And the Oscar goes to...

Every year when the Oscar nominations are announced, I tell myself that I'm going to go out and see the movies nominated in major categories that I haven't seen yet. Most years it proves to be a hollow promise.

I love movies but making myself squeeze out time to go the local multiplex is increasingly hard...the lack of free time on weekends, the rising ticket prices, the scarcity of interesting offerings in said multiplex, and, of late, my Netflix subscription conspire to give me leave to wait for the (increasingly rapid) DVD releases.

I didn't sweat the promise so much last year because Lord of the Rings: Return of the King was a mortal lock to collect a bunch of the little naked guys and I had indeed already seen that so I figured I was cool (and it turned out I was right.)

This year, I've already seen only one of the Best Picture nominees (Ray) but a couple of them are only just breaking wide (listen to me with the Hollywood insider talk :-) and showing up at the aforementioned multiplex in my community (there are, of course, other theaters throughout the city but with an 18-screen complex just down the road one would expect to be able to find at least 1 or 2 interesting movies there...though, that said, one is often disappointed on that score...)

It probably says something significant about me that I've seen all 3 of the movies nominated for Best Animated Feature but I'm not going to linger there too long (but hey, I'm not ashamed to say that I still think that watching The Incredibles was probably the most fun to be had in a movie theater all of last year.)

So I have a month or so to make myself a more knowledgeable Oscar viewer (the Oscars and the Grammys are the only award shows I sit through these days...I am quite content to give the other 5 dozen or so televised awards show a collective pass without a hint of regret.) A month to discover if the rampant critical hype about Sideways and Million Dollar Baby is justified. A month to get over my lingering (and undoubtedly unfair) impression that Leo doesn't have the gravity to properly portray Howard Hughes. A month to decide if Martin Scorsese will deserve his long overdue Oscar for The Aviator (as opposed to them giving it to him for his remarkable body of work) if he wins this year. A month to see if Jim Carrey's sweet and nuanced performance in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (another movie I actually did see last year) was really outclassed by the eventual nominees in the Best Actor category.

I'm not kidding myself, I'm probably not going to see them all...but it's Oscar time and the promise is made to myself out of habit. So wish me luck just the same.