 |
|
|
|
Today, the 30th annual running of the Iditarod dogsled race kicked off in downtown Anchorage, Alaska. Musher Charlie Boulding, a consistent top-ten finisher, was the first of 53 men and 11 women to begin the 1100-mile journey to Nome.
Dangit. It isn't that I'm not excited, you understand. On the Andy Ihnatko Sports Radar, the Iditarod is right there among the top three Alert Items, alongside baseball and hockey.
(#4 is anything on ESPN2 in which the participants have to manipulate truck tires or chainsaws. I tend to lump all other sports into a category called "Things which ruin my Sunday evening by routinely causing 'The Simpsons' to get pre-empted.")
But I was looking forward to a nice, dense arrogance. I'd been working on it for weeks. Had all of my thoughts arranged on cards of various colors, perfectly organized so that anyone listening or reading would come away thinking that I was a rare light in the heavens, shining down and delivering unto the Huddled Masses a commodity of clarity and truth which only I – a modern-day Prometheus – can provide.
(See, if you don't prepare ahead of time, you come across as an irritating, pretentious twit. It's quite the balancing act.)
So there I was, my cards all laid out in front of me, about to go off on a long, crowing screed about the impotence of media conglomerates. I was going to begin by saying that Disney and AOL and the rest were trying to make me knuckle under to their merchandising strategies by making sure that all of my news and entertainment were being filtered through them and only them, thus forcing me to give up and become a Good, Obedient Little Consumer who could be easily and efficiently marketed to.
The case in point was going to be the Iditarod. The networks can't figure out how to sell snow tires and beer to people who like dogsled racing, see, so their response to the sport is to get together and make sure there's nothing but basketball on every weekend, all day. NBA basketball. College basketball. Exhibition basketball. That 70's cartoon starring the Harlem Globetrotters. Eventually, they get everyone watching basketball – I mean, what else are consumers going to do? Talk to their families? – and hey presto, problem solved. The multigargantuas know how to sell beer and snow tires to people who watch basketball.
(The next card is a yellow one, indicating that I should toss more vim into it.)
To this, I say NAY! Thanks to the power of the Internet – the sole form of mass-media which is the slave of the proletariat, not the master – I can create my own media coverage, of the sports and entertainment events that I'm interested in!
(Hmm. Coulda used a little more polish on that one. Well, water under the bridge.)
(Red card, which is an Action Cue. I snap open my PowerBook and with a defiant flourish, show off a browser showing live coverage of the Iditarod start, complemented by windows featuring the complete race guide, the official rules, and expert analysis and commentary from Alaskan newspapers. Then another Yellow card.)
Can't you see how badly this one computer screen screws up the needs of the grubby, three-fingered multigargantuas and their desperate machinations to compress every single citizen into one dense matzoh-ball of consumers to which one ad and one product can be effeciently placed?
(Stop for dramatic inhalation of breath. Loft eyes skyward. Shake fist in air if it seems like it's that sort of crowd)
Well, Mr. Multigargantua Man! If you want to target me, you'll have to buy ads in five regional media outlets!
(applause, applause, applause; exit, borne upon the shoulders of a grateful proletariat)
Pure Tabasco, every bit of it, except perhaps the word "Multigargantuas" which, now that I've typed it like six times, seems similar enough to the word "Gazongas" to distract from my big message.
It woulda been great…but the Anchorage ABC affiliate's streaming video server was overloaded. So I couldn't get in to see the start.
I did get to see a thirty-second commercial from the streaming-broadcast's sponsor, an monolithic provider of internet and telecommunications services.
It featured Iditarod legend Susan Butcher and that J. Peterman guy from "Seinfeld."
Pretty…um, pretty cool.
(cough.)
Well, "Go Martin Buser" all the same. Race fans are hoping to see Doug Swingley win an unprecented fourth Iditarod in a row. Three-peats have been done before, and with five first-place finishes, Rick Swenson holds the record of non-consecutive wins. A four-peat is unheard of.
I'm still pulling for the Swede. He had an unlucky year in 2001, crossing the finish line in 24th place, with only 7 of his original 16 dogs. That was his first non-top-ten finish in over a decade. Some of his best dogs started limping early on and were sent home just to be safe, then Buser injured himself, and the trail was unusually rough that year, and it was all starting to get to him, and ultimately the dogs were sensing his mood and (reminding everyone once again that the dynamics of a dog team are phenomenally interesting) they started to lose their confidence in their ability to finish the race. At one point, the only thing really keeping Buser going was the large charitable donation that was contingent upon his making it all the way to Nome.
Martin'll have better luck this time. He's completing the first half of his naturalization ceremony at the starting line and the other half at the finish. So if he wants to be a United States citizen instead of one of "those millions of godless Swedes who spill across the border every year to steal away American jobs with their cheap, slipshod labor" (Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, 12/11/01) he'll haul his butt the rest of the way to Nome.
Iditarod race standings don't actually mean anything until the leaders have all made their mandatory 24-hour layovers. They sure don't mean anything when they've only been out on the trail for about 36 hours, given that the record for making the trip from Anchorage to Nome is just a hair over 9 days.
But I'm a dumb male, and the only thing worse than a dumb male is that variety of dumb male who sits behind a computer all day and has a boss who's too naive to block all non-work-related websites from the office Internet connection.
So sure, I keep hitting the link for the most recent standings. My Man Martin Buser is in eighth place. No, now he's in second place. Now he's in fourth. Now he's…eighth again?
This ain't at all like the Indy 500. There are mandatory checkpoints all along the 1100-mile trail. Sometimes, a musher will stop just long enough to sign in and have their veterinary diary checked (as required by the rules) and then they peel right back out again. And sometimes they'll figure this is a good place to give the dogs a cooked meal and five or six hours of rest.
Thus, those following the race don't glance at the standings. They scrutinize the status board. A-ha. Eleven mushers are taking a rest at the Rohn checkpoint. The current leader, Ramy Brooks, slid into Rohn and slid right out again only six minutes later. So clearly he won't be in the lead (or even necessarily in the top five) twelve hours from now.
Hmm. Buser has already dropped a dog. His website says that the dog's shoulder was sore so Buser chose to send him back to Anchorage rather than keep him in harness and risk causing an injury.
(You don't see this sort of thing in the NCAA, for instance. If one of Bobby Knight's players got beheaded by a falling backboard and staggered off-court, Knight be screaming down his neckhole. "You don't need a ****in' head! You don't need to goddamn think! Just do what the **** I tell you, a******! Now get the **** back into that game before I beat the ******-****ing **** out of you!!!!!!")
Meanwhile, back in Boston, we formally welcome two new members to the staff here at IhnatCorp Worldwide HQ. Lilith IV, my PowerBook G3 Bronze, has chosen to accept an offer of early retirement rather than to continue slamming its screen closed on my fingers at random moments during the day and risk being thrown against the wall in a manner which violates its manufacturer's warranty. Lilith V, a PowerBook G4, previously IhnatCorp's Interim PowerBook, has been named its permanent replacement.
The unplanned-for new addition is a "Quicksilver" Power Macintosh with dual 800-MHz processors and a DVD burner.
("Was I an accident?" the Quicksilver seems to want to ask, blinking its power light in wide-eyed innocence. "No, of course not," I reply. "You were our little surprise.")
It's not a dirty little secret that companies regularly send Beloved Industry Pundits stuff for possible review. And often, those pundits don't send the stuff back. For instance, if the item in question is a $30 USB adapter which cost the company only $8 to manufacture, it's a waste of their money and a waste of my time to FedEx this thing back.
If it's a pricey item, though, the manufacturer is usually more than happy to blow $22.50 for return shipping. Take this this $1800 iMac I've got, for instance. I'm sure Apple's aware that even if getting me to return it required that they pay a North Shore dockworker $500 to drive down to my house with a sweat sock filled with old batteries and a cheerful disregard for terms of his parole, they'd still come out way ahead on the deal. With this in mind, I shall be getting that iMac back to them by the 15th.
