Non-Fiction RR: Oscars, Fooling Us AGAIN?

A strange thing happened on Groundhog Day at the Gurus o’ Gold panel.

            The Gurus o’ Gold panel is made up of 14 awards watchers who write for Entertainment Weekly and the Hollywood Reporter. They predict the movies/actors/directors that will be nominated for an Oscar. Every year, for the past decade, they have predicted the correct Best Director nominations and the correct Best Picture nominations. This year they predicted, in order: Steven Spielberg, for “Lincoln”; Ben Affleck, for “Argo”; Kathryn Bigelow, for “Zero Dark Thirty”; Ang Lee, for “Life of Pi”; David O. Russell, for “Silver Linings Playbook”; and Tom Hooper, for “Les Miserables. A few on the panel thought that Michael Haneke, for “Amour” and Quentin Tarantino, for “Django Unchained” would sneak in the nominations category.

            But boy, did they get a surprise when the nominations were revealed. Ben Affleck, Kathryn Bigelow, Tom Hooper, and Quentin Tarantino were all snubbed nominations. Michael Haneke and Benh Zeitlin, whose movie “Beasts of the Southern Wild” was his first feature film, were nominated. “Beasts of the Southern Wild” was a small budget film about a fable, and “Argo”, “Zero Dark Thirty”, “Les Miserables”, and “Django Unchained” were all large-scale films that attracted a wide audience. It might as well have actually been raining cats and dogs.

            I think that this article is very interesting. It shows how even the most top notched people in award business get it wrong. I think this shows how the Oscars are always one step ahead of us in the fooling department. We can never fully know what they’ll throw at us each year. We can’t prepare ourselves for what happened last year. We have to be ready for something different to happen.  

Non-Fiction: Anna Karenina Production Design

When it was decided that the book “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy was going to be made into a movie, Joe Wright, the director, had a large and demanding task ahead of him.

He had to capture the expressive expeditions of the characters while transmitting the grand scope of the background. Wright now faced an alarming dilemma. Should he shoot the film in its Russian locations as told in the story? Should he expand the budget of the film to and unfriendly amount? Instead, Wright chose to set the movie in a rundown theater, to give it the feel of a decaying Russian society in the 19^th century.

It is quite startling to think of the magnificent set of “Anna Karenina” being set in a derelict theater. There are so many different settings set outside and inside, with thousands of people or two, all done in one theater. The epicness of the movie itself, with its sloping ballrooms and dirty streets of Russia, is quite extraordinary by itself; but to think that it was all filmed inside a theater is amazing at the determination to create exactly what you want someone to see.

  Wright had incredible skill and willpower to transform a dilapidated theater into the streets and houses of Russia. Since he didn’t want to overspend the budget and travel to Russia itself, it only made his task harder. Instead of having the streets and ballrooms already built in front of him, he now had the task of creating this town. This, while being extremely difficult, would’ve helped Wright in a way. He now had the power to build exactly what he wanted to see, which helped immensely. 

Beautiful Creatures

The book I am almost finished with Beautiful Creatures, and it is a really fantastic book. There are two main problems in this book. The first one is that Lena, the main character’s girlfriend, is a Caster, which is like a witch, and on her sixteenth birthday she will be Claimed, meaning that it will be decided whether she will go Light or Dark. Ethan and Lena find out there is a curse on Lena’s family that every Caster will go Dark. Desperate to change it, they work on finding the cure to this hazard while meanwhile, Lena’s murderous Dark Caster mother, Sarafine, is hunting her down to kill her.

         The second problem is that in the small, Southern town of Gatlin, where this takes place, they don’t take kindly to newcomers. And when anyone, especially a newcomer, does anything remotely dangerous or hazardous, Mrs. Lincoln and her cronies from the DAR take fight. Lena, being a Caster not yet sixteen, has trouble controlling her powers, and one fateful day, the rich Southern girls are teasing her in class, and she accidently breaks a window with her mind. Mayhem ensures, with mothers from the DAR screaming over that their children could’ve been killed, yelling that Lena is mentally insane. And none so extreme as Mrs. Lincoln. In fact, she goes so far to organize a court case for Lena, which she loses, eventually, but she is still planning to get Lena.

         These two plots, which we thought were separated, are finally connected in the end. It turns out that Sarafine, which we thought this whole time to be coming after Lena, was actually in the town of Gatlin this entire time. She was using Mrs. Lincoln’s body as a host, which explains the severity of Mrs. Lincoln’s plans for Lena.

         So far, it has not concluded whether Lena will go Light or Dark, but the danger is creeping up on her every second. And now that Sarafine has Lena in her grasp, the dangers are even more present. 

"Power" in Specials

In the book I’m reading, Specials, by Scott Westerfield, the clear person who has power in the text is Shay. The most interesting thing is that Shay was completely powerless in the last book, Pretties, and now she is clearly the alpha dog. The other people in her group, notice her group, call her Boss and always wait for her signal and do what she tells them to do. The surprising thing is she seems to know what she is doing as well. I think she has changed her ways because she was being casted out in Pretties and she became smarter and more intelligent on her own, and she created a new group that everyone wants to be a part of.

     Shay also seems to have taken the power spot from Zane, who had a ton of power over the main character, Tally, in the last book, and now that power has been handed over to Shay. I think part of the reasoning for that is that Shay is the leader of a huge Special group, while Zane is still an average pretty. Tally needs the powerful person in her life to be of the same species as her, not below her. 

Pretties

I am currently reading the book Pretties by Scott Westerfield. In this book Tally has been transformed from a repulsive ugly to a stunning pretty. She has the world at her fingertips, until she discovers that the pretty operation makes you forget things in your past. She then decides she is going back into the wild to find the New Smoke. This book contains a lot of questions about society and how I view justice and society in the world.

     I find that in Pretties, there is a lot of attacking the society’s views. Constantly people are disobeying the society because the society’s views are very extreme. The brain lesions create this state of being called “pretty minded”, which basically means you act and talk really stupidly and your vision is always a little fuzzy. It is not until you experience something incredibly exciting and your adrenaline starts pumping that you become bubbly, normal, for only a minute. The society’s workers, Specials, say they cannot make everyone bubbly all the time because people would fight and have angry emotions and wars would break out and many people would die.

     To me, I think this reasoning on the Special’s side is unintelligent. Our society functions in a state where everyone has emotions and fights sometimes, but that not only makes life interesting, it also lets people figure out who they are. Are they calm, gentle people like the pretties? Or are the opposite: mean minded and cruel. Maybe they’re like most regular human beings: kind but they have an angry side that will come out when the time is right.

     This book makes me think about society’s laws and rights. It is kind of confusing when you think about society. There are so many parts to it. Some parts that are wrong, and others that our right. Some wrong parts many people wish to right, but it never seems to happen. I wonder if it ever will.