Oscars Post-Mortems

We didn't have a red carpet in this house last night but we did have fun, celebrating three family birthdays. My son, who I wrote about yesterday was here too, and this morning in the archives I found this picture of him, taken just six months after March of 1998 when we took that three-movies-in-24-hours Pre-Oscars-Night road trip.The fact that he's sleeping in the picture shows what time of life he was in. Adolescents need sleep, all right. They say school shouldn't even start until 9am for kids older than 12; they're just not awake until then. In fact come to think of it, one of the three people celebrating a birthday here last night just turned 9 and he showed up in his pjs. ("Pick your battles," his parents probably decided.)The fun went on well past when the Oscars actually began, but about 45 minutes in I got a Facebook message from Old Dave's dashing-looking older brother Toby. "Compared to Tommy Lee Jones, David looks like a viable Oscar Host," he wrote. Typical big brother remark huh? Even David, you might think he was implying. Even my dismissible kid brother, though David was never dismissible and of course Toby knows that.Tommy Lee's face is collapsing into some amazing swags and wrinkles now but what a face it is! It's a beautiful ruin and God bless him for never getting 'work' done on it. Look how cute he was when he was a high school senior in Texas. This is the picture that appears in the Freshman 'Face Book' the year he entered Harvard.I know because he and David were classmates there at Harvard and played freshman football together. I'm looking at that old book as I write this.'Course my man was pretty cute too, as you can see in this photo I took when he was an usher in a wedding but maybe it's the tuxedo that carries the day in these cases.....Hmmmm, food for thought. Anyway, ya gotta love Oscar Night, eh? The morning after and I can hardly wait for NEXT year.:-)

Oscars Tonight!

A freelance columnist like me is also a salesman, and one year, when my boy was in 8th grade, he came with me on a sales trip to Pennsylvania that was to be half business half pleasure. I was visiting newspapers, yes, but we would also stop at Hershey Park and check out the fun there. We took the train from Boston to Philly, rented a car and began making our way west across the state, the visit to the Patriot News in Harrisburg being sweetened by the Hershey stop.There were disappointments of course, there always are: The Patriot News people told me they had to discontinue the use of my column, Hershey Park was not yet open for the season, and my boy wouldn't eat any of those nice tuna sandwiches I made for the train. (There's one truth I learned on that trip: a middle schooler won't EVER be seen eating food prepared at home; in fact It's hard to get a middle schooler to eat anything at all in public.)There were nice parts too though, the best being the fact that I decided after Harrisburg to scrap all the remaining newspaper visits. Instead, as we drove back across the state staying a night or two in a motel, we saw three awesome movies, all up for Academy Awards that year. They were Good Will Hunting, Titanic, and As Good As it Gets.In the car at one point, tearing across the Pennsylvania Turnpike to get from one movie theatre to the next in time for each show, he said, very much under his breath, "You're really fun.""What's that?" I asked, because I wasn't sure I heard right.But he was reluctant to repeat it.Still, I'm pretty sure he said it - and I'm very sure that watching those three great movies, all within a 36-hour period with that lively child, all before we had to board the train for home was, in my mind, just about as good as it gets for this three-time mom.And now a scene from Matt Damon's and Ben Affleck's first film, still a winner in my book. Enjoy it. Believe its message. And HAVE FUN tonight![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gfipuaIA68]

And the Nominees Are...

I guess won’t go see Django Unchained. That people are tomatoes I already know; I don’t need to see them split and splattered again and again, even in those revenge scenes that Tarantino says are meant to leave audiences cheering. I haven’t seen some of the other movies either, Argo and Beasts of the Southern Wild and The Master. I have a lot of work to do before Oscars night.I did see Lincoln and need to see it again for what feels like the total accuracy of the portrayal. Daniel Day Lewis and the cinematic magic tricks folks got that extra set of knees into him that you always sensed he had. That tall crooked shamble, ah! I watched all 234 minutes of Lincoln and was sure the man himself had been conjured up before me. And Mary Todd Lincoln as portrayed by Sally Field! For the first time you sense the pathos of her position, her beloved Will lost to the typhoid likely carried down the Potomac from the camps where the runoff from the dead and dismembered fouled the waters. More than once her grieving husband ordered the small coffin of his child exhumed and opened, so that he might gaze again upon his face. (That was a privilege few families had once the slaughter began and there was a government with no Board of Registration for the dead, not even the 19^th century equivalent of dog tags, much less an organized method of burial.)Finally, I did see Les Miserables and saw it with such high hopes for hadn’t I loved the play so much? Hadn’t I taken seven ABC students in November of ’87, the minute it opened, before the press night even? Hadn’t I gone back with my own three children young as they were and seen it twice more?I loved Ann Hathaway as Fantine. I loved Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean. I loved the way the downtrodden looked so ill and blistered as I’m sure they must have looked. It’s just that it's TOO MUCH like the play. I say if you're going to make a movie, make a movie. Let that hulking Russell Crowe just act; don’t put him up on all those rooftops and make him moo like a wounded steer.And as for Amanda Seyfried as Cosette, with her cinched waist, all I could think of was one of those rubber dolls you squeeze and its eyes pop out.Only it also sings.And sings.And sings.