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[shadowkat]

I'm fighting a sinus headache, a sick sinus headache that I've been fighting all day long. Also attempting to watch Triangle of Sadness on Hulu at the moment. It's among the Oscar nominated films that I've not seen. There are four - Triangle, All Quiet on the Western Front, the Fableman's, and Avatar.

If you watched or read about last night's Oscar telecast - Everything Everywhere All at Once, and All Quiet on the Western Front cleaned up at the event. All Quiet basically won all the ones that Everything didn't win in the categories in which it was nominated - or all the technical stuff. It also won International. Neither was that surprising. I kind of guessed it ahead of time.

And EEE won the most since Slumbdog Millionaire. Do you remember Slumbdog?
I remember it better than EEE, which I guess tells you something? I'll probably forget who won next year. I can't remember who won last year.

Three films hold the record of winning the most Academy Awards, having garnered 11 Oscars each: Ben-Hur (1959), Titanic (1997) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).

Out of these, Titanic received the most nods with a total of 14 nominations.

There's no chance of the record being broken or leveled this time around – Everything Everywhere All at Once is up for eleven awards, but it can't win every one of them given that Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis are up against each other in the Best Supporting Actress category.

Titantic's wins are actually the reason that I stopped taking this contest seriously. I disliked Titantic. It was a boring film that lasted forever.
My brother loved it. Life continues to amuse. Actually it was Gandhi before that. At least I enjoyed EEE, even if I can barely remember it and have no interest in re-watching it.

***

Managed to paint another water-color today. This one of a man I saw on the train the other day. I've been painting people that I see on the train.
Drawing and painting them from memory. It's an interesting art experiment, and I'm enjoying it more than I did painting from photographs. My memory is more three dimensional.

***

Now that I've completed Spare, I'm currently listening to "A Life in Pieces" by Bryan Cranston. Which is interesting - he started out as homicide cop with the LAPD prior to working as an actor.

Comments

[mtbc]

Yeah, when I went along with someone for a second viewing of Titanic, I bailed and thankfully opted for Dark City instead, we met up again after!

Drawing from memory is a useful skill for English court artists, they're not allowed to draw in the actual courtroom!

[shadowkat]

I barely made it through a first viewing of Titantic. Weirdly, I think the only two James Cameron films that I've enjoyed were his sci-fi horror films - Terminator and Aliens.

I've been drawing from memory because it's rude to take photos of people on subways and kind of impossible to do it. Drawing live models - which I've done - is harder to do - because usually it's set up, in advance, it costs money (not free - because you have to pay them) and generally speaking they are nude. I'm not a fan of drawing nudes -don't get me wrong, I've done a lot of it, but I find it hard. It's easier to draw clothing. (I've taken a lot of art courses in my lifetime.)

[yourlibrarian]

I have issues with a handful of movies garnering most of the nominations. To me it just speaks to the insular nature of voting groups, who are apparently not watching many movies. It's even more obvious in TV, even though that can be more easily excused by the vast quantity of shows and the many hours of viewing. Movies are far more limited in terms of numbers and hours, but they are similarly concentrated.

The digital effects winners used to be one category which tended to get an entirely different groups of movies nominated from those in other categories. But CGI is so widely used now for virtually any kind of movie (including period pieces and, as we saw with the makeup win, even actor appearance) that it's no longer the case.

[shadowkat]

Oh, I agree. There were so many movies out this year though - however, I know that everyone who votes for these films gets the films via DVD free in the mail. They send them the films ahead of time - along with a list of nominations that they'd like them to consider. I know this because an actor friend who was in SAG and the Academy, got all the DVD's and one year (when I still had a working DVD player) let me borrow a ton of them. That year I saw everything nominated.

But - I don't think they watch all of them. And people are moody. Also, it's very political - often the films that win these things don't do it so much on merit - but "political" message, theme, the message of what it means for this or that person to win. Sometimes it's on purely racial or gender grounds, which annoying, but par for the course. (And if they don't nominate diverse racial, gender, and nationality groups - they get a backlash.)

It's rarely about the films themselves - which is another reason why it is so hard to take this seriously any longer. I was talking to my co-workers about it - and none of them watched the Oscars, they just waited to see who won the next morning, and were all annoyed to varying degrees, but also didn't take it all that seriously. Two of them had seen pretty much all the films. And one told me that I really needed to see the Whale and To Leslie, which she thought had delivered the best performances.

[yourlibrarian]

It's rarely about the films themselves

Yeah, it's an issue. And for many other awards, they're essentially bought by companies. An awful lot of tributes, awards, etc. are more for publicity and creating donor support than honoring deserving winners.

[shadowkat]

I just read Scalzi's review of the Oscars - and while I agree with him about Everything Everywhere All at Once winning (it's a joyous film, and a joyous moment - my mother loved that it won because it was so joyous, but she has no intention of watching the film) - it's win felt very...political.

It would never have won ten years ago, let alone five. It's a very innovative film, that is quite progressive politically.

And we all knew it would clean up at the awards.

But was it political? Yup.