would generally be looked down upon as a disgusting vagrant with a major problem or maybe just a dude with memory problems who doesn’t understand that it’s not the 1920s anymore but — and this is the most important point I will make today — someone who stockpiles wine is totally a-ok. They’re just a ‘collector’. And a classy one at that.

My own wine collection will begin with my “wine cellar”, which I set up in my kitchen today. I’ve spent the last year trying to learn more about the types of wines available. Inevitably the only one I can remember is “Riesling” but, oddly, that’s generally all I’ve needed to know. Whenever someone is speaking of a brand of wine, I can remark that “their Riesling is interesting” and instantly connect. Only a real wine guy would say something like that — something so vague and uncritical.

Anyway, after I became an expert on the Types of Wine That Are or Are Related to Rieslings, I decided that I needed some sort of wine rack before I could go any further with this new hobby of mine. This is something I do a lot when faced with a task or goal: I’ll decide that completion of the task is impossible without first attaining some trivial item. It usually buys me a lot of extra time.

Everything has come together as of this Christmas, and I think I am ready to step into 2009 as a Wine Guy. I know what a Riesling is! I have a wine cellar! I like to drink things that can blur my vision! I even learned, today, what the proper temperature to store wine at is. Shit just got fucking REAL.

Other points of interest: Saw two movies over the last week. Seven Pounds was, and is, one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. I won’t spoil it because maybe it’s possible if you have severe mental abnormalities you might enjoy this movie, but let me just say this: there’s a lot of ways to effectively tell the story of Will Smith fighting a deadly Jellyfish. And the minds behind Sounds Pounds didn’t use any of them.

Also saw Blindness which was also pretty goddamned terrible. It’s one of those movies whose badness sneaks up on you. After you view it, you’re like “Huh. Not bad. Nice cinematography.” Then, later, you’re like “What the fucking fuck?” I feel bad because I like Danny Glover as a human being and as a presumed dude who loves to go fishing, but any movie where he plays a wizened old dude who narrates over scenes of dramatic stuff happens is bound to be terrible.

It’s kind of worth seeing, though, just as an example for how badly a movie with presumably talented people behind it. It was directed by the dude who made “The Constant Gardener” which was pretty great, and written by Don McKellar who is one of the best Canadian Dudes around and wrote and directed one of my favourite movies ever. But the film was just so badly put together it hurts to think about.

Put it this way: if other movies ended the way Blindess ends, there’d be no need to ever really think about film. The Godfather would have had ended with Al Pacino narrating over the final scene, saying “And now I have embraced my path in organized crime, and I must shut my new wife out of this world I find myself in”. Boogie Nights would have had Wahlberg thinking aloud, “I am back in this world I tried to leave, for this big penis is all I have.” Kindergarten Cop would have ended with Arnold monologuing about how, through the children, he learned what it means to love again.

It’d be great for blind people, but suck for the rest of it. Wait. Maybe THAT was the point?

Final point: I know I’m late to loving This American Life but I’m diving in head-first anyway. I love this goddamned podcast so much I find myself looking forward to days when I have meetings booked that will require me to drive for an hour or more.

Here’s a little bit from a show that popped up on my iPhone about two weeks ago, during the show where Ira Glass and the gang told 20 short stories in the 60-minute show. This was the last one. It kills me.

More later! I’m in Halifax this week but I will try to think of awesome things to write while I am there.

• Work. It’s a little known fact about me that over the last two years I managed the design and development of EmployerRegistry.ca from a chart paper concept to a fully-featured web database that has so far resulted in over 600 Ontario employers stating or restating their interest in experiential learning programs. Not that I’m bragging or anything.

  It’s still a work in progress, but websites always are. In fact, if you’re a Mac user — like me — don’t try to visit the site until later this week. It’s then that we’ll FINALLY be offering Safari support. The government has very little love for Apple computers.

• My OTHER blog, yworking.com, which still isn’t updated very often but I think has a nice little archive of posts. This past week, I was interviewed by the Editor-in-Chief of IT World Canada on the topic of Facebook (and other social media sites) at work. I also got sent a book to review. These all seem like things that are legitimizing. At this rate, the blog will be successful in roughly forty years. At which point I will be completely out-of-touch.
• Twitter. Twitter is the greatest. I know that still not a lot of people really know what twitter is, and even amongst those that do, not a lot of people understand it at all. But trust me. Twitter is fantastic. It’s inexplicable and it envelopes you slowly, but eventually you will do nothing in your life without first checking twitter. Sign up. Seriously.

  The only downsides? People keep asking why I update my facebook status so much. (I don’t! I never do!) And, also, the 140 character limit makes it impossible for me to really execute my favourite style of humour: the type that involves several long paragraphs and very little pay-off. Unfortunate.

