As requested, here’s a post-script to the Oscar pool results.
People who guessed all eight of the “major” award winners correctly: Melanie B.
(By major awards, I mean Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay.)
Others who did a bang-up job: Sandi-7 Kari-6 Hollie-6
14 people got five right 10 people got four right 5 people got three right 2 people got two right 1 person got one right
Most people were tripped up on Best Actor, which was widely predicted to go to Mickey Rourke, but we were all spared his chihuahua speech thanks (ostensibly) to Prop 8 protest votes and great acting by Sean Penn. (Personally, after seeing Frost/Nixon, I think Frank Langella should have gone home with the Oscar.) Best Director was apparently a tough prediction as well, although that might have been skewed by a Portland-heavy pool of entrants who have been rooting for Gus VanSant for all these years. Meryl Streep was the spoiler in Best Actress voting, especially from people who had low scores overall – I’m guessing that those of you who didn’t see many of the movies hedged your bets and (wisely, based on the odds) voted for her because she is, well, The Best Actor Ever. Best Supporting Actress was a tough call for many of you as well, probably because there was no real front-runner.
-DSW apparently believes large-footed women do not deserve cute shoes. -Proof of Jessica Simpson’s height-impairedness: heel height of her shoe designs -Is there something wrong with me if I buy a pair of Dr. Scholls shoes? Like, medically wrong? -Salesperson, please do not take a shopper’s query about shoe comfort as the opportunity to create a one-woman show about your European vacation for all the store to hear. Those Europeans, they walk EVERYWHERE. We get it. -What’s ickier: Carrying my own sweaty trouser sock around in my purse for unexpected shoe shopping emergencies, or using those disposable nude nylon footies that inevitably pop off while I’m in mid-stride on the way to the mirror? -New shoes are the gateway drug to new jeans (need the right length for heel height), followed by Anthropologie sweaters (on sale!), followed by trench coats (must look pulled-together now that pretty shoes and jeans have been acquired).
We used to tiptoe into Theo’s room after he fell asleep so we could watch him. Slumbering children are so beautiful and sweet that it was worth risking that his batlike sense of hearing would detect the turn of the doorknob as we stole into the room. If he stirred, Jeff would crouch below crib level and I hid behind the door before he saw us. If we were lucky, he would snorfle and turn his head away and close his eyes and we would scurry silently out of the room.
If he saw us, however, he immediately began to squeak and howl, begging to be picked up and cuddled and rocked. He pushed up onto his arms and bleated pathetically, and we would scurry from the room, listening for a few seconds until (hopefully) he forgot about us and fell back to sleep. Or else we had to go back in and pat his back and say soothing things and stroke his cheek with his stuffed giraffe and beg him to put his head back down. Which worked most of the time. But he obviously wasn’t happy that we were awake and available and watching American Idol and he was missing out on the fun.
But times are changing. When we go in his room now to listen to him breathe and see his peaceful face, he still wakes up sometimes. But he just squints at us and rolls over, as if to say, “Um, did you need something? Because I’m trying to get some sleep over here.”
It’s just another milestone that makes my brain scurry forward ten years to the day my pre-teenage son just wants to be LEFT ALONE with his iPod (or with the computer chip that has been injected into his inner ear that picks up radio signals or whatever we will be using to listen to music in 2019). I’m pretty sure he’s going to be the sort of person who sleeps until noon on Saturday mornings. But I like to think he might keep his special stuffed giraffe under his pillow even then.
You know that feeling when you’ve promised someone a favor? It’s someone you really like, and the favor is something you enjoy doing, but you just never seem to get time among all your other responsibilities to get it done. And you find yourself avoiding the person because when you talk with them you spend all your time apologizing about the favor, when they’ve probably either forgotten all about it or else just did it themselves because holy cow it wasn’t a big deal and it was taking you forever.
Yeah, I’ve kind of been avoiding blogging because the Oscar pool results were hanging over my head. You’d think I was being asked to do my own taxes or something. (My accountants and the German and American tax authorities are all thankful that’s not the case.)