Sometimes, though, you happen to catch the wave just right. Apple loaned me the Quicksilver in the winter, long after its initial July release, when newspapers' and magazines' demand for loaners was highest. I didn't even actually review this machine. I wanted to review iDVD 2, and pointed out that I didn't get to write about 1.0 because they wouldn't loan me anything with a (required) SuperDrive. Duly shamed, they loaned me the most expensive thing they had just so I could write about a piece of software that they give away for free.
Now it's due back. But in the intervening months, this specific model has been discontinued (replaced by an identical unit with dual 1-gigahertz processors). The Apple office that handles editorial loans is up to their eyeballs with these machines, they now have absolutely no use for these machines, and given that (a) it's easier for them to unpack and deal with a half-ounce cheque than a 30-pound CPU and (b) it's not their $3000 computer, technically, they'd rather I just bought it offa them.
(Yo Comprendo Todo. When I edited down my comix collection last summer, my friendly local comix retailer took the unwanted 1/5th of my collection off my hands. He was fair, and the store credit he gave me covered my next two months' worth of regular purchases. But if the truth were known all I wanted out of the deal was to be able to tell my accountant "Yes, I converted unsalable inventory to ready capital that could be applied against our quarterly operating budget.")
So they offered me a deal and – let's return to my initial theme: "Folks, I'm a big, dumb Male" – I bit. It's amazing what an effective lubricant a Deal is. I went from Relative Indifference regarding this product to the realization that this and only this item will ensure that the planets of my Universe remain secure in their relative orbits…and I made the whole trip on less than a quarter-tank of gasoline.
Well, not to worry. I can indeed justify the holy crap out of this purchase.
(1) I can run VirtualPC even faster, meaning that I won't necessarily have to go out and buy a new Windows machine, thus saving me $1500 or so;
(2) I won't have to go have a heart attack. And I surely would have suffered one had I spent this past week desperately burning DVDs of every single videotape I've got in my library and in storage, which was my goal. My health insurance really sucks, so that's a good $18,000 saved, right there;
Um…
(3) …and it's high enough to set my drink on it. So I'll take the Garelick Farms milk crate which I've been using as an end-table and I'll put it up on eBay, where I'm sure people will bid it up to $3000 or so, particularly after they read my story in The Chicago Sun-Times which implies that it was formerly owned by Jackie Onassis.
So I'll actually clear a pretty meaty profit on this transaction. But there'll be a great cost: my ancient PowerComputing tower Mac clone has sat in the same place on the desk since I set it up there in the mid-Nineties, even though I haven't really used it in eons. See, in the intervening years data cables, power cords, and other bits of new technologica have swallowed up the machine like ivy creeping up and overwhelming a Harvard professor, so an extraction is not even remotely feasible. "Best that I just leave it there as a curiosity for future generations to ponder," I reckoned.
But keeping a pokey old tower on top of the desk and keeping one of the world's most powerful consumer machines hidden underneath seems uncomfortably like an overt statement of somethingorother. So I'm just gonna have to swap it out for the Quicksilver tower.
Eventually.
After I finish burning DVDs of every single episode of all five seasons of "Babylon 5." Until then, I'd better keep it where it is, on the floor next to the home-theater stack.
OK, good. I'll go with that.
Could Grimace beat the Michelin Man in a fight? I'm pretty sure, though I've sort of been going back-and-forth on it all day.
You start off by jumping to the conclusion that it'd be the Michelin Man in a walkover. He's got an enormous reach advantage: 33" or thereabouts, compared to Grimace, who sort of just has these purple oven mitts poking out of his body. Plus, he's got legs, so he might be able to throw some Jeet Kune Do moves into the mix which the Grimace couldn't possibly counter.
Then you peel the onion. Yes, the Michelin Man has more raw power, but he's made out of steel-belted radials. What he has in strength he lacks in flexibility and agility. Secondly, Grimace is essentially a six-foot shapeless blob, making him more or less invulnerable to impact. No bones to break, no pressure-points to exploit, you see.
So if Grimace fights smart and uses the same "Rope-A-Dope" strategy that Muhammad Ali used so famously to win his championship belt back from Mr. T, the bout goes like this: the Michelin Man lands the majority of blows, winning every round on points…but then he collapses from exhaustion in the fifth or sixth round, leaving The Grimace to win by knockout.
At least that's the most logical theory. And what really clinched it for me was when I remembered that The Grimace used to get yearly visits from his Uncle O'Grimacey as part of the Shamrock Shake promotion.
That makes Grimace part Irish. And man, if there's one thing I learned in college it's that you don't want to go and fight a six-foot Irishman.
Most of the leading mushers have now completed about half of the Iditarod by now. Things start to get interesting as many of the leaders are now taking their mandatory 24-hour layovers and preparing for The Rest Of The Race.
Yes, The Rest Of The Race. The whole trail is a challenge, but the first half is cartoonishly challenging. You've got to climb up mountains in the Alaska Range, navigate down into canyons that are 1500 feet deep, complete sections of narrow, icy trails which at their worst are compared to trying to safely complete a bobsled run in a Ferrari, then you get to experience the fun of crossing a burned-out forest studded with rocks, stumps, and bare ground.
Eventually you make it to the north side of the Alaska Range and realize that you've still got all your dogs with you and that the electrical tape that you used to strap your right hand onto the sled after dislocating your shoulder at Rainy Pass is holding. And while the race organizers don't tell you where, specifically, you have to rest for 24 hours, Ophir suddenly seems like as good a place as any.
This is also the point in the race where the mushers suddenly and dramatically start dropping dogs. You need lots of pulling power to get over the mountains, plus there's such a variety of terrain and running conditions that you want to have lots of Alternatives available in case the lead dog who did so well threading the team through the forests along the Skwentna River hasn't got any bright ideas when it's on a narrow ice ledges.
Once the crap with the mountains is over and done with, you can afford to send three or four of your sixteen dogs home. Fewer dogs to take care of means more time to sleep at the checkpoint – wow, you might even get a full three and a half hours in the sack – and if you plan to feed the team one of their meals in-between checkpoints, that's 25% less food the team will have to drag across the Yukon. Translation: speed.
Weeks before the start of the race, the mushers decide what sort of food, supplies and equipment they'll be needing along the trail and ship them to individual checkpoints so it'll all be waiting for them when they check in. The truly competitive mushers will ship a smaller, lightweight "sprint" sled to one of the checkpoints beyond the Alaska Range. When mushers end their 24-hour layover they're in SPEED mode.
This is really shaping up to be a hot race. It began with a bombshell: Doug Swingley will not win his fourth Iditarod in a row, and probably will never win a fifth Iditarod.
He took some awfully long rests at the initial checkpoints, which sent the rest of the top seeds into a tizzy: just what sort of bizarre strategy was Swingley planning? Was he trying to get the rest of the leaders to run a slow race, just so he can get his better-rested team to buzz straight past them and be the first to reach the Yukon? Or was he tempting them to build the biggest lead possible while he was camped out, just so that their exhausted dogs would be too tired to present much of a challenge for him later in the race?
It's not such a cartoonish scenario. The Iditarod lasts over nine days. It's over 1100 miles. Mushers don't engage in anything that might be termed as "shenanigans," exactly, but they do use some pretty complicated Race Strategy. "Race Strategy" might mean planning to drop lots of dogs and switch to a lighter sled before reaching the Yukon River. For some mushers, it can also mean shipping twice as much food to the Koyuk checkpoint as they'll actually need. Maybe it'll be a close race. Maybe another musher will reach the checkpoint ahead of you, see your enormous pile of dog food, conclude that you're planning to spend a good long time there, and decide to take a long rest himself.
And while he and his dogs are asleep, you slide into Koyuk, get signed in, give your team a snack, and zip straight out again.
It turns out that Swingley's leisurely pace is just that: a leisurely pace. He proposed to his girlfriend on Sunday and will marry her at the finish line. In the meantime, he's announced that he's retiring from the Iditarod (at least from running it competitively) and intends to run this year's race as a "victory lap," taking the time to enjoy the trail and visit with people.
It's phenomenal. There is no analogue. I dunno. Can you picture a Daytona 500 in which Dale Freakin' Earnhardt took a pit stop at every lap…just so he could get out of the car and get a soda and maybe chat with any friends or celebrities he could spot in the grandstands?
