Sunday, February 24, 2013

Observations from the Coffee Shop 2.24

The Academy Awards are tonight so hopefully I can go from Danica Patrick in victory lane to Anne Hathaway on the red carpet. That sounds like a good way to spend a Sunday. I'm not going to make any Oscar winning predictions because in all honesty I care more about what people are wearing than who wins. Seriously, does winning an Oscar mean anything anymore other than that you made a relatively uncontroversial film and played the Oscar game just right? As a public service I'll leave this link to Nate Silver's predictions from his blog in The New York Times. Silver uses the same models he used to predict the Presidential election, when he predicted 49 of the 50 states correctly, and as he says, "Anne Hathaway is about as safe a bet to win for Les Misérables as Mitt Romney was to win Utah."

Other than that my Academy Award preview consists of sharing the documentary Chasing Ice which should win the Best Documentary Award but wasn't even nominated. Chasing Ice did win the Excellence In Cinematography Award at last year's Sundance Festival where it premiered and was also nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. In Chasing Ice the National Geographic photographer James Balog uses thirty of the ultimate in time-lapse cameras, at the time the new and revolutionary Nikon D200, to capture proof of climate change. Years are compressed into seconds as you watch glaciers and ice from Alaska to the Alps quickly disappear. As of now the movie isn't supposed to be released on video until September and it isn't streaming anywhere so you might have to make do with this clip.

It isn't much of a consolation prize but "Before My Time" from Chasing Ice is nominated for Best Original Song tonight. Hopefully we will get to see Scarlett Johansson perform and, yes, that is how I get both Anne Hathaway and Scarlett Johansson in my Academy Award preview.


link

Before My Time
Written and produced by J. Ralph, performed by Scarlett Johansson, and accompanied by violinist Joshua Bell. "Before My Time" was played under the credits of the documentary Chasing Ice.