Picking winners for the Oscar Awards
Feb 18, 2008 Movies
It’s nearly time for the 80th Annual Oscar Awards! As you probably know if you read this blog regularly, I’m a huge movie fan, so I love this time of year. This past year featured some of the better Oscar contenders I’ve seen in a while. There’s definitely some stiff competition in every category.
Enough small talk though, here’s my picks for the major categories this year at the Oscars.
Best Picture - I’ve got to go with Juno. I know there’s probably only a very slim chance that it will actually win, but for me Juno was definitely my favorite film of the past year. My second favorite was Sweeney Todd, which surprisingly wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. I also really loved Superbad.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role - Though Sweeney Todd wasn’t nominated for Best Picture, Johnny Depp did manage to get nominated for Best Actor and he would be my pick. His performance was fantastic. If I had to pick a second favorite I’d probably go with George Clooney for Michael Clayton. Great film. I wasn’t completely sold on his performance until the final scene, which blew me away. Tommy Lee Jones was also excellent In The Valley of Elah.
Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role - I’d really love to see Ellen Page win for Juno. I thought her performance was wonderful.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role - He’s probably not going to win it, but I really liked Tom Wilkinson’s performance in Michael Clayton. He had me convinced that his character was completely loony til the end when things fell into place and I realized he was really quite sane.
Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role - Why wasn’t Allison Janney nominated for her role as the step mother in Juno?! She was freakin’ great. Ahh well. I’ll go with Amy Ryan for her role as the horrible mother in Gone Baby Gone. I wasn’t blown away by the movie, but she really did a nice job of portraying a dead beat parent.
Best Achievement in Directing - Jason Reitman for Juno. My second pick would be Tony Gilroy for Michael Clayton.
Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen - Again I have to go with Juno. The dialogue written by Diablo Cody was hilarious and touching when it needed to be.
So what were your favorite films of the past year?
Popularity: 6% [?]
Looks like you've never been here before! Today is your lucky day. For just the price of a simple mouse click, you can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed!
Tags: best-picture, ellen-page, juno, Movies, oscar-picks
A little link love - Week 32
Feb 17, 2008 Blogging, Link Love
As usual more than a week has passed since my last link love post. During that time though I’ve managed to nearly complete a short film and get sick for about the fourth time this winter, so hey, at least my time away from link loving has been productive! I’m beginning to think I should start taking donations for cold medicine. Apparently in my case, you can never have enough.
Anywho, as I always do, I’ve tried to put together a few links that hopefully everyone will find interesting. Let’s get to it, shall we?
How to reciprocate all Entrecard drops - If you use Entrecard, chances are you receive a lot of dropped cards on your widget. If you like to reciprocate all those drops but find it difficult to keep up, this little article just may be the solution you’ve been looking for.
8 Characteristics of a well designed about page - How much time have you put into the about page on your blog? If the answer to that question is “uh, not much”, you should reconsider and have a look at these great tips over on Tish’s Blogging Gal blog.
How to design a great ad - Speaking of Entrecard, if you use it or plan to, you’ll need a catchy ad that will entice people to click and visit your blog. Randa Clay of the Blog Herald has some excellent advice for designing an ad which will stand out.
Return of The Smurfs!? - Admit it, you used to watch The Smurfs. We all did at one point or another. Would ya believe the cartoon will be returning in CGI form? I wouldn’t have either had I not seen this first look at the upcoming Smurfs movie on FirstShowing. This is the kind of thing Hollywood does when they’re running out of ideas.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Tags: Blogging, Link Love, speed-linking
Diary of the Dead Short Film Contest
Feb 14, 2008 Movies
My cousin Jonathan and I are big fans of zombie films and it’s safe to say no one makes them quite like George Romero. In 1968 Romero’s first zombie film, Night of the Living Dead set the bar for all films of its genre. It’s now a classic and all these years later Romero is still making great zombie flicks. His newest is Diary of the Dead and to help celebrate, Romero is hosting a short film contest on Myspace. Participants are required to make a film of no more than 3 minutes in length which of course focuses on the zombie genre in some way.
