The Academy Awards, 2011

February 28, 2011March 22, 2011 / Jared / 2 Comments

OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG you guys it’s the Oscars! We can finally stop pretending to care about all these other shows, because the Oscars are here!

Seriously though, I’ve made a lot of jokes about award shows, but I clearly enjoy them. Over the past couple of years, however, I’ve realized that this is the only one that takes its job at all seriously. I mean, the only other award show that even seems like it is moderately trying is the Emmys, and even then approximately two nominees in every category are totally ridiculous. But nine out of the ten nominees for Best Picture here are really good movies. And the tenth isn’t really all that bad (Just so you know, the odd man out here is The Kids Are All Right, which was, at best, all right.). This is a show that respects itself! And for that, I respect it.

And yes, you did not misread me; I have opinions on all ten Best Picture nominees. Because I saw ALL TEN OF THEM. I did my homework! This is, I’m pretty sure, the first time I have seen all of the Best Picture nominees before the Oscars. And I am therefore full of opinions on ALL TEN OF THEM. This should be fun.

Detracting from the fun is the fact that a lot of these categories seem preordained. As always, my wife Johanna and I will be competing in a winner-picking competition here, and I’m worried that we’ll end up in a tie like we did with the Golden Globes. One can only hope that the costume/sound/editing categories will allow one of us to differentiate ourselves.

Johanna is, as ever, in charge of drinks. She’s got like a thousand things going on right now, so I’m not going to make her try to come up with something crazy. I think we’re just going to go with gin and tonics, because it’s a classy drink for a classy evening. We’ll be upping the classiness to astronomical levels by referring to them as “The Meryl Streep.” Also, it was 78 degrees outside today! Warm weather drink alert, whattttt!

How are we feeling about Anne Hathaway and James Franco as hosts? I think they could be fun. Or at least not boring. Anne Hathaway is musical and funny and super hot, right? And James Franco is also all of those things, except maybe musical. I’ve never heard him sing, I don’t think.

So are we ready for this? Remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Let’s ease in here, folks. As always, winners and categories and score and such in bold.

8:31 – Johanna is still agonizing over her picks as the obligatory “hosts romp through the movies of the year” montage begins. These are always enjoyable. I am not being sarcastic.

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The Golden Globes, 2011

January 17, 2011January 23, 2011 / Jared / 1 Comment

We warmed up earlier this month with the People’s Choice Awards, but now Awards Season begins in earnest with the Golden Globes. By the way, People’s Choice Awards, you may need to reassess your existence if you’re nothing more than an unnoticed ramp-up to the ridiculous disaster that is the Golden Globes. And I’m sure you noticed that I didn’t even bother with you, Critics’ Choice Awards.

As per the usual, my wife Johanna and I will be competing in a winner-picking competition. We’ve done this for nine award shows and I’ve beaten her eight times. Her one win? Last year’s Golden Globes. That doesn’t bode well for me tonight; I suspect her tendency to make at least one or two crazy choices really helps her because of the general goofiness of the Hollywood Foreign Press.

She wants the win, too. You guys should have seen her agonizing over her ballot! I thought she was going to have a breakdown making her picks. She also had to fulfill her role as award show bartender. In honor of the foreign voters and the drunken, vaguely trashy vibe of the evening, she’s whipped us up a wine spritzer with equal parts Chardonnay, Sprite Zero, and Diet Orange Fanta. As she set it down in front of me she said, “These are relatively disgusting, BTW,” but I’m enjoying mine so far. She’s calling it the “Slutty Exchange Student” and assures me that she’s working on a second concoction for later this evening.

All right, let’s get started. As always, categories and winners in bold. Take it away, Ricky Gervais!

8:01 – Here’s Ricky! As I said last year, I think he’s perfect for this job, mostly because he doesn’t seem to care much about offending people and he doesn’t seem stiff and over-prepared. I’m looking forward to it.

His drinking a beer on stage thing is starting to feel like a gimmick, though.

8:04 – The audience has definitely warmed to him since last year. He’s getting more laughs from the famous people up front. Robert De Niro is certainly enjoying himself.

