Oscars

I watched the Academy Awards tonight, even though I hadn't really planned on it in advance. I ended up getting my new computer delivered this week, so I was sitting downstairs working on getting things setup the way I want them, and moving things off of my old machine. In the process, I started the awards show and realized that I had not seen one movie up for an award.

I used to watch a lot of movies, and had a pretty healthy relationship with Blockbuster every weekend up until a few years ago. I don't really know what's happened in recent years, but the mainstream movies seem so blah to me anymore, and if I watch anything it's usually something on the Sundance channel. So, I didn't have any stake in the game this year while watching, although I was kind of pulling for Precious mostly because I think the story is pretty amazing and it would have been a big departure for the academy. In the end, I was pretty choked up by Sandra Bullock's acceptance speech for The Blind Side, and was happy to see a woman finally bring home the Oscar for best director (Bigelow for The Hurt Locker).

And throughout the broadcast, I took notes about some films that I would like to check out after being introducted to them tonight:
Paris 36
The Young Victoria
Logorama
An Education
A Single Man
Up in the Air (which I did want to see before, but hadn't yet gotten around to)
Food Inc (also wanted to see after an Oprah feature on this, but hadn't yet gotten around to either)
The Cove
The Most Dangerous Man in America

The crazy thing is that I found myself shedding a few tears at different moments, which was completely unexpected. The John Hughes montage was really touching. Seeing clips from all his films reminded me of how much an impact his work had on my upbringing. They're the movies that I still love to watch today. The In Memory section was pretty emotional, especially since they started out with Patrick Swayze, and had a section in there about Brittany Murphy and Natasha Richardson. They all died too young. Then I shed a tear at Bullock's acceptance speech. I must be PMS-ing.