Martin Buser and Linwood Fiedler (last year's #2 finisher) seem to be swapping the lead position. But it could be anyone in the top four. Buser edged Linwood out when it counted, though: he was the first to reach the race's halfway point. Pulling into Cripple earned him a prize of $3000 in gold nuggets.
And hey, the condition of this year's trail is said to be hard and fast…so some reporters are commenting on the possibility of a new race record. No one's ever completed the Iditarod in less than nine days; this could be a hot one.
On to other matters. Some people have been asking me about Bluetooth. They don't think there are any practical applications of Bluetooth technology.
(Bluetooth: an emerging wireless standard for digital communications across a very short distance, such as the distance between a desktop computer and a printer. The chipset required for Bluetooth adds only about $10 to the cost of a device and draws very little power, so there are a lot of ambitious plans to incorporate it into any and all manner of future hardware)
OK. You want a practical application of Bluetooth technology? How about Bluetooth chipsets that can be sewn into clothing? Like, for $12 your dry-cleaners will clean and press your pants and also insert a Bluetooth chip into a seam where it can't be seen.
Eventually, every article of clothing you owned would be Bluetooth-enabled.
Why This Would Be A Great Idea:
You get dressed to go out to dinner with someone. You put on the new pair of tan chinos you bought last week. You retrieve yesterday's flannel shirt from a hook but notice that it's stained, so you grab a shirt out of the closet at random: an olive-green work shirt.
It's kind of wet outside, so you put on your waterproof boots instead of your sneakers. Then you grab my winter coat (a brown leather air force jacket) and my fedora-style hat – which you wear every time I go out.
As you leave, however, a little networked gizmo next to the front door senses movement and activates, polling for Bluetooth devices. It sends the collected data to a central server in the house, which interprets the IDs as:
And after checking this against a list of red-flagged combinations, it refuses to allow the front door to unlock.
You check the status panel of the alarm system. It reads:
ARE YOU AWARE THAT YOU'RE DRESSED EXACTLY LIKE INDIANA JONES?
You clap your hand to your forehead and trot back upstairs to change into a pair of jeans.
So you see, that's why Bluetooth is such a useful and wonderful technology. We'll all be living in a paradise free from care and worry when Bluetooth finally achieves market penetration.
Until it does, however, you won't realize that you've accidentally dressed exactly like Indiana Jones until you're at a Mobil station in Leominster, Massachusetts, refilling your tank for the drive back home after having spend the entire evening out having a business dinner with someone.
Well, don't be embarrassed. It's something that everyone does, all the time. And Bluetooth is coming.
Martin Buser and his 12 dogs are in Shaktoolik and now it looks like he'll steam along the rest of the way – through the remaining five checkpoints and 220 miles – to his fourth Iditarod win. He's got a six hour lead and even the rest of the mushers in the top ten are slightly in awe of his dogs.
They're moving in an ungodly fashion. After having dragged Buser and the sled all the way from Alaska's southern shore to its northern coast, they seem about as put-out by the effort as a suburban mutt who's just chased down and retrieved a frisbee…and they seem just as eager for another go.
He's become the hands-down favorite to win due to the misfortunes of Linwood Fiedler (last year's #2 finisher), who nipped at Buser's heels for most of the race. His dogs started getting sick. He nursed them as best he could, but at checkpoint after checkpoint he had to drop dog after dog. He rested his remaining dogs for 24-hours, then gave them another six hours hoping they'd improve, but nothing doing. He finally withdrew from the race in Ruby.
The danger of illnesses contracted along the trail is something that usually doesn't get reported by PETA and anti-mushing sites like HelpSledDogs.org…probably because it's real. These dogs spend most of their lives hanging out with the same 20 to 50 dogs they grew up with in the kennel, so they aren't exposed to a whole lot of diseases. Then they come to the Iditarod, where they rub noses (and other parts) with 1100 dogs from all across Alaska. As if exposure to an exotic bug weren't enough, their immune systems aren't exactly working on all eight cylinders that week, what with having to pull a sled for a thousand miles across unspeakably crummy terrain and stuff.
So the bad news is that a common flu bug can quickly develop into something life-threatening if the musher doesn't pay attention to the health of his or her dogs. Mushers won't take take any chances with a dog that suddenly lost its appetite and didn't bounce back after a good rest. Checkpoint vets (armed with (a) logbooks on the condition of every dog from checkpoint to checkpoint and (b) the authority to forcibly withdraw a musher's entire team from the race if the health of a single animal is in jeopardy) are the next and hopefully final line of defense against casual illnesses.
The worse news is the fact that some infectuous agents can hit the right dog like an A-bomb. There are canine viruses that attack heart tissue. Bacteriae that cause a dog's health to crumble from Mild Listnessness to a Life-Threatening Illness with little or no transition. One of the two dogs who died in last year's race was dropped by its musher because it seemed a little under the weather. A checkpoint vet didn't detect anything. A vet who checked the dog after it arrived back home didn't detect anything wrong, either.
The first doctor to determine that something was seriously wrong with the animal was the vet who performed the necropsy, after it died from pneumonia three days after its return. The dog could have been saved, had one of the vets taken a more cautious approach, but according to all reports there were no solid symptoms to treat. Even people-doctors aren't supposed to dispense antibiotics to a patient who's apparently just suffering from a minor flu.
Every year the race committee modifies its list of required immunizations, based on What's Going Around Right Now. But in the end, it's simply not a solvable problem. The best that the race committee can hope for is to make it a manageable one.
Getting back to My Man Martin Buser. At this point he'd have to either make a major mistake or have some major bad luck somewhere between Shaktoolik and the finish line. Both are certainly possible.
If the section of the course across the Alaskan Range and along to the Yukon is notable for giving dogs and mushers a bad time with all of its mountains, crevasses, trees, burnt stumps, and other trail cruftage, the section that runs from Unalakleet along Alaska's northern coast serves up its slings and arrows in the form of…nothing at all. The trail turns into a featureless landscape of snow and ice. No hills, no valleys, certainly no trees or bushes or rocks, which means that there's nothing to slow down the 50 MPH winds that might blow from across the sea. And if a bad storm rolls in and you're forced to camp out on the trail, there's nothing to offer you any protection from the elements.
All of that relentless sameness can take its mental toll on a lead dog, too. A good lead dog is one who craves constant input. His overclocked brain is constantly taking in sights and smells and sounds and processing all of that telemetry into decisions on how to lead the rest of the team.
Some lead dogs encounter a white, featureless sky slung over a white, flat, featureless ground for miles and miles, and their brains can't deal with the relentless lack of anything interesting going on (I can relate. Once I accompanied a girl to a Barbra Striesand film and the batteries in my booklight went dead partway through). Competitive mushers will usually bring along a backup leader whose brain operates at slightly lower voltage (or who has had prior experience leading in those conditions) and will move him up from the middle of the team when they reach the coast.
Even if Buser's lead dogs can handle the coast, well, anything can happen. In 1987, four-time champion Rick Swenson was in the lead and only twenty miles from the finish line…and then his dogs stopped. They weren't hurt and they weren't sick. They just decided that 1,080 miles was quite far enough. Swenson couldn't budge them out of the last checkpoint; Susan Butcher passed him and went on to win.
But Buser's got one hell of a team with him. They have utmost faith in his leadership and if he asked them to fly all across the world in a single night delivering toys to all of the good little boys and girls, well, they'd be willing to give it a good try, at least.
The only real question at this point is whether or not he'll break the Iditarod record of nine days plus about an hour. He's ahead of record pace at the moment and will probably finish sometime on Tuesday.
Topic the First: My annual Oscar Package is up. 9,000 words, all of them perfect. Though you'll probably just zip straight to the summary list of predictions. Just don't tell me, all right? It'd break my little heart to know the truth.
Topic the Seconde: While we wait for the big night, let's wrap up March's the other fabulous gala of glitz and glamor: the Iditarod.
Typical.
How bloody typical! All along, who was my pick to win this year's Iditarod?
