Loserfest

The 2009 Oscar winners were announced last night and they were both predictable in a good way and unpretentious in a bad way. I still say that The Dark Knight got snubbed for Best Picture. With that out of the way, I would have given the award to any other nominee than Slumdog Millionaire, but more on that later. I expected all the winners for Best Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Actress, and I don't disagree with any of them. Best Makeup and Visual Effects both went to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and rightly so, since it wasn't given Best Picture or Adapted Screenplay. I'll accept WALL-E for Best Animated Feature because there was no chance for Kung Fu Panda, but The Dark Knight just for Best Sound Editing??? Anyway, I attended what appears to be the third annual AMC Best Picture Showcase and I watched everything except for The Reader. People clapped enthusiastically after each screening. We even sang "Happy Birthday" to someone in the audience like you would at a chain restaurant. The order of the films was interesting in that the two fantasies were bookended by reality.

Some of you may be wondering how I could sit through four movies in a row. Technically, I only sat through three in a row, because I left for a few hours after the first screening. And it's not the first time I've engaged in such extreme filmgoing. When I was in high school, my friend and I held what we called a "Loserfest." We rented five videos and watched them back to back all night until the sun came up the next day. I don't remember what we rented, just that we saved Rudy for last and it put me to sleep so I missed what might have been my first sunrise after an all-nighter. In college, I once watched three movies in a row at the dollar theater: Bandits, Domestic Disturbance, and Shallow Hal. Shortly after I married my wife, I learned that she had never seen the whole Star Wars original trilogy, so one Sunday afternoon we did a marathon. Believe it or not, I had never seen a single Star Trek movie up until a couple years ago. The Thanksgiving weekend before last, I tried watching all nine movies in the series and my wife has yet to forgive me. So I'm grateful she let me attend the AMC event, because unlike the Star Trek movies, I feel like I was a better person for having watched this year's Best Picture nominees.