Why 10 is a good number

My first reaction to 10 Best Picture nominees was to my default assumption of greed. If five movies get more money from an Oscar bounce, now there's twice the fun. However, the article about the change in The Wall Street Journal pointed out that last year, with the exception of Slumdog Millionaire, most of the Best Picture nominees didn't make a significant percentage of their domestic gross after they were announced as nominees. The Journal did point out that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences hoped that the change might draw a bigger audience to the awards broadcast. So greed is involved. What a relief.

I didn't think any more about this until we went to see Up. Now I know why 10 Best Picture nominations is not only good from a greed perspective but from an artistic perspective as well. Any plan that might get Pixar a Best Picture nomination--or better yet, a win--is good, right, decent and true.

In 2004, Peter Jackson won an aggregate Oscar ostensibly for The Return of the King that was really for his work on the entire LOTR series. He deserved it. Unfortunately, he won for the weakest of the three films. Of the other four nominated films, Lost In Translation, Master and Commander, Mystic River and Seabiscuit, NONE is a better movie than Finding Nemo. Honestly, if you didn't have The Return of the King in there, a Best Picture win by any of the other four nominees is embarrassing. (Sorry. I'm just not into to Sofia Coppola or Sean Penn. And yes, I have seen all of these movies.)

Since the Academy ghettoized feature-length animation to its own Oscar, they can avoid the hard choice of nominating an animated movie for Best Picture by pointing to an apples-to-apples comparison in its own category. This is bullshit. (They did the same thing with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, though it did garner a nomination for Best Picture. I would argue that Gladiator beat it out because people felt okay about not voting for CTHD as Best Picture because they could vote for it as Best Foreign Language Film. I mean, I like Gladiator and all, but please.)

Wall-E would have been up against considerably more formidable competition in 2009, and not having seen most of the nominees I'm not going to dismiss them out of hand. But the Journal points to a legitimate concern: most of the nominees last year were not particularly popular. I think that's why they didn't get much of an Oscar bounce in their receipts. Let's face it: a movie about Harvey Milk has a limited audience in the U.S. Which is not say that the movie shouldn't have been nominated. So too for Frost/Nixon.

My point is that expanding the nomination pool will not help those movies that moviegoers aren't interested in anyway. It can, however, open the field to deserving, popular movies that might not otherwise get recognition. (Because we all want our favorites to win, yes?)

In a year that will probably not generate a strong crop of Best Picture nominees for 2010 (have you seen anything you think qualifies?), Up will have a hard time cracking a pool of five nominees, simply because it is going to win Best Animated Feature. That's a shame, because Wall-E and Up both demonstrate that Pixar is marrying the very best expressions of the visual with some of the most subtle writing and storytelling you can see in a theater. And the best thing is that they are getting better and better at it. (With the exception of Cars, and I think that's on John Lasseter for making first and foremost a movie that he wanted to make for himself. It's good, but it is obviously a different experience from the work that Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird and now Peter Docter are doing.)

So if having 10 nominees dilutes the pool, so be it. And if it dilutes the pool so much as to open the door to a win for Up or its ilk, so much the better.

Insult + injury

As if relegation weren't enough.

Traitors get what's coming

How do you like us now, Giuseppe Rossi?

Group Stage 2009 - Group B
CLUB	GP	W	L	D	Pts	GD
Brazil	3	3	0	0	9	7
United States	3	1	2	0	3	-2
Italy	3	1	2	0	3	-2
Egypt	3	1	2	0	3	-3

Really, the only thing you can honestly take from this table is that Brazil is that much better than everyone else.

Accept no substitutes

Dear Ovation TV,

Your bait-and-switch routine nearly worked. You said you'd be showing The Music Man and Victor/Victoria back to back, and so we had The Music Man on while we cleaned because the kids would like it. Alas, you foisted the Matthew Broderick version on us, which we watched and were moderately interested in because it's more like the stage version than the movie. Of course, Broderick is also a flat and generally unfunny Harold Hill.