Martin Buser. And who won this year's Iditarod? Martin Buser, pulled by a team
of dogs that crossed the finish line looking like they'd spent the previous
8 days, 22 hours, 46 minutes, and 22 seconds posing for series of commemorative
stamps or something instead of breaking the record for trotting 1100 miles across
the Arctic.
Yet did I have any opportunities to get into an Iditarod betting pool? Of course not. The NCAA championship, yes, and the Super Bowl, too. "Five dollars buys you two boxes, plus you're in for three buckets' spread on three goals; your point key is Toby McMann," a friend in Michigan informed me. It's possible that he owes me a lot of money right now. But to be frank, I hadn't a clue what he was talking about – it could have been basketball, it could have been football, or it could have been the over/under on Rosie O'Donnell's public heterosexuality – and I gave him the fiver just to end the conversation.
I'm also unofficially banned from all of my friends' Oscar pools, having broken the bank more than once. So when do I get an opportunity to gamble on something? If I want to get the whole experience of intelligently weighing my choices and finally putting my money where my mouth is, my only real outlet is to go to the supermarket and buy a carton of milk from the front of the dairy case instead of rooting around for the fresher ones at the back.
(And this is as good a chance as any to answer an increasingly frequent question: Yes, my Oscar picks will be up shortly. You'll get 'em more or less as soon as my editor gets 'em.)
There was a bit of excitement in the closing scenes of the race. Ramy Brooks steadily closed in on Buser and ultimately left the Elim checkpoint only seven minutes behind him. But in truth, Buser's lead wasn't in much danger. Looking at the checkpoint logs reveals that whereas Buser had stayed at Elim long enough to give his dogs a nice, long rest, Brooks practically blew straight through, staying just long enough to sign in and chat with the race vets about the condition of his team.
This was strategy. The wild card was White Mountain, the second-to-last checkpoint before the finish line. All mushers must stay put there for eight hours before proceeding to Safety. In a close race, a musher might be tempted to push his or her team straight through the final checkpoints without giving them any rest; the enforced 8-hour stop with the finish line in sight (well, "in sight" by the standards of the Alaskan wilderness) neuters this impulse.
(It also adds an extra measure of safety for the mushers. The rules state that if another team wants to pass you on the way between Anchorage and Safety, you're required to yield the trail and let 'em do so. But that rule is suspended after Safety. It isn't exactly a free-for-all, but on the final approach to the finish line is in sight, Emily Post be damned. When there's a chance that the final miles of the race might be a snowy restaging of the chariot race scene from "Ben Hur" it's best to make sure that the mushers are rested and alert, y'know?)
Brooks had taken a rest at the checkpoint just before Elim and he knew that an enforced 8-hour stop was just coming up. He also knew that anything could happen between Elim and Nome. The Iditarod consists of well-worn and easy-to-follow trails that local residents use throughout the year, mushing and snowmobiling from village to village. It also consists of long links of confusing pathways that only exist during the race, and are marked by flimsy sticks that can easily be knocked down by winds and easily overlooked by mushers.
Libby Riddles, on her way to becoming the first woman to win the Iditarod, got confused by the markers on the last links of the trail and actually started mushing back towards the start of the race before discovering her mistake and making an about face.
And anything can happen in the closing miles of the race. One year, the lead musher had held first place all the way to the final checkpoint. Then his dogs took a vote and decided that they'd already had more or less as much fun as a team of sled dogs should be allowed to have. So twenty miles before the finish line, they dug in and refused to leave the checkpoint. Susan Butcher passed his yawning, stretching team and sailed the rest of the way to the win.
By blowing through Elim without resting his team, Brooks was betting that something would happen to Martin Buser's team after Elim. Those hours he saved could mean the race if Buser got lost, or if his team balled up or balked at further progress or if anything happened that might cause colorful Swedish curses to fill the crisp Alaskan sky. If so, after eight hours of enforced rest at White Mountain, Buser and Brooks might essentially be racing head-to-head for Nome.
But Brooks wasn't long on the trail before he acknowledged that Martin Buser wasn't likely to make any mistakes and that his dogs – consistently the best-rested team on the trail – weren't going to stop pulling. So he pulled off the trail and camped for a bit. Mushers don't tend to cheat their dogs out of sleep. If they have any experience at all they understand that if a car can go just 400 miles on a tank of gas, you can't drive it 600 miles and then make up for the extra 200 miles by putting in twice as much gas later on. It just doesn't work.
Ramy Brooks did well, regardless. He finished only two hours behind Buser (respectable, in a nine-day run), and he still beat the Iditarod record that Buser had broken earlier in the day.
But just imagine the scene at the White Mountain checkpoint. It's like that Chuck Jones cartoon with the sheepdog and the wolf. They're locked in frenzied conflict and just as the sheepdog's about to release his grip around the wolf's neck and send him plummeting down a ravine, the midday whistle blows and they casually wander off, pull their lunch pails out of a locker, and eat together. After leisurely extinguishing their pipe and cigarette, the whistle blows again and they immediately pick up the life-and-death battle right where they left off. It's hard to imagine the two leaders in a NASCAR race parking their cars right where they are, just two laps before the finish, and then spending a few hours together in a cabin alongside the track.
(Aside: Actually, that's not such an implausible concept. The Super Bowl begins with a five-hour pregame show and right in the middle of the actual game they screech everything to a dead stop and chase the players off the field so they can wheel in a half-hour Dick Clark TV special, for the love of God. Is it so hard to imagine a prestige championship race during which the officials order Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Tony Stewart to stop their cars, wriggle out onto the track, and then walk over to a midfield pavilion for a Trisha Yearwood miniconcert and about eleven Doritos commercials? End of aside.)
Well, Martin Buser didn't make me any money but good for him, anyway. The day after he finished he was sworn in as a United States citizen, right at the finish line. He waited in Nome another five days to personally greet every musher who crossed the finish line and then he and his family climbed onto snowmobiles to ride the Iditarod trail all the way back home to Big Lake. Now that's style.
There was also bad news from the trail: a dog was killed just outside of Ruby. A back-of-the-pack musher had taken a wrong turn and was turning his team around when one of them got tangled in the gangline (the length of aircraft cable that connects all of the dogs' harnesses to the sled). It suffered a spinal injury and soon died. The body was sent to Anchorage for necropsy and the musher has been allowed to continue the race pending review, though race officials have already said that (for now, at least) they consider the death to be accidental.
There was one more dog death before the race was over. Dee Dee Jonrowe sledded into White Mountain with a sick dog riding in the sled bag. It was shocky and vomiting blood and was flown straight to a hospital in Nome where it died during surgery. The cause of death was an ulcer that had either gone undiagnosed before the race or had developed since the start. The dog had been eating and behaving normally before White Mountain and only fell ill while trying to make it up a steep hill known as "Little McKinley."
It took 14 days for the last musher to finish. As always, there were mushers struggling at the back of the pack. Before Martin Buser arrived in Nome, these mushers were humored, but after the first ten or twenty mushers crossed the finish line the officials started encouraging stragglers to face facts and withdraw from the race. In extreme cases, officials might sieze upon a technical rule violation and use it as an excuse to disqualify them.
This is a nod to reality and safety. Each checkpoint is staffed by volunteers: vets who check the dogs, pilots who ferry people, dogs, and supplies, specialists who maintain the communications network, and other volunteers who provide logistical support in a million different ways. The Iditarod is only possible because these volunteers are constantly watching the dogs' and the mushers' backs. And you can't keep all of those people away from their homes and jobs for a whole month while the last musher continues to beg his dogs to please please please get up and pull the sled to the next checkpoint.
That's not an exagerration. These dogs are incredibly canny. If you don't know what you're doing, the dogs will soon figure that out and refuse to do what you tell them to do. In exchange for pulling the sled, they're expecting to be fed regularly and rested regularly. If you're not going to hold up your end of the deal, why should they bother leaving the checkpoint? If you keep screwing up and steering them in the wrong directions, forcing the team to turn around and retrace their steps time and time again, why should they accept any of your commands?
Some are downright diabolical. If they sense a vacuum of leadership, they might stop for no reason at all just to see what you'll do. You might be dumb enough to think they stopped because they're hungry. If you toss them some snacks, congratulations: now they'll stop every time they feel like getting a snack… ie, all the time.