• Christmas. I was going to link to christmas.com, but apparently that’s little more than a domain squatter site. Someone is missing out on making a ton of money selling trinkets and crap through that domain name. You’d really corner the holiday market as it pertains to web users whose browsing style involves thinking about whatever it is they want to see and then typing that in followed by “.com”. And there are a lot of these people.

  In any case, Christmas (the holiday) isn’t really taking up THAT much of my time, as I eschew the more time-consuming customs (Sending out cards, having a tree, baking things, smiling at people, etc.) in favour or kicking back and buying most of my gifts through amazon.ca. (Don’t want a book or a DVD? How about NOTHING? Would NOTHING be an appropriate gift for you?) But still there is something about it being almost Christmas that makes putting serious effort into anything almost counter-productive. Who’s going to take notice of things NOW?

  No. Better to wait until January. 2009. That’s when things stop being polite and start getting real.

• TV and Movies. I’m still a media junkie, though less so than before. Thankfully the Fall Season produced zero new shows that I actually watch, so all I really bother to catch these days is The Office (Still good), 30 Rock (Bad start but getting better), How I Met Your Mother (delightful), Prison Break (Almost literary), Heroes (Terrible) and House (Mostly boring). Plus my secret shames which include ER, The Hills and the nobody-likes-it-but-me Canada’s Worst Driver. I also watched The Shield and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia which both had fantastic seasons, but they’re done now.

  As far as movies go, it’s an exciting time for me. As a self-appointed member of The Academy, I expect to see all sorts of Oscar-worthy movies this season. Looking forward to Milk, The Wrestler, Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon and so many more. This past weekend Erin and I saw Rachel Getting Married which was seriously great, even though more than half of it was little more than people dancing to World Music. Don’t go see that movie if you hate the idea of people dancing to World Music.

That’s about it for now. I’m sure that seems kind of lackadaisical and lackluster (and… lacking?) compared to people who do important things like save lives or fix teeth, but it’s my life and it’s the only one I have. As always, I apologize for everything.

Erin and I watched two movies this weekend. Burn After Reading was a nice reminder that, even after the Coen Bros win an Oscar and direct a movie that connects with audiences, they’re still incredibly dark filmmakers with little-to-no inclination towards crowd-pleasing. Burn was pretty typical, and likely would have gone over better if it hadn’t come on the heels of No Country and had a red-band trailer that pretty much contained all of the straightforward “funny”. The rest is just bureaucracy and people getting murdered.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno was probably better than Kevin Smith’s last two movies, but nowhere near a triumph or anything. The first twenty minutes are actually pretty solid — right up to the high school reunion scene — but then it descends into dullness as soon as the titular porno comes into play. Plots always seem to ruin Kevin Smith movies.

Also, and this is standard with Smith flicks, but the Mary Sue self-insertion in the script was ridiculously over-the-top. Overweight bearded slacker dude wins over attractive woman with his magic penis? Come on.

I’m in full-on winter hibernation mode these days, as nothing about going out on weekends really appeals to me at the moment. It’s cold and it gets dark before five o’clock. That’s bullshit and I won’t even tacitly support it. My protest will be in the form of staying at home and watching movies.

I started playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on my new iMac. I played through the original and Vice City, but never got around to this one. It’s all right, though kind of a bit too much like The Sims with drive-by shootings. I have to go to the gym, visit my girlfriend, eat food and buy clothes? Jesus Christ. It’s hard out here for a pimp.

This week: a hopefully quieter week at work. Oh, and we’ll probably have a new Prime Minister tomorrow. How cool is THAT? The rest of the world will be so confused as we’ll magically have a new leader without so much as an election. Parliamentary democracy is the best.

More later!

I’ve had a couple of weeks with my new 24″ iMac now, so I thought I’d throw together some thoughts. I was actually surprised by the lack of blog posts about iMacs out there on the internet as I was researching this purchase. Aside from the crazy superfans on the MacRumors forums (Who all seem to be incredibly angry about very minor things) and the occasional review from CNet or whatever, I wasn’t able to find much in the way of helpful impressions. I hope this contributes toward filling that void.

