2010 Oscars Recap

From my TinselTalk Blog:

If you ask me, last Sunday's Oscar's ceremony fell kinda flat. Well, not all of it. I liked Neil Patrick Harris' opening number. But after that the downcast mood and lighting in the Kodak Theatre seemed to match the fact that host's Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin slowly died during their monologue and never really recovered.

However, I did have some highlights in the night. The first?

THE HURT LOCKER BEATS AVATAR!!!!

A close second was Kathryn Bigelow's historic win, where she beat out ex-husband James Cameron.

Other highlights for me included Ben Stiller coming out dressed as a Na'vi, the John Hughes tribute, and Sandra Bullock winning Best Actress.

A complete list of winners is below. I was about 75% correct, one of my better scores in recent years.

Best Picture: The Hurt Locker
Director: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
Actor in a Leading Role: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
Actress in a Leading Role: Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side
Actor in a Supporting Role: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
Actress in a Supporting Role: Mo'Nique, Precious
Original Screenplay: The Hurt Locker, Mark Boal
Adapted Screenplay: Precious, Geoffrey Fletcher
Animated Film: Up
Foreign Language Film: The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos, Argentina)
Original Score: Michael Giacchino, Up
Original Song: "The Weary Kind," Music and Lyrics by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett (Crazy Heart)
Art Direction: Avatar
Cinematography: Avatar, Mauro Fiore
Costume Design: The Young Victoria, Sandy Powell
Makeup: Star Trek
Film Editing: The Hurt Locker, Bob Murawski and Chris Innis
Documentary Feature: The Cove
Documentary Short Subject: Music by Prudence
Animated Short Film: Logorama
Live Action Short Film: The New Tenants
Sound Editing: The Hurt Locker
Sound Mixing: The Hurt Locker
Visual Effects: Avatar
Governors Award: Lauren Bacall, Roger Corman and Gordon Willis

What were your favorite parts of the show???

Crocheting Exploits

So, I am teaching myself how to crochet. Judge all you will but it simply so I can make this:

Tenth Doctor Doll

I taught myself to crochet in about 2 hours and now, after completing the arms and torso to Snuffykin's specifications, I have made an important decision...to make him bigger. Right now he's gonna come out to like 9 inches...with my plans he'll measure more like 18 or something. More to come...I promise.

Barbara Kingsolver's "The Lacuna"

This was supposed to be a review of Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Lacuna.” And it is. Sort of.
As I sit here writing this, I am on page 283 of Kingsolver’s latest novel, the 13th work in her distinguished writing career, and by the time you are reading this, I’ll probably be finished.
So far, “The Lacuna” has been everything I want and expect in a good novel and a Barbara Kingsolver novel. It’s filled with rich descriptions that can’t help but paint pictures in my mind and charismatic and captivating characters that keep me turning pages for more while challenging my thoughts and views on the world. Like “The Poisonwood Bible” before it this book has swept me off to a time and place I would have never gone to otherwise allowing me to learn a bit of history along the way.
It is for these reason I am a Kingsolver fan. The first time I read a Barbara Kingsolver novel, I was a senior in high school. The book was “Animal Dreams.” Now, while I love to read and enjoy devouring books to visit worlds I will never see, most of the time I didn’t enjoy reading for school. I didn’t enjoy the pace I was forced to read at, wishing to be able to savor each book’s flavor. However, reading “Animal Dreams” was one of the few reading assignments I enjoyed.
Her use of language to place me out in the Arizona desert, a place I have never been, was like nothing I had read to that point, at least in a novel where the place the author was describing actually existed. After I graduated from high school, I read “The Poisonwood Bible” and knew I had found a new author. The interconnected narration of five characters giving you five different points of view of imperialism in the Congo left me craving more. This is a trait I fear “The Lacuna” will raise in me once again.
Barbara Kingsolver writes what good literature is supposed to be. Not pulp fiction “literature”, but true novels that will stand the test of time. As she stated at one of her book talk , people need fiction for its symbolic properties and its ability to convey emotion. It is the only form of entertainment that allows you to completely set aside your own life with all its troubles and worries and pick up someone else’s. When you do that, you experience my favorite part of reading: You visit entirely new places and often have no idea where you’re about to end up.

The Genius of JJ Abrams

To take on the task of re-launching a franchise over 40 years old with one of the most loyal and devoted fan bases on the planet, you would have to be a lunatic or a genius. Luckily for movie fans everywhere, and every Trekkie on the planet, JJ Abrams is a genius.

This summer’s smash-hit, “Star Trek”, which was released to DVD and Blu-ray Tuesday, was a movie you didn’t have to be a Trekkie to appreciate. Though I have seen episodes of various incarnations of “Trek,” I am far from considering myself a Trekkie. But I cannot get over the genius of what Abrams did in this film.

First of all, he made a film that even someone who knew absolutely nothing about the Star Trek universe could appreciate. The movie starts from as close to the beginning as one can get (the birth of James Kirk) and just builds from there, introducing you to each character as if you are meeting them for the first time and taking nothing for granted.