But then you gave us the film of the stage version of Victor/Victoria from the mid '90s. Are you on crack? Or do you just hate Robert Preston? What's next? A remake of The Last Starfighter with Victor Garber as Centauri? Please understand: direct remakes are a bad idea. Their history is fraught with ugliness. These are certainly not the most egregious offenders (I think that goes to 12 Angry Men, which was remade with Tony Danza as Juror #7, originally Jack Warden), but still.

Best regards,
John League

Sharing as storage

I've had these videos bookmarked for months now, and I'm going to post them here so I can find them. The first commemorates Phil Neville's tackle on Cristiano Ronaldo, the diving diver who dives. Widely hailed as the catalyst in Everton's drive for fifth place and the FA Cup final, it's just a good hard tackle that would have received absolutely no attention had it been made by Rio Ferdinand or John Terry on any other scoring threat in the Premier League. (Come to think of it, though, I don't think John Terry could make a tackle like that if his life depended on it.) It's only when you watch these things in slow motion that you see how absolutely ridiculous Ronaldo's histrionics are.



This one is the strangest hole of golf I've ever seen.



Playing: Bach, Fugue in G minor BWV 542, "The Great," E. Power Biggs

Respite

Welcome relief:

1. Having completed this test, I feel like someone has lifted a great rock off my chest. I haven't blogged hardly at all this past week because I've been so busy doing stuff that I simply couldn't do when I was studying 24-7. And of course I'm overdoing it. I am reading three books at the same time. I've got a big project for work that doesn't have anything to with the test. And I have ancient sendings from Netflix that I need to get through. But it is quite the relief to be able to do them.

2. Part of that comes from getting back to Getting Things Done principles. Seriously, I have to write in more detail about this, and you have to get this book. The best part for me this week: knowing when it's okay not to do something on my list. Yesterday Reed and I played air hockey, even though I have this big project and a mountain of laundry and a bunch of yard work. But I knew all of those things were there and what needed to be done on each, so when Reed asked if we could play I knew I could agree and not feel like I was neglecting something else in order to be with him.

3. Newcastle are relegated, so (thankfully?) they can't overpay for more Real Madrid castoffs. Huntelaar and Van Nistelrooy could help someone, and I would love for someone to pick up Arjen Robben so I can vent my spleen on him again (don't know why he sets me off--because he looks like John McEnroe whinging?). Because if this had happened two years ago, Newcastle would have broken the bank to sign these guys as mercenaries to the noble cause of finishing between 7th and 11th.

4. I've been looking to add some novel-length spec fic to my reading list after basically avoiding the lot for about the past year. I kind of overdid it in the previous five years. But the library did not have what I was looking for, and I am not interested in books I feel like I "should" read. (Maybe someday I'll get to Asimov's Foundation or Cecilia Dart-Thornton's The Ill-Made Mute, but not soon.) However, I saw yesterday that Robert Charles Wilson has a new book coming out next week. I never read Axis, but Spin is one of my all-time favorites and so I'll give this a go (and maybe go back in for Axis, because I "should" give it a whirl if I like Spin that much).

Playing: Bach, Chaconne BWV 1004; Helene Grimaud. This is Busoni's pianized arrangement of the D minor partita for violin. It's not the same piece of music, but it is.
Reading: The Ball Is Round; Ready for Anything; Starting Strength

Historical parallels

In 1934 and 1938, the state apparatus of sport in Italy went all out to demonstrate the vitality and superiority of Italian fascism by doing whatever was necessary to win the World Cup. Those teams even proudly displayed the emblematic color of fascisti in their brown uniforms. They also featured players of Italian descent who had been born, raised and first emerged as professional footballers in South America, notably Argentina.

Sixty years later, fascism is dead, but the Italians are world champions again. And they wear brown uniforms. And they rely on players of Italian descent born in the Americas.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming

I'm back in circulation now. You're relieved, I'm sure.