A dog team has to believe that you're the smartest and most capable member of the group. If they do, they're happy to just pull the sled and obey your commands. If they don't, you're in for an utterly wretched couple of weeks camped out in checkpoints and on the trail itself, wondering why this well-fed and well-rested team of veteran Iditarod dogs keeps stopping for naps.
That's all well and good, the Iditarod is a race. It isn't a camping tour of Alaska. At some point it becomes clear that some mushers should have spent their $14,000 on one of those luxury cruises from Seattle to the North Atlantic instead of on an Iditarod bid…because judging from their progress thus far, they're sure not going to make it to Nome riding a dogsled.
Still, if you're making progress albeit slowly, they'll let you finish. This year's winner of the Red Lantern Award (the trophy for last-place finisher) went into the record books for being the fastest last-place musher in Iditarod history (finishing in 14 days, 5 hours, 38 minutes, 12 seconds). It was the first time a Red Lantern musher had actually managed to turn up for the Mushers' Banquet. Usually there's still a team or two out on the trail while all the other mushers are inside eating. But David Straub arrived with two hours to spare and took his seat still dressed in his musher clothes, having just finished taking care of his pooches.
Testing...testing...
Forgive me, folks, just testing the microphones and such...
More testing, folks. Some of the software I've written to handle this is deciding to be all irky and petulant all of a sudden.
Okey-dokey. I'm willing to believe that this software is now ship-shape, or at least I'm willing to believe that this software believes that if it acts up on my just once more I'm going to pull that big decorative axe down from above my mantle and really give it something to think about.
Okay! We're off and running.
I suppose I should be pleased to learn that the reason why the posting software I wrote this afternoon stopped working about twenty minutes ago is the fact that, according to the server logs, demand for this page has gone flooey. So my poor server is trying to make big changes while lots and lots and lots of people are trying to access it.
Which makes me happy. One likes to think that other one(s) are reading and enjoying one's stuff. Yet one is kinda wondering how all you people found this page.
Ah, well. One deserves to be popular. One shouldn't keep putting one down; one doesn't want to get a swelled head or anything, but if one doesn't deserve some small measure of success, then who does, one wants to know?
So one -- sorry, "I'm" here watching the Oscar pre-game show. Let's not forget that this half-hour show came into being when too many former standup comediennes resuming a mummy that's been dug up, unwrapped, and spacked and sanded abused the Red Carpet interviews.
Well, I didn't like Joan Rivers' celebrity interviews -- I mean, as an interviewer, she makes Larry King seem well-informed -- but still, I miss the old circus. Lots of reporters with lots of agendas tag-teaming the celebrities in a free-for-all; it was fun seeing what was going on up front, but it was just as great to keep your eyes peeled on the background. You'd see forty or fifty local entertainment reporters from network affiliates all across the nation scrambling around, desperate to collar someone for an interview, trying (and failing) to conceal their disappointment when it turned out that the hunky leading man they'd just buttonholed turned out to be a damned writer of all things. "If only he were one of Nicole Kidman's limo drivers!" they seem to be saying, through their rictus-like smiles.
So out all of that went, to be replaced by a very safe, very predictable "official" Oscar pre-game show. Dash it.
So while there's a commercial on, let me explain the local scene here.
I am seated on my sofa.
Lilith 5, my PowerBook G4, is in my lap and is the machine I'm using to create this coverage.
Lilith 4, my PowerBook G3 Bronze, is on a cart to my left. A wireless keyboard and mouse are attached. Via Lilith 4 I am participating in three different online Oscar parties, including a private one with two of my best buds.
My dual-processor G4 "Quicksilver" tower is on another cart to my right. This is my "reference" machine, offering
Oh, cool; they came out from commercial too late...so we've lost the very start of the awards. Abruptly we stop learning about Dunkin' Donuts and join an introduction of seated directors in mid-sentence.
Altman looks cranky. Someone should tell him he's been nominated for an Academy Award.
Hey..is that Donald Sutherland doing the voice-over? Cool.
Tom Cruise is first up...and wowzers, John Williams is conducting the orchestra?!? Somethin' cool's going on.
But I wonder why Tom Cruise decided to wear his Blues Brothers costume instead of coming out in an actual tuxedo?
And here we have the first mention of 9/11 of the evening. I'm kind of disappointed. By now, we've all found our personal relationship with the event and way of coping. Does it serve any good to keep raising that spectre?
I miss the opening montage of theme-related movie clips...which the Oscars used enough times for them to become beloved, but not a beloved tradition.
But wow, I like the Errol Morris film they've commissioned. I wonder if he used his special gizmo for it. He does so many first-person tales like this one that he built a special camera rig with beam-splitters that allow the subject to speak directly into the camera while actually looking at, and making the mental connection to, the filmmaker himself.
Film is a personal medium. I think "Moulin Rouge" was one of the worst films I saw all year. Yet other people are nuts for it. Good for them. This montage demonstrates that movies are all about what a movie does to you.
Whoopu Goldberg makes his entrance on a trapeze, a la Moulin Rouge. I don't dislike her that much as an Oscar host...but I confess that my first reaction was to think about that WWF wrestler who died trying to make a similar appearance.
How long until the first fart joke?
OK, that's it for Whoopi's intro. Really nothin' to it. Nothing special. That's why I don't think she's a good tap for host.
On the plus side...she didn't do anything really dumb. So I guess I just lost a five-dollar bet...
Best Supporting Actress. Everyone seems to think that Jennifer Connelly has a lock on this one. Let's see.
Yup, that's it all right. My first correct call of the night, but the thing is, when everyone is calling someone the inevitable winner, that's the inevitable winner. Why? Because the voters watch TV and read newspapers and magazines. They don't actually watch movies, you know? So if everyone is sayin' it, sooner or later, the voters will believe it and vote accordingly.
JC's nomination and win has also put an idea in the back of my mind...one that might influence my future Oscar picks. The idea is that sometimes, a Best Supporting Actress Oscar might be given as a "thank-you" gift for having enthusiastically done some really great nudity earlier on in her career.
Call it the Kim Basinger Rule. The only problem with this as an indicator is that if it's actually true, why the bloody hell didn't Connelly get her Oscar the moment "The Hot Spot" got its first preview?
Wowzers. Donald Sutherland and Glenn Close doing announcements. Not only that...but they're actually reading commercial endorsements. I gotta wonder what sort of deals had to get swung to make that happen.
"Take it from me, Glenn Close: nothing satisfies more than the clean, refreshing taste of a Camel Light.."
And judging from that last shot of Connelly backstage, it looks like we can look forward to some red freak dancin'...
Film Editing. This was a tough one to call because predicting the winner requires you to figure out what the voters think "Film Editing" means. It could mean "Lots and lots of cutting," like in Moulin Rouge. It could mean "Some sort of flashy storytelling technique," as in Memento. It could mean a good, conventional job of editing.
And it went to "Black Hawk Down." I called it incorrectly, but I did say that BHD would be one of the front runner. BHD's win means that the voters were voting for actual editing. An action film -- particularly one that's exceptionally well-handled like this one -- has an edge in this category because it's so difficult to tell a story effectively when so many of the scenes consist of action. A man is shot. Do you start on the shooter? Or on the target?
Think about all the different ways that one can be answered, and you can understand why action films can be so hard to cut.
Note that the winner was wearing a proper tuxedo with a hand-tied bowtie. It's the technical people and the writers who never, ever ever show up for formal occasions in non-formalwear.
Best Makeup. First win for "Lord Of The Rings." Should be the first of a great many: I'm predicting it to win most of the technical awards.
The tech awards can also be tough to predict because voters can imprint their like or dislike of the nominees. If you loved Moulin Rouge, you might have thought that while "Lord Of The Rings" had the most ambitious (and important) makeups, why, "Moulin Rouge"'s were subtle! Elegant! "You know it's great because you can't even tell it's there!"
(Which is true. Everyone's wearing some sort of wig and/or facial appliance)
Two presenters wearing nonstandard ties. What's the deal with wearing a standard necktie with a tuxedo?
