Greetings

I’d like to echo K’s warm thoughts and wish you all regular visitors (and newbies!) a very wonderful Christmas. A special thanks to K, whose invaluable contributions to this blog are warmly appreciated. Cheers everyone and thanks for the lovely thoughts you send my way during this past week; my vacation was lots of fun and I’m sure the positive vibes y’all sent helped make it such. Happy holidays!

Cheers

All right, guys. I’ll be off on vacation for the rest of the week. Can you guess my destination? I’ll give you this hint: it ain’t Fiji and it ain’t Brazil.

In any case, I’m not sure whether I’ll have internet access where I’m staying, and even if I do, I’ll probably be doing loads of sight-seeing, leaving me no time to follow the awards scene too closely.

I’m sure K will do a magnificent job keeping the blog updated, so no worries there. Here’s to hoping more awards come Marion’s way this week. Cheers!

Oscars!

So true!

Birthday

Today’s my birthday and it was, overall, fun. Thanks to all the wonderful people in my life, I love you all.

Totally unrelated: I had a thought about something that happened to me last night. I rode my bike from the train station to my house after work (as I’m bound to do), and it was pretty dark out (I tend to leave work well into the evening). Suddenly I felt a car slowing down next to me, and something dawned on me: I’m in NYC, in a dark road, and a car is approaching me and slowing down. Fuck! Then I hear “Excuse me, miss, but your kickstand is down, you’re going to fall.” I turned around and noticed the pesky kickstand. I quickly thanked the young man, whose car then sped up and went on its way. “How lovely,” I thought. And it occurred to me how he could have just driven off and not given a crap, but he took the time to warn an unknown cyclist out of the kindness of his heart.

Thank you, sir, wherever you are–that was pretty cool of you!

Manamana

You regular visitors might have noticed a lack of updates during the past few days. No real reason except for the fact that there’s no real news out there, plus I’ve been mad busy at work (which is a good thing).

Anyway, when there’s nothing to say or nothing to do, it helps to watch a little manamana:

Hopefully I’ll have a Marion-related update soon!

Blogs

I have to say, one of the highlights of this experiment has been reading other people’s blogs (like this one) and opinions about not only this film and its star, but life in general. Call me sentimental, but it speaks to the power of film to bring people from vastly different walks of life together.

Holiday

I’ve been on a bit of a holiday (i.e. Labor Day), so nothing new to report, except for a lovely image that came my way:

Voilà.

Competition

So September is once again upon us, it can only mean one thing: the best of the best, the creme de la creme will hit be hitting a screen near you. In short, the Oscar-baiting season begins.

Because news have been pretty slow (as expected…), I’ll be expanding the scope of the blog to include news about other candidates for the Gold. In the end, this will accomplish two things: (a) provide context to Marion’s inevitable win, and (b) keep aware of the ever-changing trends should the win prove not that inevitable after all.

In addition, I’ll be discussing the main contenders in other major categories, like lead actor, best picture, best director, etc.

Lastly, thanks to everyone for the kind messages I’ve received. It’s nice to see folks out there enjoy this absurd little experiment! Cheers.

Look

Nothing new to report today. I did update the blog’s “look.” It was incredibly difficult to do and took me hours and–oh yeah, I just changed the template. Silly me. In any case, here’s a photo, just because:

Greatest

One of my stomping grounds on the web is a little place called “Goldderby.” And while it can get pretty contentious in there at times, everyone loves and respects films. In any case, one of the current topics of discussion there is people’s favorite performances by actresses. I posted my list there and well, things still being pretty slow, I figure I’d post it here as well. Here goes:

01. Vivien Leigh, A Streetcar Named Desire/Gone with the Wind (to me, the two greatest performances ever put on film)
02. Gong Li, The Story of Qiu Ju
03. Elizabeth Taylor, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
04. Sophia Loren, Two Women
05. Kate Winslet, Heavenly Creatures/Jude/Eternal Sunshine…/Little Children
06. Katharine Hepburn, Little Women/Stage Door/Bringing up Baby/Long Day’s Journey into Night
07. Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth/Notes on a Scandal/The Aviator
08. Bette Davis, All About Eve
09. Marion Cotillard, La Vie En Rose
10. Juliette Binoche, The English Patient/Damage/Blue
11. Patty Duke, The Miracle Worker
12. Meryl Streep, Sophie’s Choice/Kramer v. Kramer/Silkwood/She-Devil (seriously)
13. Shirley MacLaine, Terms of Endearment/Postcards from the Edge
14. Halle Berry, Monster’s Ball
15. Bibi Andersson, Persona