Andy Ihnatko Picks On Oscar! 2006 is now Online

Friday, March 03, 2006 • 10:11:27 PM EST

This year's Oscar Picks are up! Hang your eyeballs on 'em at this url:

http://www.cwob.com/movies/oscars2006.html

As always, feel free to link elsewhere to all interested friends, operatives, and outlets.

I will indeed be live-blogging the Oscarcast on Sunday night. You'll find the URL to the liveblog inside that main Oscars 2006 page. If the content isn't exciting, the means by which I produce it sure will be: it'll be the first live-fire exercise of my new blogging engine. The idea here is that I can generate a "most recent first" blog while the Oscars are in progress, and then rebuild it afterwards sorted by time.

Well, let's just see how it works.

If it works.

It'll work.

Now's as good a time as any to mention that I've got a new podcast, too:

Andy Ihnatko's Little Red Envelope DVD Reviews

The big idea here is that I'm reviewing all (or nearly all) of the DVDs that I get through the Netflix service. Show 6 (containing an audio version of my Oscar picks) will go up late tonight. I've held off on talking about this thing because to be honest, I was just playing with GarageBand's (rather awesome) new podcasting features. GB takes so much of the malarkey out of recording podcasts that I found myself sitting down to record these things rather regularly.

Naturally, like all of my Web ventures, the Little Red Envelope podcasts are published under the Creative Disappointment License: ie, this is just me having fun so please come with your expectations set to the "low/hand-washables" setting.

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2006 Live OscarBlogCast is now going on!

Sunday, March 05, 2006 • 09:11:23 PM EST

Incidentally, I am currently liveblogging the Oscars. Point your browser yonder for all the gory comments and commentaries:

<http://www.cwob.com/movies/oscarcast2006.html>.

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Sunday, March 05, 2006 • 09:28:05 PM EST

I need to check with the statistician: was this the first car fire on an Oscar stage?

And why didn't they use this idea during the closing ceremonies of the Los Angeles Olympics?

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Oscars 2006: The Destruction of Jared-Syn

Monday, March 06, 2006 • 01:01:15 PM EST

It is morning. I have kicked Uma Thurman out of my bed and put her in a cab to the airport

...and come to grips with the fact that I went 13 for 24 this year with my Oscar predictions.

Well, clearly there's room for improvement next year. I shall emerge from this experience stronger and wiser. And in nearly every category where I got something wrong, the Oscar went to a person who lived in the general category of "Wouldn't it be great if we all lived in a world where this guy had a snowball's chance in hell?"

Jon Stewart got off to a shaky start. There are some challenges that simply go a little more smoothly if you're just a little bit drunk. Not schnockered, mind you. I mean a half an hour before going on, you're into your second gin-and-tonic and that's when you think "Whoah...I'd better knock off the drinky-drinky until after the show."

IE, just enough alcohol in his system to fill him with a misplaced sense of confidence. With one and a half hotel minifridge-strength gin and tonics in him, Stewart's hosting would have been a B+ or A-. As-is, it was a B or so. The audience just plain wasn't having his opening monologue at all, and a touch more arrogance on his part would have turned that around. If you're going to try to be funny in front of an audience that includes Jack Nicholson, you can't be entirely humble or entirely sober.

The length of the show was just fine. To those who complain every year about the fact that the Oscars run three and a half hours I have this to say: There are 24 categories to go through and it's only once a year. Just deal with it. In my world, the NFL would get 30 minutes for the Super Bowl and the entire season of "American Idol" would be reduced to a 60 second WMA or Quicktime on YouTV.com. I don't pretend that these observations say anything more than "I, personally, am not at all into this show" and these complaints about the duration of the Oscars should be processed in precisely those same terms.

And can I say something about all those clip montages on the show? They're useless. Worse, they're actively frustrating. There are tens of thousands of classic films on DVD and a package like this is a wonderful opportunity to get people all excited about a forty-year-old movie that they saw during the Oscarcast. But did the producers think to include the titles of the movies they're praising? No. They did not.

Result: it all comes across as pointless nostalgia. They're relegating these films to the museum and subconsciously communicating that there's really no need to actually go out and see these things. You've seen that bit from "Network" where the newscaster shouts "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more!" and honestly, people...that's really the whole movie, isn't it? No, go out and see the I Dream Of Jeannie movie instead.

Wouldn't it be great if instead of these impersonal, random clips, they simply recorded short interviews with past and current nominees about their personal favorite movies? "Recommend one and only one movie that you absolutely love," they should be asked. And then we all see Jack Nicholson spending thirty seconds passionately extolling the virtues of a certain Russ Meyer film. And the title stays up on the screen long enough to plug it into a Google search.

On and on. Well, check out the LiveOscarCastBlog for the play-by-play commentary.

But before I click "Post" and move on with my day (filled as it is with delights and dreams), let me single out one particular Oscarcast All-Star: AppleScript.

What. A. Champ. As I sat down to write my Oscar predictions, I realized that I was about to write 24 little articles, all of which would be formatted exactly the same. After ten minutes in Script Editor, BBEdit was sporting a brand-new menu item that took the selected plain-jane paragraphs and turned them into nicely-styled, ready-for-the-Web text in just one click. When it came time to prepare for the live blog, I realized that my usual blog -- which is itself an AppleScript production -- probably wasn't the best sort of venue. It's not set up for dozens of little posts. And the usual software wasn't the most convenient solution, either; it wants a title for every item, which needlessly slows me down in this particular task, and it updates the RSS feed each and every time, which floods subscribers with dozens of individual alerts, when a single "Hey, I'm liveblogging the Oscars" alert would suffice.