Best Costume. They know nothing about proper formal attire but their filmed intro is a good bit. Wonder why wrote it. Hell, maybe they did it themselves.
Back to the podium. Yeah, see, I'm also really thrown by the black shirt black tie black jacket deal. Makes me think of Hotblack Desiato's ship from "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy."
The Nominees. This should be an easy one for "Moulin Rouge." I actually think it was a bigger challenge for "Rings"; MR was a very insulated film, whereas "Rings" had to costume characters from so many disparate worlds and cultures.
And it's "Moulin Rouge." I didn't care much for the film, yes, but I'm cheering for it to win in any category which I've already gone out on a limb and publicly predicted that they'll win for.
Costume guy is wearing a necktie instead of a bowtie, but it's a formal necktie. Plus, dang, he knows how to wear such a thing. Bonus point for being a costume designer and not wearing a tux that screams "Hey! I'm a costume designer!"
Wowwww...Woody Allen! On the Oscar stage! Getting a standing ovation, no less! Cool beans.
(and he came up with a great line, too)
He's demonstrating that we should never forget that he was a fantastic standup comic before becoming a filmmaker. His double-album remains a real classic.
I'm glad he's introducing this New York tribute film this way. The time for solemnity is long-past. It's no longer appropriate to speak about New York City with your hands clasped behind your back and staring moodily at the ground.
(Aside: The great problem with so many of the 9/11 tributes is that it takes a long time to actually produce these things. When the producers of the Super Bowl Halftime Show planned their tribute, the events were probably just a few weeks old. By the time the Super Bowl actually took place, we'd all found our own relationship to the events and begun to find our own peace. So the sight of people re-enacting the simple raising of the World Trade Center flag, using the actual flag itself was sickening and garish.
At least it was to me.
But this filmed tribute was right-on. It was full of delight and exuberance and charm. It's time to look forward, not back.)
Cinematography...
"Lord Of The Rings." This was one of those picks where it really, really should have been the one I picked. Evaluating cinematography is a delight. It means you go into the theater and try not to listen to the dialogue or follow the story: just look at the pictures.
Comparing other nominees to "Lord Of The Rings" is sort of like comparing skiers who grew up in Brazil to the ones who grew up in Austria. It's not that the Brazilian skiiers aren't talented and aren't wonderful athletes...but there are so many opportunities in Austria that good skiiers soon become great.
So when a director comes to you and says "Hank," (if Hank your name it be) "I've got a movie here that involves lots of tiny sets, lots of enormous sprawling vistas, scenes of intense natural beauty and scenes taking place in environments that are beyond the imagination of even the most rabid regular poster on rec.arts.movies.scifi.nerd.nerd.nerd. Interested?"...you, as a cinematographer see nothing but Opportunity To Exercise And Further One's Art.
A montage about Documentaries. See, now this is how they should fill time during the OscarCast. I don't wanna see Savion Glover's Interpretive Dance In Honor Of The Death Of The Final Surviving Castmember Of "The Apartment." I'm watching the whole Oscarcast because I love movies, not Entertainment.
Well, that line seemed a lot better inside my head. But you know what I mean.
(Server problems are more or less over with; server was getting hammered as everyone was tuning into this site as soon as they began tuning into the Oscars. But now that everyone's hitting the site at their own pace instead of all at once, things have more or less taken care of themselves. Now I'm only failing to connect once every twenty minutes or so.)
Dang, Best Documentary is "Murder," not "Promises." Best Documentary is impossible to safely call. Unless you can sense some sort of Buzz, you go with anything having to do with the Holocaust or related issues...only because those topics have won so often.
Best Documentary isn't voted on by absolutely everyone and has been a regular source of controversy. It used to be that the most important thing to do when striving for a Best Documentary Oscar was not to capture and document the truth of the universal human condition, but to serve on the Documentary Oscar committee and make some friends. It's a little better now, but it's still a hard category to get a handle on.
Best Documentary Short: Thoth. Dang. Another one I missed out on.
Aw, geez, what the hell is coming up to the stage? Ah. The subject of the documentary. Why couldn't "American Movie" have won, then? If Mark Borschardt and his pal Mike had been given a chance to speak to one of the largest live audiences in world history, well, they'd probably stop running that clip of the streaker in the Oscar Highlight Reel.
Thoth, for his part, reminds me that sometimes there's a limited difference between Being Wonderfully Open To Love And Delight and being just narking nuts.
Art Direction. I took a risk here, going with "Rings." Which should win. But "Moulin Rouge" has flashier art direction, so hmm...
Damn. "Moulin Rouge." Robbery. It's not that the art direction isn't good work...it's just that the film only demanded a one-note approach on a highly limited number of sets. "Rings" required that the art director erase the whiteboard and start all over again at least five times with each change in location.
And with this loss, my chances of breaking my old record have been dashed. My best year I correctly called 20 winners. I've already missed four. Dash it! Time to fish another bottle of Coke (in a glass bottle, as God commands) out of the ice chest.
Technical Awards. Please please please don't mock the Tech Awards winners like you did last year. That's just dumb. It's like mocking a plumber or an electrician. Let's see how well you'd do without 'em if the water, sewer, and electrical service in your house were all pulled out, all right?
Nathan Lane. Let's have him host! He's at once funny, cutting, and somehow respectful. Whoopi can deal with one of these at a time.
Where's my bottle opener?
Cool, all of the nokminees were CGI so of course, they're all being composited into the audience.
Hahaha! This introduction is way, way better than Whoopi's entire Oscar intro.
Oscar goes to Shrek. Cool, the studios had to provide clips of the winners winning and losing.
I predicted that "Shrek" would win, but I was pulling for "Monsters, Inc." which I think was a better flick. "Shrek" made a good start but failed to maintain its edge and quickly settled into a fairly tame and traditional "fish out of water" kiddie toon.
But the big question is "Why wasn't 'Waking Life' nominated?" Why was "Jimmy Neutron" nominated and not an innovative and grown-up film? Why was "Neutron" nominated instead of Disney's "Atlantis"?
The answers are potentially bad news for the future of the category. Potentially, they're
1) This category is for the best kiddie film, and will not serve to further the development and recognition of animation; so "Waking Life," as well as any other film that tries to promote the idea that animation is a Film Medium, not a Kiddie Film Medium, doesn't have a chance.
2) This category is going to be controlled by the studios, not by the Academy. How else to explain the inclusion of "Jimmy Neutron"? Rumor has it that Disney intentionally withheld "Atlantis" from consideration, knowing that "Shrek" would undoubtedly be one of the nominees; they didn't want the Disney vote to get split, so they chose to push one film forward.
Best Sound. A real tough one. Who really knows the difference between Best Sound and Best Sound Effects Editing? (I do. But then again, when I don't know stuff, I go look it up)
Yeah, see, "Black Hawk Down" wins for Best Sound, when it really should have won (or even been nominated) for Best Sound Effects Editing. SFE is about 'splosions and individual noises. Best Sound is about creating a total sound picture.
"Pearl Harbor" wins for Best 'Splosions, as expected.
Best Supporting Actor. Jim Broadbent. OK, cool; he did a great job in the film he was actually nominated for, and the fact that he supported three of the Best Actress nominees, and let's also say the fact that he was so super in "Topsy-Turvy" last year, means that he's got it coming.
Still, I had picked Ian McKellen. Ian's nomination was definitely one of those "He was a Lead Actor, but a gentle older Englishman is gonna get creamed in that category so let's take out ads asking the Academy to please please please won't you nominate him as a Best Supporting instead?" sort of deals. He's the backbone of "Rings."
Back to formalwear. You ever drive through a neighborhood and look at all the houses and you just think "Man oh man...the aluminum-siding salesman who came through this street about twenty years ago must've been one sliiiiick-talkin' sumbitch"?
Man...the knee-length formal topcoat salesman who came through Hollywood last month must've been one sliiiiick-talkin'...
Aw, man, the Oscarcast producers must be reading this log. They're doing a tribute to film special effects. Just to piss me off, they're using it as an excuse to bring out Cirque du Soleil.
