Five For Friday: Oscars Edition

 I am having a weird week in a weird month in a (typically, so is it even weird) winter, and I sat here literally unable to figure out or remember how to begin a blog post, so thank fuck I remembered it's Friday and I can just do FFF. It has gotten cold and snowy again after a couple of weeks of mild grayness, and I like this more, although I don't volunteer that widely. Except I guess I just did. Oops. Weird. 

1. I decided a couple of weeks ago to try to watch all the Best Picture nominees for the Oscars. The main reason is so I could make a list and cross things off the list and feel list-accomplished for doing nothing but watching movies, because low-stakes validation is helpful right now. 

There are ten movies up for Best Picture. That is too many, in my opinion. I thought five was a good number. Also, what the heck, precisely, is 'best picture' supposed to mean? Okay, I googled desultorily and I am not interested in going down that road too far. 

Here are the ones I have watched, alone or with others, and my opinions, which I do not expect anyone to share:

-Barbie: Saw in the theatre with Eve and her friend Jackson and my friend (Eve's other friend's mom who is now my friend) Jody. Liked it a lot. The aesthetic, Margot Robbie's and Ryan Gosling's and America Ferrera's performances, the satirizing of the patriarchy. I love Greta Gerwig as a director.

- Oppenheimer: I missed the chance to do a Barbenheimer experience when they were both out. My  husband is an engineer with a degree in Engineering Physics, so it was an obvious choice for us to watch, but the timing didn't work out. He rented it one morning while I was still asleep and he was about to leave the country yet again, and told me there were a couple days left in the rental for me to watch it. Which I did, but in shifts, because it is long and I was having attention span issues. 

I liked it. It didn't blow me away. It seemed like a very obvious "Best Picture" sort of movie in a Hollywood way. Cillian Murphy was compelling. My husband was disappointed that it didn't go more into the physics. He said "it was more just about...." and I said "...Oppenheimer?" and he said "shut up". I understood what he wanted, but I would have thought it was unlikely in this type of movie. Favourite line: "you're not just self-important, you're actually important". 

-Killers of the Flower Moon: watched alone on Netflix, again in shifts, more because I found it too upsetting to watch all at once. I thought it was really, really good. Personally I think Leonardo DiCaprio should have been nominated over Robert De Niro for Best Supporting Actor - Collette (HI COLLETTE) said he was too old to be convincing in that role, which may be but I am crap at judging people's ages, and his mannerisms and way of talking and his way of bearing himself seemed to embody the character perfectly and were utterly convincing to me. Lily Gladstone was fantastic. 

-Past Lives: rented while Matt was away for three weeks in January and watched alone. I loved it - I think it's my favourite so far, by a tiny margin. I love the way it concentrates on moments and lets silences stretch out. All the actors were phenomenal, and I could watch Greta Lee - her expressions, her hair swinging, the way her demeanour seems to change subtly depending on whether she's speaking English or Korean. It's a bit like a more cerebral, Korean Sliding Doors. The characters are allowed to show vulnerability in a way that almost challenges belief. I also loved the blithe use of "12 years pass" twice. 

-Anatomy of a Fall: I rented this at the same time but didn't watch it while Matt was away. We planned to watch it one Saturday night when he got home but I had a migraine, so we watched it with our dinner from Take Another Bite on Valentine's Day (which was amazing). 

It was long. It was really, really long. And French. And maybe not the best choice for Valentine's Day. Matt said "it's kind of like Kramer vs. Kramer if one Kramer is dead". We were doing the dinner in courses, which was kind of good because we would pause the movie and chat a little and take a break, because two and a half hours of people demonstrating intense anguish is a lot. But my humorous puerile whining aside, it's very well done as a character study and I can see why Sandra Huller (sorry, can't figure out how to do an umlaut) was nominated - the actor who played the son was fantastic as well. Also, if it's at all accurate, French courtroom procedures are very different from, well, from what I know of American court procedures from American tv, so who the hell knows. But there was a lot of unchallenged speculation. 

-The Holdovers: watched with Collette last night. We were going to see it in the theatre but by the time we coordinated a time it was only playing late, so I bought it on Apple TV, which was cheaper than both of us buying a ticket anyway. It was excellent. Paul Giamatti is the perfect embodiment of the set-in-his-ways, socially awkward, erudite boarding school teacher, not really fitting in with his colleagues and lamenting the "vulgar, rancid Philistines" he has to teach. Dominic Sessa also really tears it up - bold, angry, vulnerable - and Da'Vine Joy Randolph? WOW. I had a sense of how the movie would play out, but the details were magnificent. It was the only one that made me cry. 

We're going to watch American Fiction (which is based on a book by Percival Everett, whose book The Trees was insanely good) next week. Then I have Poor Things by Yorgos Lanthimos (loved The Killing of a Sacred Deer, from what I've heard of this one I am interested and a little grossed out already), The Zone of Interest, and The Maestro. 

2. From The Holdovers I learned that I have been mentally pronouncing Anaxagoras with the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Wait, no, I just looked it up and according to what I found, Paul Hunham actually pronounced it wrong. Huh. 

3. Last Monday a student walked up to the desk and barked out "Minecraft books", which is a thing I tend to gently correct. I said "you mean 'can you please help me find the Minecraft books?'", but I guess he didn't hear the 'you mean' part, and he said "I don't know where they are, that's why I asked you." Which was funny. 

4. Eve comes home tomorrow for the week and I cannot WAIT to squish her. She has a semester that is way heavier on reading and writing than her usual science-heavy fare, and it's been fun having her bounce ideas off me and doing some editing of her papers. I have never done that Google Docs thing where I can suggest edits and she can incorporate them in real time and it's like a different version of FaceTime that is really fun. Also, she had to write a reflection on the book Cassandra by Christa Wolf, and the first line was "Before I started this book I asked my mom what she knew about Cassandra because she reads everything and knows everything about books", which was, obviously, not true, but still nice to read. I'm so lucky I got the kids I did. 

Picture of Eve from Valentine's Day Facebook memories

5. I have been resolute that I would not get an air fryer, but should I get an air fryer?