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Movies, 2010

December 29, 2010February 13, 2011 / Jared / Leave a comment

I had such big plans for my Christmas in Boston. We were going to see so many movies! One every other day, or maybe even more than that! I was going to see True Grit, Black Swan, The Fighter, The King’s Speech, all the movies that aren’t yet playing in Chapel Hill. I was going to really beef up this list and make up for the fact that I didn’t make it to the theater much this year.

Alas, time flew and whatnot, and none of this happened. I did have a chance to watch the movie I have at number five below, so at least I got to round the list off with ten. Because, honestly, I didn’t see anything else that really came close to warranting a spot here. As it is, this is sort of a weak list. MacGruber made my top ten, for Christ’s sake. Anyway, let’s start things off by watching this montage of scenes from the many, many movies I did not see this year.

Now let’s move on to the very few movies that I actually did see. As always, this is not a list of the best movies of the year, since I really don’t see that many movies and don’t feel qualified to write that. This is just a list of my favorites.

10) MacGruber

Like Hot Fuzz, this is a satire of action movies that pretends to be an homage to action movies. I enjoyed Hot Fuzz, but I think this was quite a bit funnier. It’s basically just a long series of gags, so it sort of is just the extended SNL sketch that its critics accuse it of being, but I thought the gags themselves were really pretty hilarious.

This was my dog’s least favorite movie of the year. He normally completely ignores the television, but he lost it during the sex scene in this movie and would not stop barking at Will Forte’s over-the-top grunting.

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Music Video Monday

October 4, 2010October 4, 2010 / Jared / Leave a comment

Note to self: don’t try to do these entries when you’ve just finished sorting through your day’s worth of Google Reader and have like thirty tabs open and tons of stuff running on your computer. It makes YouTube videos take FOR-EV-VER to load.

Janelle Monae – “Cold War”

I mentioned in a different post that I heard a whole lot about Janelle Monae before I actually heard anything by Janelle Monae. Johanna only recently bought this album, and I’m still trying to form my opinions. But I like this song quite a bit, more than I did her previous single, “Tightrope.”

That said, this sounds A LOT like “Going On” by Gnarls Barkley. Like, tons.

And, while obviously very different in tone, the video reminds me quite a bit of the famous D’Angelo video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel)”. I would post that video here, but EMI has disabled embedding. It’s absence has nothing to do with my comfort level with my own sexuality.

Duck Sauce – “Barbra Streisand”

This has been all over the place lately, but it’s a fun watch/listen, so I figured I would pay it forward. It sparks a bit of a philosophical battle in my brain, as I’m always both attracted to and repulsed by masturbatory NYC lovefests like this.

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The MTV VMAs, 2010

September 13, 2010December 18, 2010 / Jared / 3 Comments

The VMAs! I actually didn’t watch them live last year and then regretted it when I ended up spending the next afternoon catching up on the videos of the bonkers performances online and reading all about the Kanye backlash. I was assuming that MTV and I had mostly diverged in our musical tastes and was overlooking the fact that this isn’t really about the awards, it’s about the spectacle.

Now, with the long-running award show winner-picking competition between Johanna and me, there’s absolutely no way I could miss it. Filling out our ballots proved relatively difficult. We both employed a strategy of spreading the awards around to as many artists as possible, because we figure the whole thing is rigged and MTV is going to want to get as many people as possible up on stage. So, I basically just picked randomly.

Let’s roll. Since this is the VMAs, Johanna has tried to mix us a cocktail that a young person might enjoy. She’s combined vanilla vodka with Diet Coke, and we’re drinking it out of glasses we appropriated from our favorite bar in college, Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap. She initially wanted to call it the Sorority Slut, but we workshopped it and came up with the Mean Girl, which is more fittingly high school. As always, categories and winners in bold. Also, I unfortunately don’t have MTV in HD, so these photos look awful. Apologies.

One last thing. I’m going on record early here saying that I guarantee they have Taylor Swift “interrupt” Kanye’s performance. It’s going to be awesome.

8:19 – I have the pre-show white carpet on in the background (yes, white carpet), and all of the sudden Sway starts giving out awards! WTF?!

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