AND THE OSCAR GOES TO...

Well, it's Oscar week and once again I find myself scrambling to see all the films I missed throughout the past year. This Sunday night at 8pm EST the 79th Annual Academy Awards can be seen on ABC. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to one of my favorite weeks of the year!

What do I love about it, you ask? I love the glamour and the stars, I love the good movies that play all week on TV, I absolutely love that it gives me something to think about other than my own life, but most of all I love that it really is a dysfunctional celebration of the art of film. Sometimes it's exactly right and other times it's like a train wreck, and in both cases we all stop to watch in amazement.

Each February I find myself thinking back to years past when I've completely disagreed with the winners (Russell Crowe for best actor, are you kidding?), when the right actors have triumphed (Marcia Gay Harden), when I've been left in a state of total shock (Gladiator over Traffic?!) -- actually the 73rd year was the year that seems to have left me slightly disenchanted about the Academy so perhaps I better stop there for now.

Anyhow, what particularly interests me about this year is that I'm not completely decided about any one person or film quite yet. For example, I love The Departed (and of course I love Leo just as much as Scorsese appears to) but Little Miss Sunshine was a damn fine film. This weekend I'll be seeing The Queen and Babel and I hope then I will see an obvious choice, but the choices are really tough this year because they all deal with such convoluted subject matter. Why haven't I mentioned Letters From Iwo Jima? Because as much as I love Clint Eastwood and what he's attempted to do with this film, I feel like he came up just short. I went home thinking less about the timeliness of the film given our present day situation, and more about certain scenes that I felt could have been left out. And I'm always worried about a movie during which I look at my watch. When I go to see a film I want to lose myself in it, like I did with Sunshine and Departed, not feel like I'm losing time in my life.

[And speaking of Scorsese, I'll be really surprised if he doesn't get anything this year. He's been nominated seven times and each time went home empty handed. Clint's got five, give Marty a chance.]

Well, this is the first in a series of Oscar ramblings that you will see this week out of me. And yes, I might go all Perez Hilton or Fug on y'all the day after and talk about the fashion (or lack thereof) on the red carpet.

In the mean time, if you haven't seen Half Nelson yet, check it out for both Ryan Gosling (nominated for Best Actor in the role of Dan Dunne) and Shareeka Epps (Drey). Despite the painfully sad storyline, those two make the film and really give two of the most solid performances I've seen in a while.