So about the Oscars. I had a great time watching the big show with Katie. (Well, besides the part where I tried to demonstrate the wonders of modern technology and somehow used our DVR to skip over about 20 minutes of the telecast.) It was Slumdog Millionaire’s night, as you know, and while I am not convinced it will stand the test of time as the Best Picture, I couldn’t help but be touched and thrilled by the fresh-faced enthusiasm of the cast and crew as they accepted award after award. Highlights for me included Penelope Cruz winning Best Supporting Actress, the Milk screenwriter’s speech, and Kate Winslet receiving long-deserved recognition. I’m glad I didn’t have to see Mickey Rourke talk about his chihuahua and I like Sean Penn just fine but I wish Frank Langella had won. Also, I made some killer guacamole, which was delicious.
And now, the pool results. My sincere apologies for taking a year and a day (well, just a couple of weeks, actually) to get the results tabulated. Thanks to all 37 entrants. Repeat players will note that our big winner, Melanie, has been in either the first or second spot all four years we’ve played this game. If she doesn’t watch out we might have to name the award after her. Notably, she picked only three of the 24 awards incorrectly. Next year, let’s all take her to Vegas. Second place goes to my blog pal B. who has had kind of a rough year so far and deserves some good news. Neat prizes will be headed their way soon.
Oscar Pool 2009 Results, by name and number of correct predictions:
Last week, I was feeling like I spent most of my time in negotiations. I thought far in advance about how I could convince my son to wear socks each day. I talked up the thrills and delights of his tractor plate at dinnertime. I offered to race him upstairs when the bathtub beckoned. But, most of the time, he was having none of it. He whined and flailed and threw his cars. I despaired, wondering where my easygoing kid had disappeared to. I thought (hoped) it was his molars. I didn’t want to resign myself to the idea that he was just kind of a jerk, but the thought crossed my mind. He’d just turned two. This is how they act for a couple of years, I thought. Maybe I should hire a live-in massage therapist to reduce my stress, I thought.
I was ramping up to a business trip, and I was hosting my book group. I had a lot to do and plan and think about. And the more I had to do, the crankier Theo became. He spent the weekend alternating between angelic glee and freaked-out screeching. He’d even stopped sleeping well. He demanded attention at 3am, and then wanted books read and balls tossed and games played. All three of us were delightful to behold when it was time to get up.
Tuesday night, he woke up crying (again) and screaming. OUCHY OUCHY OUCHY he said. EAR he cried.
“That’s a pretty clear signal,” the doctor snorted when I told her the story the next morning. We gathered up our Amoxycillin and went on our merry way. He’s not a jerk, you see, he just has an ear infection.
All this made me feel a little bad that he’d obviously felt miserable for a while but I’m not embarrassed to tell you I was relieved. Because he’s gone through cranky periods before and I hoped and thought it was teething or illness and in the end he was just cranky. So this time, when the doctor handed me the prescription, it was good to have a solution that didn’t involve trying to have patience, trying to listen and talk and convince a toddler that screaming should be confined to emergency situations and the playground (and possibly those evenings when his mother just can’t take it any more).
(To those of you anticipating the Oscar pool results, I apologize for the delay. I promise to post the big news later this week. Thanks for your patience.)
I had one of those low-point parenting days yesterday. It wasn’t even an entirely bad day, it was just a really horrible thirty minutes, when I was trying to feed him dinner and he wanted to eat dinner but then he didn’t, and he was shrieking and I was shrieking and one of us swore at the other one and finally I just angrily unloaded the dishwasher while he wailed in the next room. And when I finally went in to make sure he was still as mad at me as I was at him, he was standing sadly in the dark dining room next to the wall, trying to wipe his nose with the Kleenex I’d stuffed in his jeans pocket earlier in the day. So of course that made me feel like someone should probably just take him away from me because who does that? Yells back at their toddler, and even swears in his general direction? But before I was declared an unfit mother I snuggled him in the rocking chair for a while, and whispered apologies into his hair, and then we read some library books.
There’s more to the story than that, of course. There’s me making an entirely-from-scratch chicken pot pie. There’s him spending the whole of his life up to now eating absolutely everything placed in front of him and then asking for more. There’s both of us hungry and just wanting to eat our freaking food. There’s him trying to tell me he wants MORE CHICKEN but then throwing the chicken across the room when I put it on the table. There’s me wondering when Jeff is going to come home, why can’t he come home sooner, the dinner will be burnt or cold and if I hadn’t tried to wait dinner for him then no one would be shrieking. And there’s me, wondering when I became a 1950’s housewife making dinner from scratch and then resenting everyone to whom I’m serving it.