When Jonathan and I found out about this contest, naturally we were giddy. Now that the rules and guidelines have finally been released, we’ve been working diligently on our entry. The deadline for the contest is the end of this month. Because there’s such a short time frame to work with, we’re attempting an idea where we won’t really have to focus on the zombies so much but still hopefully have an element of suspense. I think we may actually have the thing done within the next few days or so. Once it’s completed, I’ll of course post it up here for everyone to see. Chances are it’s not going to be Oscar caliber material, but we’re having a ton of fun =)
Popularity: 6% [?]
Tags: contest, george-romero, short-films, zombies
Time to catch up on some awards
I have to admit I slack on keeping up with blogging awards. While it’s always very nice to receive them and feel appreciated by your blogging peers, I always cringe when having to pass them along to others because I’d like to just give them to everyone. If I did that though, I think Google just might boot me out of their index for creating link farms.
There’s been several awards tossed my way since my last award, so I’m going to attempt to cover as many as I can. I’m sure I’ll end up leaving out a few. If I miss your award, I apologize. Feel free to yell at me. Okay, let’s get this party started shall we?
The I Love You This Much award
First I must say I love this little award. It’s such a cute design. Credit for its design goes to Emila Yusof who was also kind enough to award it to me, along with Marzie. Thank you both very much!
I’d like to pass this award along to all the regular readers of my blog. The fact that you’ve all stuck around regardless of what I may ramble on about means a lot. I appreciate each and every one of you =)
Blogging Mentor Award
A while back I helped Tish move her Kat House to a new server and gave her a few Wordpress pointers. I’m guessing it’s because of those deeds that she has awarded me the Blogging Mentor Award. Thank you, Tish =)
There are three people that immediately come to mind for this award - Mark, Baron and Christy. Three great blogging pals whom you can always count on to offer feedback, advice or whatever ya may need.
I Am a Little Nutty
It would seem that Jos and Eric think I’m a bit nutty. I have to say I can’t really disagree. I certainly have my nutty moments. There’s no denying it.
There’s one person in particular that comes to mind for this award - Bucky. Not because he’s a total nutjob, but because he’s alway posting something a little nutty which makes me laugh. Seriously, if you’re having one of those days where you could just use a good laugh, I highly recommend dropping by Bucky’s place. I guarantee you’ll find something giggle inducing.
Friendship Badge
Christy was nice enough to pass along the Friendship Badge to me eons ago. I feel like a total schmoo for posting about it so late. Sorry, Christy!
This is another of those awards which I’d like to pass along to all the great friends who continue to stop by here each day. Blogging just wouldn’t be the same without the friendships that are a direct result of it.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Tags: blogging-awards, Link Love
Blog contests, guest blogging and wordpress stuff all rolled into one
Feb 11, 2008 Blogging
I have a few different things to write about today, so as you can probably tell by the post title, I’ve decided to lump them all into one big post. If you’re a regular reader here, you probably know that I’m also a co-founder of the BlogsWeLuv blog along with Tish from Blogging Gal. We just launched our latest blog contest in which one lucky reader will win a blog review and 1,000 credits from Entrecard. Submission to the contest is easy and you can learn how over on BlogsWeLuv.
We’re also currently looking for new contributors on BlogsWeLuv. If you’re interested in writing at least one blog review per week, please check out Tish’s post for more details!
Last but certainly not least, I’m hoping someone out there may be have a simple solution for something we’re trying to implement on the BlogsWeLuv site. We’d like to create a tag cloud using custom fields. For example, every post made on BlogsWeLuv contains keywords which helps us to generate a list of related posts. Has anyone heard of a plugin that would allow the creation of a tag cloud using custom fields? The fields are considered meta-data I guess. Any insight anyone may have would be wonderful =)
Popularity: 10% [?]
Tags: blogsweluv, guest-blogging, keywords, tag-clouds
