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It’s about that time. I’ll probably live-blog the Oscars tonight, just because I like doing it. My commentary on the nominees is here. My picks for winners (and preferred winners if I had to pick from the nominees): Best Actor: Jamie Foxx. Should be Clint Eastwood, but the Academy will steer clear of him this year. The political aspects to Million Dollar Baby didn’t help him. Best Actress: hard to call, but I think Hilary Swank. (My other guess would be Catalina Moreno.) Kate Winslet should win it, though. ...

In 1981, Steve Martin took on his second starring role in a motion picture in Pennies From Heaven. It was not exactly what was expected from the guy who’d just starred in The Jerk. People went in looking for broad slapstick, and found themselves in the middle of a deeply cynical musical. Instead of using the musical numbers as uplifting emotional high points, Pennies From Heaven recasts the musical number as an unhealthy fantasy. This goes beyond the musical work of Sondheim, who broadened the emotions depicted by the musicial number to include angst and despair, and subverts the entire concept of the musical. Pennies From Heaven uses the musical form to critique the musical form. It is unclear to me how this ever got greenlit; I suspect MGM was just caught up by the idea of reviving the musical. ...

FYI: Theodore Roszak’s Flicker is back in print. It’s a great book about movies, albeit one with a somewhat unsatisfying ending; this review hits the mark for me. Particularly in the snark about Aronofsky as a director. (Via Twitch.)

I’m living my life wrong. How do I know this? I never get to say things like “The optimal, best-case scenario is the ashes will be shot out of a cannon.” (original) Ever.

In her first scene in Constantine, Tilda Swinton wears a bespoke suit. A bespoke suit is the best possible suit: hand-sewn and carefully tailored to the individual. English Cut is a bespoke blog: a blog written by a Savile Row bespoke tailor, who has made suits for Bryan Ferry, Prince Charles, and Ralph Lauren. Not a shabby resume.

Although Ulysses has flaws, CopyWrite has a very similar interface and provides a slightly better editing pane (paragraph spacing) plus in-line formatting. It looks like I can coerce InDesign into handling formatting codes for me, which means named styles are less important. And CopyWrite is about a quarter the price of Ulysses. I’m doing my latest game (The Kiss of God) in CopyWrite; after I’m done I’ll post about the experience.

Final tally: around 58% of eligible Iraqi voters voted. My definition of success was 60%, so that’s a near miss. It’s close enough so that I don’t feel comfortable saying Bush missed that metric, but I wouldn’t say he succeeded either. The ruling coalition needs 184 votes to reach a 2/3rds majority. The United Iraqi Alliance can reach that easily with the Kurdish parties, and fall just short if it teams up with Allawi’s Iraqi List. That means, in practice, that the UIA can form a weak ruling coalition with Allawi and a strong one with the Kurds. The price of doing business with the Kurds is a mostly independent Kurdish north, possibly including Kirkuk. ...

OK, so Guckert got his press pass (original) as a representative of GOPUSA. Apparently GOPUSA is not linked to the Republican Party and thus their reporters can get credentials. Fair enough; I’m inclined to think that we want fairly lax standards for who can get into the press room and ask questions. More people asking questions is good. However, if The Raw Story and BuzzFlash (original) and, hey, even Daily Kos aren’t currently applying for daily press passes under the excitingly loose guidelines for accreditation — well, I don’t know what they’re waiting for.

Speaking of Wong Kar Wai, turns out the Brattle is running a Wong Kar Wai retrospective in April (original). They’re showing everything but 2046. Note that Ashes of Time, the only Wong Kar Wai movie unavailable on DVD in the US (OK, yes, but Sony seems to have the rights to 2046 (original) and it’ll be out by the end of this year, I bet) is playing on Sunday, April 10th.

I’m currently in La Guardia Airport. In the ideal world, I’m in Boston, but that world was shattered sometime this afternoon. No biggie. Most of the annoyance I might otherwise feel is dispelled by the fact that the Fort Lauderdale airport has free wireless Internet. Cool beans for Fort Lauderdale, which has suddenly become my preferred transfer point for any air travel involving Florida but not involving Orlando. (Once in the past seventeen years, counting this trip, but still.) ...