Academy Awards, is it really an Academy?

So, it's the big day for film here in Hollywood.  Below are my Predix:

Best Pix:  I think there will be an upset here.  I don't think it's going to be Avatar or Hurt Locker.  So let's see:
Up in the Air:  overrated; good flick but geez, where's the payoff?
Up:  What are the odds that two films nommed for best pix have "Up" in the title?  Odd.  Anyway, this was really good and not what I expected but it will get Best Animated Pix for sure.
A Serious Man:  who remembers this flick?  This is a Coen Bros & Co. flick!  Good reviews when it came out but virtually disappeared and no one is even talking about it.   So, I think this will win.
The Blind Side:  inspiring for sure, fun to watch Bullock for sure, great dialogue, but not a great film per se, yet, it does stand a chance.
Avatar:  If the Academy goes predix-able, this will win.
Hurt Locker:  If the Academy gives Director to Bigelow, this film might win.
An Education:  Small but good but not that good, Molina was robbed of a nom this year.
District 9:  Yes, this is a film.  A weird but oddly compelling film that ultimately moved me in the end.  This film is an example of what film can do to be thought-provoking and be a voice for oppressive societies.  Also, just to be clear, it's a work of fiction and no one I know owns any interstellargalactic weaponry.  You may know people, but I don't.
Precious:  In one word, amazing.  This film is the upset I think.  I think the Academy may just eschew both of those other favorites for this one.  This film was so amazing and moving and unbelievable that it stayed with me for days and days after I saw it.  It is not relentless or a "downer", it is ultimately satisfying and uplifting.  And like District 9, it is an example of what great cinema can do for the spirit.
Inglorious Basterds:  As much as I wanted to hate this flick, dammit, it's good.  Really good.  This might be the one to win actually if I think about it.
So I predix:  Precious, Inglorious Basterds, Hurt Locker, Avatar (in that order)

Best Direx:  Bigelow! that's all for this category.  If that stinkin' Cameron guy wins, I'll eat a second piece of baklava.

Best Actor:  Bridges!  Hands down and if he doesn't win, I'll eat a third piece of baklava. 

Best Actrix:  Bullock!  (Hey, there's quite a "B" thing going on here, how did that happen?)  This is her "Erin Brockovich."

Best Supporting Actor:  Waltz, he's worth the price of admission alone in Basterds.  Amazing.  Although anyone else from this category, I'd be just as happy.

Best Supporting Actrix:  Mo'Nique.  You have to see her work in this film to believe how amazing it is.  I'm not coming close to articulating how great.

Best Orig Screenplay:  Mark Boal, Hurt Locker.
Best Adapt Scrix:  What's his name and what's his name who never met each other but wrote the script for Up In The Air.  Go figure.
Best Song:  Who cares?  Do we really hear these songs again?  They used to get radio airplay, now?  But it will be the Crazy Heart people and I hope so because music made that film as much as Bridges did.

Best Documentary:  I don't know, if they would only show these flicks at the theaters, we could actually see them, geesh, hello distribution?
Best Foreign Flix:  Une Prophet even though White Ribbon will probably win.  I am dying to see both of these (and that's dying in a figurative sense for my new readers who are having a hard time with the English language syntax).
Best Short Film:  I don't know because ONCE AGAIN, no one puts these great little flicks in theaters.  Shame shame shame.

And is the Academy really an Academy and if not, then why do they call themselves that?
Yay, Steve Martin is hosting.  Finally, someone actually funny, wry and sarcastic....

mm

THE FIDDLE AND THE DRUM AND THE NAIL ON THE HEAD

I was out walking with Lilly tonite around midnight (like the song, only without the brandy, the drum brush in the background and the red lipstick), and I feel I have to write this blog.


My voice once again is trying to be silenced. I have a quote under my signature on my email: “Your silence will not protect you. Audre Lorde” I doubt these people even know who Audre Lourde is and they certainly lose out for that, great poet that she was and firm believer in speaking up for what’s right and for dignity in general. Now, for all those who know and love me, and since all this distress has happened, and I know there are many more of you than I ever could believe and for that I am truly grateful and appreciative and amazingly moved in my heart; but for all those of you who know and love me, you know that I am a kind, generous, wonderful person who would cross a war zone to help someone if I could; especially a child and an animal.


Recently one of my blogs I had written was being used against me to try to injure, once again, my good name and make me into some criminal of sorts. For people to read anything I have written here in these blogs to indicate anything other than an individual trying to make sense of the nonsensical that life sometimes throws at us and trying to do that in a humorous, irreverent, wise-cracking, compassionate way, are people who are really grasping at straws to try to save themselves from their own fragile egos.


But that’s not my point for writing this or for what I’m about to write: the only fight worth fighting is the spiritual fight. Everything else in this world is illusion. So when it seems that others are trying to purposely keep you down, see you as a threat to their fragile self-esteem and figuratively use you for a punching bag, you take a step back and when asking, the plaintive, “Why me?” you realize, it isn’t about you at all. And then that wonderful “shift” happens, that place where the seas part and the sky opens up and the burden is lifted all because you fought the good fight, not the earthly one they wanted you to fight, but the one where you could be the “detached observer” not the emotional person they want to think you are. You stepped back and said to yourself, “I see. I was blind and now I see.”


There are some people in the world who are attracted to you because of your light not because they are trying to compliment it. They have some piece missing in themselves that they find in you and they want it and they figuratively try to take it. They’ll try to shame you into silence, find a way to play you a crazy fool, and they even believe that you will behave the way they do and strike back and when you don’t, it baffles them. So they try to amp it up. This little trick didn’t work, so let’s try that one. All I can say is, try it. You’re expending your valuable physical, mental and emotional energy on an illusion. As the Course in Miracles asks and is the whole premise of its program, “Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?” And I answered that question a long, long time ago.


I had the pleasure and honor of attending the Alberta Ballet at UCLA Live to see their program: Joni Mitchell’s The Fiddle and The Drum. She composes music to Kipling’s poem, “If.” She writes in the Program Notes, “With our situation for all earthlings—man and animals—becoming so dire, I felt that it was frivolous to present a lighter fare….” The depiction of the beauty of the dance numbers against a backdrop of dramatizations and images of war was powerful, moving and at one point when I started actually weeping early on in the program, I found, cathartic. As Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes in “Women Who Run With The Wolves”: “…the demon cannot enter any house where tears have been cried by a true heart…tears have done three works: called the spirits to one’s side, repelled those who would muffle and bind the simple soul, and healed the injuries of poor bargains made by humans.” And creates in us a space for the shift where we can realize what is illusion and what is worth fighting for: peace, harmony, self-respect and greater connection to self and God, an understanding that can transcend the earthly values of ego, meanness and predatory elements, that attempt to devalue and douse our light.


There is no other fight but the spiritual one: it’s time for all of us to grow up, to become cosmic adults, to realize we need to live together and to become aware of our own paths to use for good in the world, not destruction. There can be no physical destruction unless we find it in our own hearts first. Pema Chodron talks about connecting in our meditation each day with those sentient beings who are: (1) going through suffering akin to our experience, (2) causing our suffering and that of others, and (3) near and far from us, individuals, the community and finally, the whole world. This way we feel the compassion that helps us transcend the suffering and bring it to the light.


As a writer, I’ve always known: “The pen is mightier than the sword.”


I will leave this blog with Rudyard Kipling’s poem for it certainly hits the nail on the head for me at this time (by the way if there are any nails out there threatened by that reference, I apologize but it’s always been a figurative saying and not real, i.e. an illusion):

If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Many blessings to everyone and welcome new readers!


MM