SmartRemarks

And no one told me when to run… that’s for damn sure.

New Year’s came and went without me writing a blog post. I was preoccupied with other things at the time, as detailed to some extent in my last couple of entries bookending my computer headaches. But I did make some observations that I think are still worth mentioning, as both the year and the decade rolled over and restarted.

I’m well aware, of course, that both our calendar year and the decades into which we assemble them are completely arbitrary human constructs, and that there’s nothing metaphysically significant about the transition from one random chronological marker to another, despite all the cultural baggage we attach to them. Nevertheless, one of the central components of human consciousness is our capability for pattern recognition, and the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century definitely displayed some patterns that are, at the very least, psychologically meaningful.

To put it all in a nutshell… this past decade sucked. Big time.

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Turns out that there really weren’t many surprises last night. My Academy Award predictions were correct for 19 out of 24 categories (which was enough to win the pool at the party I attended.  8-)  )  The only ones I missed were Foreign Film, Documentary Short, Animated Short, and both Sound categories. (Okay, those last two were a surprise. I really, genuinely expected Wall-E to take at least one of them.)

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I’m off to an Oscar party this evening, and what fun are the Oscars without a scorecard? I’ve seen most (but not all) of the nominated films, and done some reading on the various other honors handed out during “awards season,” so let me toss my hat in amongst the many, many other sites offering analysis and predictions, and go on the record with my own expectations.

(Which are not the same as my wishes:  what I think will win and what I think deserves to win are often different things. But that’s nothing new.)

Taking it from the top:

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