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Ah, my secret shame: awards-gazing. I follow the Oscar blogs fanatically, and I look forward to the announcement of the nominees and the awards themselves perhaps a bit too much. Inevitably, I am disappointed. This year is a bit less disappointing than usual - those 10 Best Picture nominees yielded an interesting group, and I’m solidly behind two of the locks for acting awards (Mo’Nique and Christoph Waltz). There were a few duds in the nominees, and there could be in the awards themselves - but I’ll talk about that only if it happens.

Best Picture: Avatar; The Blind Side; District 9; An Education; The Hurt Locker; Inglourious Basterds; Precious; A Serious Man; Up; Up in the Air

I have seen all 10, and I like 8 or 9, love 3 to 6 of them (the three I definitely love are A Serious Man, Inglourious Basterds, and The Hurt Locker. I might love Up, Precious, and District 9, but would probably have to see them again to be sure).

The upside to this batch is that we got an interesting mix, and that these are all movies that at least some people genuinely loved - there’s no coasters, although the quality of some nominees is debatable.

Prediction: The Hurt Locker

Spoiler: Avatar

My favorite: Don’t make me choose between Basterds and A Serious Man. OK, it’s Basterds for now.

More after the jump.

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Here’s the conversation Ben and I had about the Live Action shorts nominated for Oscars, including our predictions for which one will be taking home the prize on Sunday night. Check out Ben’s place for some video clips of the animated nominees, too.

Ben: OK, so I finally made it to the live action shorts as well.  On the whole, I was fairly disappointed.  I saw them last year and, as a group, they were much stronger.  That said, I did enjoy seeing some different interpretations with what can be done with 20 minutes of screen time.

So, they were pretty dark and bleak.  Every single one has some sort of violence or death (at least imagined death, in the case of the true comedy of the bunch.  My favorite was definitely Miracle Fish, about an 8-year-old schoolboy is a bit of an outcast at school. He gets upset, sneaks into the nurse’s office to take a nap, and wakes up to find an empty building.  This was definitely the only one of the films where I couldn’t predict where it was going.  While it probably had the lowest production values of any of the films (it seemed a bit blurry to me), it had the most compelling story.

After that, my favorite was “Instead of Abracadabra,” a sort of Swedish Napoleon Dynamite about a 25-year-old amateur magician who still lives with his parents.  This was shown last, and you could tell the audience ate up the chance for some laughter.

“Kavi” and “The Door” were well-made, but not surprising or all that interesting.  Kavi actually seemed a touch too reminiscient of Slumdog Millionaire.  I think it even had a song by the composer from Slumdog.  The Door, about the Chernobyl disaster and its affect on one family, was beautifully made but, again, a little familiar.

“The New Tenants” started out strong, with some funny repartee between the gay couple who just moved into an apartment.  It gets a little too “wacky” for me, though, and I hated the ending.

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Today, I’m here to help you win that office Oscar pool.  My old friend Ben and I sat down (metaphorically) and had a conversation about this years nominees for the Oscar for best animated short film. We both agree that the new Wallace and Grommit adventure is poised to win, but disagree on the most likely spoiler. Read the transcript below, and check out Ben’s blog, too!

Rebecca: I didn’t notice right away how much this year’s nominees are about death and violence, probably because the tone tended more towards dark humor and. ‘The Lady and the Reaper’ is about an old woman who wants to die, but is filmed as a slapstick battle for her soul between the grim reaper and a heroic doctor. ‘Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty’ is a fairytale turned into a rant about old age. ‘Logorama’ features a murderous Ronald McDonald taking Big Boy as a hostage, as well as an earthquake ripping part of California off of the coast. ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death’ is about a serial killer who murders bakers, and Wallace might be the next target. ‘French Roast’ is the only short that doesn’t deal directly with death - it’s about a guy who forgot his wallet sitting in a cafe.

First things first: I love the look of stop-motion so much more than computer animation, it’s hard for me to be unbiased about ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death.’ There’s so much character and nuance that comes out of stop-motion, whereas the computer animation in ‘French Roast’, ‘The Lady and the Reaper’, and ‘Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty’ starts to all look the same. ‘Logorama’ was an eyesore, but that’s part of the point, as everything is constructed out of corporate logos.

I enjoyed ‘Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty’, ‘French Roast’, and ‘The Lady and the Reaper’ (in descending order). In addition to the similar CG visual styles, they all consist of a simple concept made into a humorous short film of 6-8 minutes. The reason ‘Granny O’Grimm’ was my favorite of those three was the great vocal performance at the center of it, and the visual contrast in styles between the grandmother/child framework and the Sleeping Beauty story itself. ‘French Roast’ and ‘The Lady and the Reaper’ were enjoyable enough, but didn’t really stick with me.

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Book 9 in Cannonball Read 2

John Hodgman, contributor to NPR, The Daily Show, the PC in those Mac commercials, and generally adorable person, has written two books of random, often fictional, trivia. The Areas of My Expertise : an Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order was the first to appear, and it covers such subject matters as hoboes, the 51 states in America (yes, there’s a 51st state), and “movies in which I, John Hodgman, have appeared”.

The Areas of My Expertise is a good bus book; you can pick it up when you have a few minutes to spare, and not worry that you will lose the plot. There is no plot, it’s just random stuff Hodgman makes up and talks about in a funny, ironic, adorable way.

I enjoyed reading it, although it would be a better book to skip around and read what interests you (i.e. Hodgman’s essay on the mythical lost city of Chicago) rather than read it straight through, including reading every name on Hodgman’s list of 500 hobo names. It is enjoyable light reading.

Book 8 in Cannonball Read 2

Grave Secret is the fourth book in the Harper Connelly series, written by Charlaine Harris (most famous as the author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels that have been turned into the tv show ‘True Blood’). The Harper Connelly mysteries have quite a few things in common with the Sookie Stackhouse series, not the least of which is diminishing returns for the reader as the series goes on.

Harper Connelly has a supernatural gift (just like Sookie Stackhouse!). She can communicate with dead bodies, receiving information on their last few moments of life and their cause of death by being nearby. Her gift is in some ways a curse (just like Sookie Stackhouse). She has suffered childhood trauma and grew up parentless for part of her life (just like Sookie Stackhouse!) due to her neglectful, drug-addicted parents. Some people despise her gift, and others don’t believe in it despite pretty strong evidence (just like Sookie).  (I think you get the point. Harper’s a lot like Sookie).

However, instead of having a hot, slutty brother who she can’t really depend on, Harper has a step-brother who is her only real friend, and they have the hots for each other. By the time Grave Secret rolls around, they’ve been together for awhile and are planning on getting married. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found the ‘but they’re not really related’ thing pretty creepy, even in The Royal Tenanbaums, so having a book and a half about Harper and her step-brother - who may not be related by blood, but grew up together as brother and sister - having sex and talking about marriage is just weird.

Harris subscribes to the Harry Potter school of ‘mysteries’, where the mystery happens to the main character.  A series of weird things happens to Harper, she can’t figure out what’s going on, and then she figures it out in the last 50 pages - usually when someone does some sort of violence to her, and then explains what has been going on. It can be somewhat suspenseful, but by the fourth book just seems silly, and embarassing to read in public.

I recommend The Hunger Games, John Le Carre, or The Turnaround if you’re looking for a page-turner. If you’ve already started the Harper Connelly series, you’ll probably continue, just like me; if you haven’t started yet, the choices above are far more worthwhile, and more entertaining.

Book 7 in Cannonball Read 2

Bright-sided: How the Relentless Pursuit of Optimism is Undermining America is a Barbara Ehrenreich’s takedown of positive thinking. To some, this may seem needlessly negative, a knee-jerk cynical response to other folks optimism. However, Ehrenreich’s writing makes a great deal of sense, especially to me - it fits well with my worldview.

Ehrenreich is not railing against hope or optimism, but rather the head-in-the-sand approach of positive thinking that has become increasingly ubiquitous due to books such as The Secret.  The Secret is based on the premise that if you wish for something really hard, and send positive thoughts about it out into the universe, it will happen. I’ve never read the book, because holy jeezy creezy, I do not want to sit through hundreds of pages of that crap. You see, the problem with this ‘positive thinking’ is not so much that it encourages people to think positively, as that it correlates positive thoughts with positive outcomes in such a way that not only are we being told that positive thoughts, not hard work and sometimes luck will result in positive results, but it results in a dangerous, victim-blaming corollary: if you don’t have positive outcomes, you must have not put out enough positive thoughts.  After all, if really wanting to have your dream job and visualizing it can make it come true, then isn’t that unemployed guy down the street probably just not visualizing hard enough?

Ehrenreich opens the book with her experience after being diagnosed with breast cancer. She was repeatedly told to ‘be positive’ and even told by other cancer patients that having a negative attitude (in this case a ‘negative attitude’ was being angry that her insurance company was dicking her around and that her treatment options didn’t seem too great) would harm her chances of survival and recovery. Ehrenreich digs into the reality, which is that positive attitudes have been shown to have no effect on outcomes. Not only that, the ‘positive attitude’ meme has been debunked as a way to make caregivers feel more comfortable with cancer patients, while making those patients suppress negative emotions such as doubt and fear.

Ehrenreich talks to various corporate leaders and speakers, and details the ways in which criticism and bad news was suppressed before the economic downturn. Some corporate leaders were acolytes of positive thinking, ignoring bad news and signs of bad things to come in favor of hiding their heads in the sand and hoping for the best. Condoleezza Rice is quoted concerning the taboo on negativity and criticism in the Bush administration, which arguably contributed to 9/11.  Ehrenreich piles on example after example of ways in which positive thinking and false optimism has taken the place of real planning or risk assessment.

These examples, and the themes that Ehrenreich highlights, add up to a tiny powerhouse of a book. I was pretty hard on Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed, but this book is totally different, calling out trends in our culture that are invisble but everywhere.

Beyond the political and economic implications of positive thinking, I find this trend alarming because it attempts to blot out a huge part of the human experience and suppress naturally occurring - and sometimes necessary - negative reactions and emotions. It’s pretty deplorable to tell a cancer patient to stop being so negative, or their continued cancer is their own fault for thinking bad things. I mean, they have fucking cancer, let them think through those negative thoughts - like ‘I might die’ and ‘chemo is crap and makes me feel like death’ - without forcing them to put on a smile and a pink ribbon for your benefit. Not only is negative thought allowed when you have fucking cancer, it’s allowed all the time. I know folks these days can be a bit too self-obsessed, and the tiniest thing can lead to wallowing in self-pity and exclaiming ‘poor me’, but the answer is not to ban all negative thoughts. Without allowing people to express doubts, hopelessness, despair, worry, and anger with one another, those happy smiles and mindless optimism don’t have much meaning - they’re just a happy mask put over empty, shallow lives.

Christopher Plummer, nominated for Best Supporting Actor in The Last Station:

I’m absolutely delighted that Helen Mirren and I have both been nominated by the Academy for portraying that stormy couple, The Tolstoy’s.  As I’ve just turned 80, there’s no way it will go to my head.

Book 6 in Cannonball Read 2

The Hunger Games has everything I want in a book: it’s entertaining; it has a complex, not always likeable but always interesting main character; and it raises some Serious Issues without being overly portentous or heavy-handed. It’s also a page-turner and a quick read, and while it manages to hit all the plot points you might have predicted, it gets there in unexpected ways.

The Hunger Games takes place in a country with a rich, opulent capital, surrounded by 13 districts. Every year, one girl and one boy from each district are selected as tributes to the capital. All the tributes compete in the Hunger Games, which take place in a giant arena. For days, sometimes weeks, they fight each other until only one remains alive. Back in the districts, people are required to watch the games and cheer on their district’s tributes.

Collins’ narrative focuses on Katniss Everdeen, a young girl from one of the poorer districts who ends up in the games. About half of the book covers the time leading up to the games - Katniss hunting and gathering for her mother and sister on the day of selection; the selection itself; the glamourous processionals and interviews that she must participate in before the games begin; and the training she undergoes. Even though Collins takes time getting to the games themselves, the story never lags in this early part of the book; in fact, it is just as riveting as the action described later on.

Collins brings in many issues - the disparity between the wealth in the capital and the poverty in some of the districts; the way that many poorer children are almost forced to put themselves at higher risk of being selected in order to provide food for their families; and the way the games are a constant reminder of the overwhelming power that the capital wields in the lives of the citizens.

Perhaps most interesting is the way Collins portrays the various people who help to plan and implement the games each year. As mentioned above, the capital wields great power, power that is difficult to resist in any meaningful way. Some of the people who work for the games buy into the system wholeheartedly - the idea that the games are an exciting event to be celebrated, and that the districts should be proud of ‘their’ competitors. Others, such as Katniss’ stylist, seem to be just finding a way to do something that they enjoy within the context of the games. There’s also Haymitch, a previous winner of the games who is supposed to be training Katniss, but is mostly just drunk a lot of the time, probably due to the emotional weight of preparing two people each year to go into the arena and die. Collins complicates the picture beyond simply those who resist the capital and those who support the system blindly; in this world, as in our own, there are varying levels of resistance and collaboration, and varying levels of rationalization.

The Hunger Games would be a great read even without the layers of characterization Collins adds; the story is simply engrossing. That, for me, is the true test of a book that includes some kind of commentary or connection to bigger issues: does the story stand on it’s own? If the characters are memorable, and the story is good, then I’ll read it, but I won’t read a book that allegedly has some grand social commentary but fails to tell a story I want to hear. That’s what non-fiction is for.

Book 5 in Cannonball Read 2

I picked up Julie and Julia, Julie Powell’s book about the year she cooked every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and blogged about it, after watching the movie. I did not find the Julie storyline very interesting, but I was intrigued by the actual food she was making and thought I could hear a bit more detail about the cooking, instead of it being the backdrop for a not that interesting story.

Sadly, the book, just like the movie, contains a lot more about Julie’s personal life than it does about the project she has undertaken. That personal life is not so interesting. Basically, she does all of the following things a lot: 1. drinks, 2. orders bacon pizza, and 3. struggles with her project. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with those things, but it does not make for fascinating reading unless the writer is truly great.  Julie Powell is not a great writer; she’s not bad, but if she had not undertaken a fairly complex and interesting project, no one would take much interest in her writing.

It also suffers from Powell’s own self-image. Did anyone else, when they were watching Adaptation, think there was no way Charlie Kaufman could be so unlikeable as he made himself in that screenplay? There’s a little of that going on here. The Julie Powell in her autobiographical work is fairly insufferable, becoming self-centered and acting as if the whole world revolves around her project. She is repeatedly rude and dismissive towards her husband - and this is only made worse by the fact that she recognizes she is being pretty awful to him but then continues to do it anyway. I have a feeling that this is Powell’s attempt to put on a certain personality, a flawed but lovable and self-deprecating cutie-pie - ‘oh look at me, I got carried away but I’m mocking myself for it later’ - but it just doesn’t work. She comes off as grating, cold, and self-absorbed.

My next move is to go straight to the source and read Julia Child’s cookbook. That’s all I wanted - writing about food, detailed writing about the process of cooking and the way different methods impact the result. Sorry Julie Powell, and Amy Adams, you’re not really worth my time.

Book 4 in Cannonball Read 2

I will just get one thing out of the way before I start: short stories are not my thing. I mean that a. they are not a favorite genre, so even the most well-crafted collection does not inspire the same personal reaction as a novel that has the same level of craft (though I can and do appreciate individual stories at a higher level), and b. I am not good at talking about/writing about short story collections. In fact, I have a suspicion that I am complete shit at it. So, here goes my very uninformed attempt at conveying my thoughts on Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies.

Interpreter of Maladies  is pretty amazing.  Each story creates its own world, and lets you know a great amount about the characters in a small amount of time. You can picture the characters, the settings, and the actions perfectly.  You understand the actions and feelings of the characters.

Lahiri’s stories are mostly about Indian immigrants in the U.S.  Some of the characters moved to the U.S. in their lifetime, some of them are the children of immigrants. Like Lahiri’s novel The Namesake, Interpreter of Maladies explores the meaning of identity, ethnicity and culture in the U.S.  Sometimes these issues are in the foreground, sometimes they are only background; in all of the stories, the subject is difficulty in relationship and communication.

The first and last stories - ‘A Temporary Matter’ and ‘The Third and Final Continent’ - were probably my favorites. ‘A Temporary Matter’ is about a young married couple who have grown apart since the wife miscarried. The bulk of the story takes place during a series of power outages, as each night they confide secrets to each other. The sadness and longing in the story is palpable, and Lahiri uses the concrete details of meals - both the food prepared and the physical setting - to give the story a sense of place, something that happens frequently in the stories that make up Interpreter of Maladies (and in The Namesake as well).  The story is told from the husband’s perspective, and he - at first -  interprets this confessions by candlelight as a sign that their relationship is on the mend; however, after the power outages are over, his wife tells him she is filing for a divorce. Lahiri gracefully shows how the secrets are not the kind that bonds them together, but the kind that reveal how far apart they now stand.

In ‘The Third and Final Continent’, a young Indian man moves into a boarding house in Boston to prepare for his wife’s arrival. The story details the strange house he lives in, with a well-meaning but elderly and increasingly infirm landlord, Ms. Croft. He develops a friendship with her, but moves out when his wife arrives after six weeks. At first, he does not like her very much (they only know each other from the wedding in India). When he takes her to meet Ms. Croft, the events that transpire are the beginning of the two warming to each other and falling in love.

The stories in Interpreter of Maladies are graceful and often melancholy. Lahiri gives a full picture, such that I can look back on each title and remember the main characters, and even specific images or interactions from the story. Maybe good short stories for me are like obscenity for Potter Stewart: I can’t define them, but I know them when I see them.