See, the freak with the hula hoops is blocking my view of Maria's transformation scene from "Metropolis." So perhaps we could have a little less of the freak with the hula hoops or the freak with the trampoline and the freak with the thingamabob and the other dealie. Okay?
Best Visual Effects goes to "Lord Of The Rings." Another one that really should have been obvious. With some categories you think about various plusses and minuses and external factors that might affect a nomination. But Best Visual Effects really had to have gone to the film with (a) the most spectacular visual effects and (b) $300,000,000 in ticket sales. If it hadn't, the reason why would wind up shaping Oscar oddsmaking for years to come.
After all, when up is down and north is south and dogs really can play poker, who knows where to put your trust?
Wait, wait! There's a tribute to VISUAL effects, and they obscure the screen with refugees from the set of "Mad Max" jumping up and down on discarded gym equipment...but when they're doing the tribute to film scores, a speciality in which all y'gotta to is listen, oh, then they don't want anything blocking everyone's view?
That's it. I think I'm just gonna have to produce next year's Oscarcast myself, dammit. They've proved that they're too immature to govern themselves and have left themselves ripe for annexation.
Man alive! Everybody reading this at an Oscar party: suggest a new drinking game. You gotta do a shot every time someone appears onstage in a necktie and knee-length overcoat.
Well, he might have been Alternatively Attired, but I'm glad that the guy who scored "Lord Of The Rings" won.
Denzel Washington appears in proper attire. And I thought I couldn't possibly respect him any more than I already did...
It's not that you intend to go to the bathroom during the Lifetime Achievement Award, but if you're like me, at this stage during the telecast you've been sitting on this sofa for three hours and you're on your fourth or is it the fifth Coke and if you don't go to the bathroom in the bathroom, a more straightforward result will occur.
It seems odd that we're 210 minutes into the telecast and we haven't heard any of the Best Song nominees yet. That probably means they'll present them as a medley. And why not. After all, this year Sting and Paul McCartney are nominated. It's not like they've got some sort of big star that could hold everyone's attention for a whole three minutes...
With the appearance of Hugh Jackman, may I point out that we have three people in the Oscarcast who have, or will, play characters from Marvel comics (Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, um, that kid who's playing Spider-Man, and Jennifer Connelly, the future Betty Ross from the upcoming Hulk film.)
Best Short is "The Accountant." I picked this one because it was long-form (about twice as long as the next-longest nominee), because it was a really colorful story (a couple of good ol' boys hire an accountant to think up creativbe ways to save their family farm).
Bust Animated Short. "For The Birds." I'm happy it won and I'm a little disappointed. I picked it to win. It really deserved to win. But I'm starting to wonder if Pixar is one of the 900-pound gorillas of this category for the right reasons.
(Hey, cool, he thanked Steve Jobs, as actually is proper.)
Anyway. It seems like if it's a Pixar film, or an Aardman, or (to a lesser film) from the Film Board of Canada, it's in. But what am I complaining for. "For The Birds" was funny. It was superbly animated. And it pushed new technical boundaries without looking like they were showing off their new feather-rendering algorithm.
Sting sings his Best Song nominee. Looks like it will be a medley, with the performers singing truncated versions. He's at the center-left section of the stage, with the remainder of the stage curtained off.
So why the bloody hell did Cirque du Soleil get an entire act to itself? I say, cut the Cirque. Let's see entire performances from the Best Song nominees. Enya is a best-seller. Sting is a best-seller. Faith Hill's doing just fine for herself and her record company, and can you get any bigger or famouser than Sir Paul McCartney? Randy Newman...okay, sure, let him in there too. That's how strongly I feel about this.
(Look, he's brought John Goodman with him, cool. If I were a better man, I wouldn't be so pleased that it was Goodman and not Roseanne who wound up still having a career after the sitcom ended)
Paul McCartney. I'd be a little disappointed if he won. It might be just my ear, but for years it's seemed to me that his post-Wings songs fall into two categories: wonderful new creations, or things that spilled straight out of his tune-o-matic software.
The winner: Randy Newman. Damn. You're tired of hearing this, but I'm not tired of saying it: every Randy Newman song sounds like the exact same basic dish. Some have a little more salt, some are slathered in ketchup, some might have an extra squirt of Tabasco, but it's all this monotonous plunk-PLUNK-plunk-PLUNK junk.
There are exceptions. Yes. There are exceptions. But "If I Didn't Have You" mushes straight into "You've Got A Friend In Me" which mushes straight into "I Love To See You Smile" et cetera and given the beautiful meolody of Sting's "Until" and the way that Enya's "May It Be" was perfectly integrated into "Lord Of The Rings" I can't help but think that this was nothing more than a pity Oscar. Lotsa nominations over lotsa years and no Oscar.
Rrgh. Okay. So he's won an Oscar. Maybe now he'll GO...AWAY.
Here's an interesting one. Will they give "Best Adapted Screenplay" to "Lord Of The Rings," on the basis of the sheer enormity of the task?
Nope, it goes to "A Beautiful Mind." I thought this was a pretty safe one, but I had some second thoughts. In the end I decided that the adapters of "Rings" would be more or less invisible. Plus, it's probably the most typical sort of winner. Let's see who wins "Best Original." I might be able to explain it better if who I think's gonna win, wins...
Yup, "Gosford Park." See, if you want a real lock, you look for a film that's all about acting, that got lots of critical acclaim, and that hasn't the slimmest chance of winning anything else.
So that's "Rings" and "Shrek" out; they're considered to be special effects films. "A Beautiful Mind" would be an underdog here because voters think, hell, it's gonna win Best Picture so let's give the Oscar to a film that needs one. But no one's seen or heard of "Ghost World." They should have seen "Ghost World" because it was one of the ten best films of the year. But they didn't. The film's limited release could have been countered with a big Oscar promotion where the film company makes sure that Terry Zwigoff et all make the rounds of all the chat shows specifically to pooh-pooh rumors that it's a lock for Best Original Screenplay, thus creating the rumor. But no such luck.
If no one had seen or heard of "Gosford Park," it would've been in "Ghost World's" position and Best Adapted would have gone to "Monster's Ball"...another film that won't win one of the "Picture" awards.
Best Foreign goes to...not "Amelie." Okay. I felt I had to select it because it was nominated for just about everything else, and as such I felt that this just had to be taken of a sign of widespread awareness of -- and respect for -- the film. And I just couldn't get a bead on any sort of buzz for any of the nominees, so I went with my first hunch.
Russell Crowe presents "Best Actress."
(Wearing a duster: Jesse, Brenda, and Jim, who have emailed since my posting about the drinking game: you may tell your group to drink up again. Just make sure that everyone put their car keys in a fishbowl before you broke out the Stoli. (a) because friends don't let friends drive drunk, and (b) I'll tell you about another fun little game you grownups can play later on.)
His clothing is a little closer to proper formal attire, at least. Unlike last year, when he was nominated for "Gladiator." I think this year he sensed that if he wins, he'll win for his role in an actual bona-fide decent movie and he dressed accordingly.
Ooooohhhhhhh...he mispronounced Sissy Spacek's name.
It's Halle Berry (he said, checking again to make sure that he's spelling it right, after just having bitched about Crowe mispronouncing Spacek's). Good, good, good. I was afraid it'd be Nicole Kidman. I thought it would be a somewhat tight race between Halle and Spacek, to exceedingly deserving nominees. On the basis of merit, I couldn't really choose between the two. But again, when Everyone Is Saying That [blank] Will Win you have to factor that in.
She's crying. Call me a softie but it's great when someone wins who isn't afraid to show how happy they are to win. And what a wonderful, respectful speech. Aw, and Mom's crying and her husband's close to cryin' and now I'm starting to tear up but to be truthful I've got this persistent eye problem and I'm supposed to be taking these drops for them and I don't think I took 'em today. But look, I'm moved, nonetheless.
(But when a winner starts thanking her lawyers, individually, it's time to start playing her off the stage)
How cool...Denzel Washington wins as Best Actor for "Training Day."
I picked Russell Crowe. I thought he did as good a job in "Beautiful Mind" as Denzel did in "Training Day." Plus, "Mind" was a more recent film, it's gonna win Best Director and Best Picture (though maybe I shouldn't speak so fast, there), and it's unusual for a film like "Training Day" to create a Best Actor award.
