Monday Medley

What we read while Colin Firth managed to give a stutter-less acceptance speech…

• Natalie Portman won the Best Actress award last night, so it’s worth asking: Is Natalie Portman a good actress? Slate ran two stories that seem to say “no.” Slate also dished on The King’s Speech and stuttering.

• We know one Egyptian who will be retroactively upset The Social Network didn’t win Best Picture.

• Suze Rotolo, of this famous album cover, died last week, meaning pop music lost perhaps it’s greatest muse (it’s either her or Pattie Boyd, right?).

• Have you ever wanted to hear Louis C.K. repeatedly ask a former Secretary of Defense if he is an alien lizard? If so, then boy do we have a link for you…

• On his “other” other blog, Chris Jones riffs on the rules to the press box and the locker room for sports reporters. The latter drew some commentary from former hockey player Justin Bourne.

• Frank Lloyd Wright had a 10-point manifesto for his apprentices. It doesn’t necessarily conform with the philosophical tenets of the book he, in part, inspired.

• Man, when was the last time we had a batch of DFW links? Well, here’s an old Laura Miller interview with him, as well as a thoughtful look at the underappreciated Oblivion, and a look at the recently opened archives in Austin. And hey, this makes Infinite Jest slightly less confusing. Slightly.

• The multi-talented Donald Glover as a rapper.

• What your favorite classic rock band says about you…

• Charlie Sheen…er, uh, well, we don’t really know what to say….

An Ill-Informed, Underqualified Oscar Preview

Although NPI officially endorses the new Oscar voting policy for the Best Picture award, one of the major downsides of expanding the category to 10 is that it makes it twice as hard to keep up. I have seen five of the films nominated for the Academy’s grand prize tonight; you’d think that would be enough, but it leaves me without anything to say about 50% of the nominees. I mean, who has time to see 10 movies a year? I have TV to watch…

Anyway, if the Academy thinks that not having seen most of the films up for awards tonight is going to stop me from offering predictions and analysis, they were wrong. Dead wrong. Like last year (when I was 5/8), we’re sticking with the eight major awards:

New Year’s Eve

: any ideas?

: i just want to have fun

: stop

: i just want to have fun

: i get it

: all i want, is to have fun

: you done? happy?

: this is fun

: im sure it is

so im guessing you have no ideas

: i have no ideas

aside from the having fun part

: ok, i think i have one

: really?

: i think we should see the black swan

Aught Lang Syne: The Top Ten Movies of the Decade

Despite my general negativity about movies of the Aughts, there were still plenty of great films released this decade (although I think a Top Ten list of 90s movies would probably omit films that could be #1 on this list). I’ve already provided a list of the ten funniest films of the decade, and there were other great comedies that didn’t make the list. Today, though, we turn our attention to the dramatic category. As Josh has already declared, though, genre concerns can be distracting, so I will not be bound my technical genre classifications. Consider this a list of films I like for “dramatic” reasons: