jai ho

I have been horribly remiss in not seeing "Slumdog Millionaire," although I was pleased to see the song-n-dance numbers for it on the Academy Awards. I watched the entire ceremony; while I had intended to keep up my television boycott in an effort to get shit done, I ended up watching the Oscars instead. Since reading my favorite celebrity gossip blog (dlisted) is one of the few remaining pleasures I have allowed myself in my quest for ultimate productivity, it's little surprise that I have a secret addiction to ridiculous celebrities, and the Oscars are must-watch in that case.

Overall, I thought that this year's production was pretty good. I liked Hugh Jackman's opening number, particularly his little song and dance for "The Reader" (in which he admitted to not having seen "The Reader", and danced to some weird techno-y stuff with robot-like backup dancers, which is clearly unrelated to the subject of the movie). I also liked some of the montages of films that were not recognized but were actually popular and commercially viable -- clearly the Academy is recognizing that they're not making any friends by denying the top-grossing films. I liked how ridiculous Robert Pattinson (the dude from "Twilight") was, and how he couldn't seem to look at the camera to save his life. I liked the song-n-dance numbers. I loved Ben Stiller's riff on Joaquin Phoenix's disastrous David Letterman interview a couple of weeks ago. I loved how annoyed Jennifer Aniston looked, and how much it must have sucked for her to have to present two or three different awards while only fifteen feet away from Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who were seated in the front row while she was relegated to the side of the second row. And I really really loved the acceptance speech by Heath Ledger's family, and how teary-eyed the crowd was.

The only thing I didn't like was the camera angles during the tribute to the academy members who died in 2008. The camera kept moving around and was often too far away from the main screen showing the dead individuals; if I had trouble reading names on my reasonably large tv, it must have been really hard on a smaller tv. It seems that tributes to the dead are not the time for trickery, so they should reconsider next year!

Anyway, I didn't do much else today; I ran a couple of errands, spent an hour and a half on the phone with my parents, and spent a couple of hours with Tom at a cafe, trying to work on zee romance novel. I only wrote 600 words -- less than three pages for the whole weekend is a steep decline from the 70 or so pages I produced last weekend. Boooo. Hopefully I'll get a chance to write tomorrow, since this book isn't going to write itself! But now I'm going to go to bed; work doesn't look too awful this week, although my boss is in town from Ann Arbor and so I have some events thrown into the week that I normally don't have to plan around. And of course, at some point I have to read the assigned reading for this week's class and write a short story; but Saturday will be the last class, and after that I can focus on the book in earnest. Goodnight!