My studies have had me thinking a lot about money lately, and the drama of the end of Newcastle's season have me thinking about football. If you put those two together, you wonder about the money end of football and what it means that the new president of Real Madrid was elected on a platform of I-will-spend-whatever-is-necessary-to-attract-top-players. There is a lot to be learned here from Michael Porter and John Nash, and I'll probably write more and more about this as the close season in Europe progresses--and we see if Liverpool's American owners default on their loan and who fancies a turn at running Newcastle United.

(And then there's this: one of the world's best athletes is virtually unknown, even in the country for which he won a gold medal in Beijing.)

By coincidence, I am reading David Goldblatt's doorstop volume The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer. He wrote in the preface to the U.S. edition that he spent the year after he finished this book watching American football, baseball and basketball, and it is easy to see how one might have had one's fill of the beautiful game after assembling this thoroughly exhaustive look at the historical, social and sporting development of soccer in, well, every nation in the world. I'm thinking I may have to buy this because I am not certain that I can digest all 900 pages before the library will want it returned.

I have a pile of my own books to read, first among them David Allen's Ready for Anything, a sort of devotional guide to GTD, if you will, and the slender A Short History of Ireland that I bought off a remaindered table in Barnes & Noble 10 years ago and have never once opened. I'd also like to get to library copies of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Game-Changer, which I'm looking at again now that P&G is downshifting from its emphasis on premium brands (which I think is a mistake).

Since February, I have been doing CrossFit and am completely persuaded by the foundations, dynamism and techniques. I'm stronger, I look better, I feel great, and I don't spend a ton of time in the gym. I have had no actual CrossFit specific training. (I should, but I can't spend the money right now.) However, I have acquired a copy of Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength that I will devour over the next few weeks.

So, that's football, reading and exercise... oh, yes. My own writing. Until I started studying full time in March, I was moving apace through a novel-length piece I have tentatively titled The Prodigal Brother. I reread the nine chapters of the manuscript this morning, not really knowing what to expect after such a lengthy remove. I was pleasantly surprised. I like what I have written, and I notice some things that work well that I did not consciously build. So good for me. Chapter 10 starts tomorrow.

Playing: Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 5, Andras Schiff. NPR has given significant attention to Schiff and his study of Beethoven.

When it counts

"David Ortiz is a great clutch hitter."

You hear that a lot (or you did before this year). The idea being that when the game is on the line--or even the season, or the pennant--that David Ortiz is better than other hitters in that situation. I think that's crap. David Ortiz has been a great hitter in those situations because he's a great hitter. You can find guys who are great hitters who choke in season-on-the-line situations, just as you can find weak hitters who significantly outperform in such circumstances (David Eckstein and Shane Spencer come to mind).

Most of the time a great hitter is a great hitter whenever he hits. All of his at bats reflect his skill--and they all count. So it is with Newcastle United: all of their games, not just the one that sent them down mathematically, reflect their skill--or rather, their inexplicably putrid lack thereof.

Yes, today they needed someone to step up and invent a way to break through Villa's not all that rigid defense. But they needed the same against Fulham's not all that rigid defense, and Hull's, and Sunderland's, Portsmouth's... You get the idea. The notion that they would conjure some sort of creative spark on this last day was naught but fantasy from the off.

If you want to blame Damien Duff for relegation, don't blame him for his statistically freakish wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time own goal. Blame him for always being slow and not finding the net since last October. Blame the powers that be for selling James Milner instead of Duff. Or for refusing to invest in a real winger instead of Milner or Duff to add some width to a persistently feeble attack.

There's plenty of blame to go around, for nearly every decision in every game this year--and likely every board meeting over the past six years. At each point along this road from the Champions League to the Championship, Newcastle have failed when it counts. And they all count.

On June 7 I start looking for a new Premier League side to follow. Neutrality is so boring. Newcastle, alas, were only boring on the pitch. Everything else was a melodrama to shame the sappiest soap opera.

A fitting end?

There are about 25 more minutes left for Newcastle United's season, and I could not have made up a more fitting end to this miserable effort than an own goal.