I realize this is just the beginning of the toddler control freak era. I realize that he woke up yesterday morning and thought, whoa, let’s go to Burger King where I can have it MY WAY. I realize that I’m not the first person who ever lost her temper with her two-year-old. But even though it’s normal and I’m not the only one, it was a bad thirty minutes in a not-so-great day. Today was better.
The Oscar pool deadline is fast approaching. Don’t forget to enter.
Also: if you’re Julia who submitted the very first ballot (gold star for promptness – seriously, I love it), please submit another one as there was a glitch with your entry.
I unearthed a batch of mix tapes over the weekend. I hung onto them through the CD years when it was all but impossible to create mixes myself, during a time when I didn’t even own a tape player. Listening to old music is such a time machine experience, and I feel like I spent my Saturday afternoon as an early twentysomething, just graduated from college and flailing blindly through my life. Thank heaven my friends introduced me to some good music. Here are my mixtape favorites, that I downloaded and compiled into a playlist I named the Cassette Mix.
Heal The Pain by George Michael This is so much better than “Faith,” why don’t I ever hear it on the radio? Come Back Down by Toad the Wet Sprocket I still don’t understand this band name. Dela by Johnny Clegg & Savuka I’m a little horrified that this was part of the “George of the Jungle” soundtrack but I swear I was listening to it back in 1992. I’m not sure why that’s better than hearing it for the first time over the credits of a Brendan Fraser movie but somehow it seems like it should be. Occasionally by Melissa Etheridge I almost always prefer the acoustic version of any song. Ergo, I really miss that MTV “Unplugged” series now that MTV only broadcasts Real World spinoffs. Longview by Green Day Theo loves this. I can’t wait until he starts shouting the swear words from his car seat. Let the Day Begin by The Call Apparently this has become a popular choice as a campaign theme song. However I learned about it via my roommate and she first heard it on from the guys down the hall who played it to start their campus radio show that no one ever listened to. Maybe that’s how Al Gore first heard it too? Waiting for Somebody by Paul Westerberg Remember “Singles?” Man, Matt Dillon sure looks a lot better without the hair and the soul patch. Alison by Elvis Costello I only figured out who Elvis Costello was in my twenties, but it feels like I’ve always known about this song, and I never get sick of it. Kayleigh by Marillion This is one of those awesome eighties videos featuring children in military costumes and a mournful yet indecipherable message. Hymn to Her by The Pretenders This is a beautiful song. I can’t believe no one (Jessica Simpson? Mandy Moore?) has released an inferior cover version. All That You Have is Your Soul by Tracy Chapman
Last year I worried that a five-minute video of Theo’s first year was too long. But this year I don’t care, and I made it over eight minutes long. Mostly because I suck at video editing and the software I was using made me want to cry. But also because my child is eight minutes’ worth of fascinating. I thought about ending it with a shot of myself pulling out my hair and hurling my laptop into a ravine in frustration, but then I remembered it’s not ALL about me.
You know those days when it seems like the universe is speaking straight to you? Well, that happened to me recently except it was just my Google Reader, not the whole universe. Which is less intimidating anyway.
Jeff and I watched Iron Man over the weekend, and fifteen minutes in he said, “If I’d known what this movie was actually about, I would have wanted to see it a long time ago. But the previews made it look like it was just a big comic book superhero film.” And then I read this on kottke.org, an excerpt from a depressing article about movie marketing. No wonder previews barely resemble the movies they’re pitching.
And then I was trying to figure out if I should send out some Valentines, but it would be more fun to make them, but I’m kind of lazy. And this list of free downloadable Valentine cards appeared in my life.
I started subscribing to Penelope Trunk’s blog recently and her latest post, Don’t Try to Dodge the Recession with Grad School could have been a missive straight to the me of 1993, except I wasn’t dodging a recession, I was dodging, well, real life. It’s really smart advice.
Don’t even ask me how I found this, but I totally love it, it’s an article by Guy Kawasaki about all the stuff that online companies do to drive away business. It’s like he read my mind and made a laundry list of the stuff I HATE when I’m trying to get stuff done on the web.
And this list of People Who Are On Twitter just made me laugh. Especially since I am also on Twitter and I recently started following Shaquille O’Neal. (By the way, if you haven’t joined Twitter, you totally should. It’s like having a blog without really having a blog.)