So I clicked over to Script Editor and within about twenty minutes, I'd taken the engine of my blogger and used it to build a whole new OscarCWOBber app, tuned specifically to the needs of Live OscarBlogging. Even while the OscarBlogCast was in progress, I thought up ways to streamline the process. Every time that happened, I was able to command-tab back into Script Editor, quickly bash out a few lines of AppleScript, and have the new feature in place...all during a commercial break.

It was yet another one of those days when I think "What would I do without AppleScript?", turn towards Cupertino, and chant "Hail Sal!" three times.

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Congratulations to Sean, from Your Pals at Yellowtext

Saturday, March 25, 2006 • 03:42:10 PM EST

So Sean Patrick O'Malley, archbishop of Boston, was elevated to Cardinal this week by Pope Benedict XVI. Naturally, here in the Land of the Cod the event was all over the news. Some TV stations actually carried the ceremony live from the Vatican.

Note the choice of language: he was elevated, not promoted. If I'm ever lured away from the monetary and spiritual rewards of freelance journalism and into a vice-presidency at a top, influential tech firm, I'm going to file this tidbit away. And if I make it to President or CEO, I shall insist that the press release reflect that I was Elevated to the position. "Elevated" suggests that my advancement is a simple result of the cream rising irrepressibly to the top...instead of the result of my using two whole bags of Quicklime whenever I buried a body, to hasten decomposition and ensure that the damned thing stayed buried.

As a cardinal, O'Malley is now in effect a Senator in international Catholicism. He'll be appointed to various committees that determine directions for the Church, ranging from basic administration to whether or not removing Limbo from the afterlife org chart will help to cut overhead costs and increase efficiency. I also imagine that they're starting to worry about what might happen if Dick Cheney finally realizes that the only way he's ever going to get into Heaven is to inflict a Regime Change on the Holy See and then tell the new Pope to write an encyclical exempting His Holiness' staff and advisors from jus pontificium. Thus one of Cardinal O'Malley's first tasks will be to look into the logistics of swapping out the Swiss Guards' pointy spears with something a little more ballistic.

What I enjoyed most about all of the O'Malley coverage was a photo that appeared in the Boston Globe this morning. It's a shot of the crowd at the elevation ceremony, showing O'Malley's mom taking pictures with a little camera.

You gotta love that. It goes to show you that a Mom's love is pure and unconditional. The pride she feels when you're being installed as a Prince of the Catholic Church is exactly the same as the pride she felt when you played a twelve-note solo on a plastic recorder during your school's Christmas concert.

Though six will get you ten that at least once in the past few weeks, Mrs. O'Malley wondered if her Sean would ever get married and settle down.

A Mom is a Mom is a Mom...

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Rolling, Rolling, Rolling...

Tuesday, March 28, 2006 • 03:37:23 PM EST

There are times when I wish I were the administrator of an enormous scholarship fund. To be absolutely truthful, there was just the one time, and it was earlier this afternoon. But you would have wished the same thing if you had been driving along a residential street and spotted that 8-year-old playing on the sidewalk. Clearly, this specimen is destined for greatness. I wanted to tell him "Kid, you're on the right track. Keep following your own instincts, and you will change the world for the better" and there's no more emphatic way to send that message than to hand over a properly-executed legal document promising four free years at the college of their choice...be it William & Mary, or Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey.

I am forced to use awkward gender-neutral pronouns because the I can't say whether the kid was a boy or a girl. Y'see, the young person in question was wearing a paper sack of the type that a more mundane mind would have used for the recycling of leaves and lawn clippings.

You've seen those bags, I'm sure. You've probably seen an eight-year-old kid as well, so with very little effort, you will put the two images together and recognize that what I spied was a brown paper sack that floated above a pair of ankles and sneakers.

If you took it upon yourself to picture that the kid would have needed to cut two enormous cartoon-like circles in the bag so s/he could see, award yourself some extra points because that's exactly what -- okay, I'm just going to say "he" from now on -- he did.

But I'm guessing that you aren't picturing that he was wearing the sack with the eyeholes while energetically propelling himself down the sidewalk on a RAZR scooter. And for this, I pity you, dear reader. I laughed so hard and for so long that a few hundred yards later, my eyes were burning and I was a little short of breath and I had to pull into a CVS parking lot.

You're with me on this: the kid gets a four-year scholarship, including room and board and a small stipend for incidentals. Hell, throw in an extra thirty grand for a year abroad.

Did I mention that there were two kids there with him, egging him on and trying to keep up? It looked like those films of the Wright Flyer taking off, with guys running alongside the wingtips to make sure that nothing bad happened to Orville. Or more to the point, nothing so bad that an adult would take away the scooter and the sack and call everybody's Moms.

And you know that there was a Perfectly Good Reason why these kids were out there doing that. It's an admirable and enviable trait in children: they're absolute masters at developing lateral solutions. Much like the fabled crow, who wants to drink water from a tall glass and immediately flies away to gather small stones, you can be certain that the kid zooming down the street on a scooter wearing a paper bag represented -- with some twists and turns, I grant you -- the clear, logical answer to some question or problem.

It's quite possible that I shall be speculating on the exact nature of that question until the day I die.

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