But the true genius of JJ Abrams comes in the story he chose for the movie itself. “Whatever our lives might have been, if the timeline was disrupted, our destinies have changed,” Spock says about halfway through the movie. JJ Abrams and his writing team cancelled out 40 years of Star Trek storylines, allowing themselves a completely blank slate with which to re-launch the franchise. What better way to rejuvenate something than to make it completely new again?
The other part of this movie that makes it the best movie of 2009’s Summer Movie Season was the casting. There was not a single actor in this film that gave a poor performance, something I have come to expect in JJ Abrams work. Chris Pine’s Kirk was spectacular, Zachary Quinto’s Spock was impeccable and Eric Bana is completely unrecognizable as Nero. The rest of the cast is equally flawless. Here, JJ Abrams did not forget the “Trek” fanbase, giving a relatively large cameo to the series’ original Spock, Leonard Nemoy.

Abrams’ triumph in this film is a genius he has shown in many other projects of his career. I mean, we are talking about the man behind the hit TV dramas “Alias,” “Lost,” “Felicity,” and “Fringe,” as well as movies like “Mission Impossible III,” “Armageddon” and the movie that was a viral craze before it was even released, “Cloverfield.” At present, Abrams is working on “Mission Impossible IV” and a sequel to “Star Trek” is slated to hit theatres in 2011. Only then will we know just how far his genius can boldly go. (Okay...I have a Trekkie in my somewhere)

A Return to Childhood

Did you ever wonder what happened to your toys when you weren’t around? I did, but after I saw Toy Story as a child, I had the answer. Now, almost 14 years after its release, Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are being rereleased in theatres for a two-week only engagement beginning October 2.

This isn’t just any rerelease though. It is meant to correspond with the release of Toy Story 3 next June. The third installment of the Toy Story franchise is set to be released in 3-D, so its two predecessors will also be shown in this double feature event in 3-D. Given the more than 10 year gap between Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3, this is also, undoubtedly, meant to introduce a new generation of children to the beloved franchise and get them excited for the third movies release next summer.

Like any good Pixar fan, Toy Story holds a special place in my heart. When it was released in 1995, it marked the first major motion picture collaboration of the Walt Disney Corporation and Pixar Animation, a partnership that has gone on to release 10 of the most beloved children’s movies in the generation after ours as well as the finest animated movies made today. It also forever changed the way animated movies are made, catalyzing the move from hand-animation (beginning to be aided by computer at that time) to full-fledged computer animation less than a decade later.

The Toy Story franchise is not the only neoclassic Disney movies getting the 3-D treatment. Before it is rereleased on DVD and released on Blu-Ray for the first time, Beauty and the Beast will also be rereleased into theatres in a 3-D format sometime in fall 2010, just one year before the films 20th anniversary. This trend smells vaguely of the IMAX rereleases Disney attempted (to very little success) in the early millennium. It is my hope, however, that these do much better, because some of the classic and neoclassic Disney movies would be a fantastic 3-D adventure. In the meantime, journey back to your childhood and take a few hours to relive one of the greatest Pixar triumphs like you’ve never seen it before!

The Two Best New Shows on TV this Fall

I love TV. Mostly because, in college, it gives me about an hour everyday where I can kick back and relax for a bit before getting back to my hectic life. I have my usuals on my specific days. Mondays I watch The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother, most Thursdays I watch The Office. In the spring I'll watch Lost and American Idol.

But as you can see, this schedule has a few holes in it. Luckily, I have found the 2 best new shows in the fall lineup to fill the void.

Wednesday nights at 9 pm, FOX airs the smash hit Glee. This amazing new show is everything good TV should be, and I think the reson for it's appeal to me is its quirky humour that almost has a British edge to it. As someone who watches the BBC equal to the amount of American TV I watch, this appeals to me.
It also appeals to the music lover in me who enjoys, above all else, watching talented people perform. Lea Michele is the next great vocal performer and I can't wait to see what she does. The pilot is everything I love about this show, and I was pleased when this week's episode seemed to return to the things that made me love the show in the first place. The cast's vocal abilities are uncanny and the singles they keep putting out make me feel like I'm falling in love...because on some level, I am.

Thursday nights at 8 pm, ABC airs its new drama FlashForward. Why do I love it? Because it's everything that got me hooked on Lost before they turned it into a circus that I couldn't stop watching because I was too involved to leave (like a bad relationship).
FF returns to the question I wish Lost had continued to answer: "Where is the line between Fate and Coincidence?"
This show has me on the edge of my seat for an hour every week. During the premiere, I literally sat stone still for the entire episode without realizing (until it was over) that I hadn't moved in an hour. And just when I think it's going one way, it completely switches directions.
I know I have said it once before, but this show is what Lost should have been.

So that's it. These are the best two new shows on TV this fall. Glee has already received its full season order, and I really hope FlashForward recieves the same (because I HAVE to know what the heck is going on).

The Fresco in the Capital Rotunda

I've just finished Ch. 21 of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol and have a picture to share with you(no I have not abandoned Bran Hambric, I just have this thing for reading many books at once).





The last time I was in DC, I was inside the Capital Building and took a picture of the ceiling. Here is that picture:

Now you will know what Robert Langdon is describing.

My favorite quote so far? "you'll never want to join *my* cult...Don't tell anyone but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh...And if ...any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard Chapel on Sunday, kneel before the crucifix and take Holy Communion...Open you minds, my firends. We all fear what we do not understand."