Some thoughts on this computer, in no particular order:

• The best thing about this computer is the screen resolution. I’ve been essentially using a laptop as my main computer since 2001, going from a 15″ Dell Inspiron (1024×768, I think) to a 12″ iBook (ditto) to a 13″ MacBook (1280×800). Even at work — for the fleeting hours I’m in the office — I work off a 17″ LCD with a maximum resolution of 1280×1024. The iMac, then, with a resolution of 1920×1200 is a gigantic improvement. I can actually display multiple windows on screen at once without Exposé juggling. I feel like a whole new level of usability in OS X has opened up to me.
• And the screen itself is gorgeous. I opted for the 24″ iMac partially because I read a lot of whining about the 6-bit screen on the 20″ model. I sincerely doubt I would have really noticed a difference — the MacBook panel is 6-bit too and it doesn’t bother me — but the difference in cost was slight and I figured I might as well get the best screen possible. And it’s a phenomenal screen. I keep downloading High-def trailers from apple’s trailers site just because they look so damn good.
• The only downside to the screen is that it is insanely bright. This is nice to have — and probably necessary if you work with your back to a window (I don’t) — but it does make for some eye strain. Without a lamp on, even with the screen at its lowest brightness setting, I start getting eyestrain quickly — it’s that powerful. And, unlike Apple laptops, turning brightness all the way down does not turn off the iMac’s backlight. It would be nice if it did.
• Speed-wise, this machine is a beast. At 2.4 GHz and with 3GB of RAM (I upgraded from 1 — I’ll jump to 4 at some point in the future.) everything feels incredibly fast. The dedicated graphics card – an ATI Radeon HD 2600 — makes a huge difference from the integrated graphics on the MacBook. OS X was clearly designed with a dedicated graphics card in mind (making the decision to go with integrated graphics on the consumer line after the Intel switch really confusing, but I digress) as everything — all transitions, animations, etc. — look smooth and glitch-free. I ran Call of Duty 4 on it this past weekend just to test it out, and it ran perfectly well with no slowdown at native resolution. I don’t plan to play many games on this computer, but it’s nice to know I could.
• I installed Windows XP through Boot Camp and then grabbed a copy of VMWare Fusion, which lets me use the Boot Camp image as a virtualized machine. Starting up Windows in VMWare taxes the hell out of my MacBook, to the point where I avoid using it unless I absolutely have to, but it works amazingly well on the iMac. Boot time is less than a minute, and it doesn’t slow down OS X programs to any noticeable degree. I was running Internet Explorer 7 (to test some stuff) in Unity mode today (which puts the icon right in the dock and makes it look like a native application) with no issues to report. Very very cool and great for any kind of web development.
• I’ve been using Leopard’s Screen Sharing to go back and forth between the MacBook and the new iMac a lot, and it’s driving me a little crazy. I don’t have a lot of love for Windows these days, but their Remote Desktop client kicks the hell out of OS X’s Screen Sharing. It’s much faster, it adjusts resolution automatically, supports copy and pasting with way less hassle, and just generally works a lot better. I hope Apple has some plans to improve their support for this kind of thing down the road.
• The computer is silent. Unless it’s playing music, you would not be able to tell if it’s been turned on.
• Let’s hear it for Apple’ s Refurbished Macs page. I’ve been extolling the virtues of the Refurb store for a while. It’s a fantastic way to score slightly older models of Mac computers for deep discount prices. The 24″ iMac starts at $1900CDN, I got it for $550 cheaper than that. Sure, the processor is a bit slower (2.8 vs. 2.4) and it came with less RAM standard (2GB vs. 1GB), but aside from that it’s an identical specced machine. Plus, probably due to stock issues or whatever, I got a free upgrade from the standard 320GB hard drive to 500GB. It takes a bit of effort to keep coming back and refreshing the refurb page a bunch of times a day — deals come and go very quickly — but I don’t think I’d ever buy anything BUT a refurbished model going forward.
• Drawing on the screen brightness thing, the one thing I ardently DISLIKE about my iMac is the lack of a ‘turn screen off’ button. Thankfully, they added the Ctrl+shift+Eject shortcut in a recent OS X update. It’d still be nice to just have a little button on the back of the screen, though.
• New Apple keyboard is very nice. I’m not a gigantic fan of The Mighty Mouse, but it hasn’t pissed me off too much at this point. I plan on upgrading to something cordless with a nicer wheel in the future.
• The integrated speakers seem quite nice. I thought about getting some externals, but I kind of feel like they would ruin the aesthetic unless I hid them. Plus, I’ve been using the internal MacBook speakers for so long that any improvement at all is nice.
• I’m satisfied with the purchase. I really think the desktop + small laptop combination is the way to go these days. I considered just getting a MacBook Pro and an external monitor/keyboard/mouse setup, but I really like the “base station” the iMac provides: here’s where I save and back up important files, keep my music and media (and torrent downloads), and do more intensive projects. It frees up the MacBook for what it does best: handle smaller, quicker tasks and travel well. (My MacBook is actually provided by work at this point. The very-very-very long term plan is to eventually get a new-model for myself, hopefully a netbook-sized MacBook Air or similar. It all depends on where Apple goes with the product line.)

More thoughts later! I bet that all sounds very geeky. I’m at peace with that.