The long march from Selma to the Dolby Theatre was stopped cold in its tracks by a fabulous year in white cinema.
The Academy Award nominations are in! But you already knew that. Like 99% of America, you likely haven’t seen too many of the nominees yet. The complete list is available in myriad locations (here’s the example I’ve been using for reference), so I don’t see a point in wasting time or space copying, pasting, and reformatting all that off someone else’s site. The nice thing about running my own site is I have no high-pressure word-count quotas to meet.
I’ve seen and written about three of the nominees so far — Birdman, Boyhood, and Selma — all of which I super-liked, all of which I wish could win all the prizes, one of which was dealt a far crappier hand than the other two by the elderly white voting majority of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Perhaps Selma‘s most egregious error was in failing to better balance the dual celebrations of black and white nobility like The Help did. Who can say.
The following lists and other thoughts popped into my head throughout the day while I mulled over this year’s honorees:
If you’re online much, you’re already aware this year’s Academy Awards nominations were announced today. If you follow either The Hollywood Reporter or The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences on Twitter, you had the opportunity to see the categories live-tweeted one at a time early this morning. If you shared my mistake of following both entities, you were treated to a double-barrel Oscar-nom redundancy blast that turned Twitter to sludge for fifteen minutes. Homework question: how many live-tweeters does any given event really need?
As my seventh annual foray into this personal fun ritual, presented below anyway is the timeline of events as I witnessed them during tonight’s ABC telecast of the 85th Academy Awards. All quotes are approximate as best as possible without benefit of rewatching, cribbing from national news outlets, or much proofreading. Our household does not own a DVR; all recollections are a combination of short-term memory and notes hastily handwritten on a legal pad, not a copy/paste reassembly of a distracted live-tweet flood. When I’m seated in front of a TV, I’d much rather watch than type.
I already explained 
As mentioned previously, I’ve seen every Academy Award winner for Best Picture from Wings to The Artist, retaining varying degrees of recollection. I’ve also seen every Best Picture nominee from 1997 to the present, and have embarked on a slow, low-priority, extra-long-term quest to see how far backwards in time I can extend that date. Right now I’m stalled on 1996 because the DVD version of Secrets & Lies is out of print, secondhand copies are priced much higher than I’d prefer, and I’ve never caught it airing on a cable network. Someday I’ll overcome that obstacle and continue down the line in reverse order.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 