No doubt there will be those who will claim that the voters decided to honor African-American actors this year. Rubbish. Halle Berry and Denzel Washington won because, individually, they created some wonderful characters. That the top acting honors went to African-Americans is just a happy coincidence.
I do wish that the Academy had waited a few years and given it to Denzel for another role. He's one of those actors who (like Morgan Freeman) does something unique and wonderful every two years; Denzel played a streetwise dangerous cop superbly, but he played a streetwise dangerous cop.
Ron Howard wins for Best Director. Thank Tarim. If he'd lost it would have been just plain disgusting. He deserved to win it years ago. Had he lost, it would've been a profound statement about the inability of the Academy to do actual thinking and accept that just because you first came to know a guy as the castmember of a popular sitcom, that don't mean that he don't evolve and grow and change.
(I'm happy he won. Happy, happy, happy. But again here's a guy on the Oscar stage dressed as one of the Blues Brothers, not like an Oscar-winner)
I am reminded via email that I'd forgotten that Halle Berry and Ian McKellen, too, had played Marvel comix characters (Storm and Magneto in the "X-Men" film). If Marvel Comics doesn't issue a press release or something about this, they're not getting their money's worth out of their publicists.
Ron's win means that a Best Picture for "Beautiful Mind" is a virtual lock.
Yes, indeed. Good. I sometimes wonder if the producers don't choose an Oscar presenter based on a likely winner. It can't be just plain luck that Tom Hanks is presenting this award, given his history with Ron and Imagine.
Okay, that's a wrap. The stats:
Four hours and about fifteen minutes or so. That's perfectly fine with me. When the network telecast of the Oscars runs one minute longer than the Super Bowl, then I'll tolerate people complaining that it goes on and on. Given that this year's Super Bowl went about eight hours, I say let's hear the Best Song nominees in their entirety.
(Hell, just to rub people's noses in it let's send a helicopter out to the Micronesian island we banished Debbie Allen to ten years ago, and have her choreograph a ten-minute dance tribute to Panavision cameras and lense))
Fifteen for twenty-four. That's barely at the margin of what I consider acceptible. Friends are sick of my reminding them of the year I only missed two categories, and I'm happy with anything better than 18, but anything under 16 makes me question my faith in a just and kind God.
I got clobbered in the minor film awards (documentaries and shorts), which are usually the difference between my doing Okay and doing Czechoslovakia proud. You have to work to learn about those flicks and unless you want to just guess, making a pick is a real hoo-hah. Usually I get all but one or two of them; leaving aside Best Animated Feature (which I picked correctly, but this is the first year it's been awarded) I only went two for five. Usually I get one of the Documentaries right, but I blew 'em both.
There were plenty of credits in which -- I'm sorry, but it's just the truth -- I WAS RIGHT AND THE VOTING MEMBERS OF THE ACADEMY WERE WRONGWRONGWRONGWRONGWRONGWRONG!!!!!!!! pantpantpantpant
Hi, I'm back. I wasn't gonna predict Randy Newman over Sting and Paul McCartney for Best song. Nuh-huh. And "Moulin Rouge" did not have better Art Direction than "Lord Of The Rings." Yes, the Academy believed otherwise. But there are people who drop $2000 on one PowerBall lottery drawing and believe that NASA faked the moon landings and go off and name a major airport after Ronald Reagan, too. The world is full of irrational idiots. And given Reagan's two terms, us rational sages have long-since been resgined to the fact that idiots vote, too.
(Okay, look, I still haven't gotten over Iran-Contra and deregulation. Since Nancy went public about Ron's degenerative disease I've tried really hard not to be so public about how intensely I despise the man, or at least his Administration. Some December 31 the Universe's accountants will discover that they've got a huge surplus of Irony still lying around and if they don't use it before the end of the year it'll all go to waste. So they'll make sure that there's a passenger on an airplane who shoulda recieved psychiatric care in the Eighties but got booted out when social-services funding was eliminated, and after he freaks out the pilot tries to land the plane at the nearest airport, Ronald Reagan International in Washington, DC. Except that deregulation led to lessening of Federal safety guidelines, so plane with serious metal fatigue was given its flight certificate regardless. And because the airline industry was turned into a free-for-all, the airline couldn't afford to have its mechanics properly inspect the plane before it took off, so the engine flies apart and plane crashes into the runway, and because the regulation regarding the minimum number of emergency medical personnel an airport must maintain was lowered and the definition was broadened to include anyone whose hands fit whatever rubber gloves are available, everyone who survived the impact dies in the fire. End of aside.)
Other categories simply went to perfectly-credible alternative choices. I had to back Ian McKellen for Best Supporting because he had considerable buzz, he'd beaten Jim Broadbent in the SAG awards, and he was well-respected. But I'd been pleased by all of his great work this year and (he said, adopting a shamelessly defensive tone) I did say that it'd be either McKellen or Broadbent.
Five Cokes, half a bag of pretzels, and half a bag of M&M's. I must be getting old. A friend of mine recently sent me a tape of a whole row of guys eating jar after jar of straight mayonnaise, so I know that I'm not operating nearly at the peak of human gluttony. Maybe it's like becoming an elite runner: either you're born with the potential to eat eighty hard-boiled eggs in ten minutes or you're destined to just watch from the sidelines.
No boobies, but more black neckties than I ever hope to see outside of a Blues Brothers film festival or a big ska revival. Gweneth Paltrow was at least trying, bless her heart for wearing something sheer and tight, but the days when a cameraman would adjust his camera to the pre-set Female Oscar Presenter position and then quickly snap it up and zoom it in for a tight head-and-shoulders shot -- God bless you, Geena Davis, just...I mean, God bless you -- are a distant memory.
I'm okay with the idea that the women had the curtains drawn on their front porches. Unlike many men, I'm, y'know, all evolved n'junk. But where are the dead swans? Or the actresses who, when asked what designer they were wearing, would answer "The 3M Corporation"...acknowledging the prodigious amounts of spray adhesive that kept their appearance suitable for the ABC Network as opposed to the sort of shows that run after 1 AM on Cinemax?
Doubtless this was part of the inevitable post-9/11 conservatism. It's no good to introduce a tribute to the victims while wearing a dress made out of six feet of red licorice.
Only one naughty joke from Whoopi. And not a terribly naughty one, either. Look, I'm not a prude (as the the contents of my web browser's image cache would dramatically attest, if not for the fact that I purge it regularly and frequently). It's just that there are only so many times I can hear someone in a formal evening gown talk about the smell she just left behind backstage.
Nathan Lane showed how the role of host should be performed. Actually, Billy Crystal, Johnny Carson, and Steve Martin did, but they weren't actually there. But in those five minutes during which he announced the Best Animated Feature award he was funny and he was irreverent, while still managing to present an image that matched the occasion. The great hosts keep things going. They inject spontaneity into the proceedings, dynamically sensing what's sagging and propping it up. Whoopi was utterly disposible. She was the host because they always have a host at this thing.
Sunday, March 24, 8:34 PM. That's when Reality Television was officially pronounced dead. If "Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire?" resulted in one of the most widely-mocked and monumentally-embarrassing shows of the past five years of network television -- yes, there was "Celebrity Boxing," but that was popular enough to merit a repeat airing and an upcoming sequel -- what makes ABC think that stretching that one-night special into an entire series will be a ratings bonanza? Aren't there any old episodes of "Full House" still lying around somewhere?
7,281 words. I've written over seven-thousand words about tonight's Oscarcast and now I'm very nearly as sick of writing about it as you are of reading about it. But I cannot say goodnight to you all without closing with the following nine words.
THANK GOD "MOULIN ROUGE" WON NOTHING OF ANY IMPORTANCE.
It is for this reason that I shall spent tonight sweetly and soundly asleep, instead of numbly wandering the streets in my bathrobe, clutching a fringed upholstered chair and a paddle-ball game, my hollow, dead eyes fixed onto the horizon of the bleak, dead world that I know sprawls menacingly ahead of me.
|
![[Onward!]](../standards/onwardbuttonsmaller.gif){kind=small}