Oscar Picks

Lead Actor: Forrest Whittaker (Last King of Scotland)

I'm not the first person to make this comment, but his role was not really the lead role in the film. If only the Academy could have set things straight and put him into the supporting actor category. Then, Peter O'Toole could have gotten his career Oscar - despite already having a lifetime achievement award - and we could probably be saved from ever hearing the phrase "from Acadamy Award winning actor Eddie Murphy."

Supporting Actor: Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine)

Murphy's probably going to win this for Dreamgirls since he's won everything else running up to this. But I'm pulling for the upset. My Oscar pool be damned. I just refuse to pick someone who follows up a nominated performance with Norbit.

Lead Actress: Helen Mirren (The Queen)

I'll quote Entertainment Weekly on why she might not win: "[Crickets] Um, maybe voters might want someone else to win for a change? Oh, who are we kidding?"

Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls)

I never caught Dreamgirls, so I'll just go with the gold she's already picked up for the performance.

Animated Feature: Cars

Is this category still around? Really?

Documentary Feature: An Inconvenient Truth

Global warming is bad for the Earth, but good for Oscar gold.

Adapted Screenplay: The Departed

The Departed isn't perfect, but neither are any of the other nominees really. It fills out its predecessor (Infernal Affairs) in all the right places.

Original Screenplay: Little Miss Sunshine

The category is really a toss-up. Sunshine is great, but the story gets a little too outlandish. Babel has to shoehorn in the only good section of its four-part narrative. Letters from Iwo Jima was written by Paul Haggis. Pan's Labyrinth is foreign. The Queen is based on actual events, so how "original" is it. Sunshine won the writer's guild award, so I'll go with that by a nose.

Director: Martin Scorsese (The Departed)

He said he didn't do it for the Oscar. According to Cinematical, Spielberg, Coppola, and Lucas are presenting the category, so it might finally be time for Marty to clear off some pace on the mantel.

Feature Film: The Departed

If the Oscars took place a month ago, I'd definitely be bemoaning the fact that Babel picked up the statuette. The category has turned into a bit of a race at the end, and yet my favorite movie of the five - Letters from Iwo Jima - still doesn't have a real chance. I think Scorsese's win should be enough. By the way, is it too late for a write-in vote for Children of Men?

All the news that's fit to mock (badly)

Explanation via Variety. I might chime in later with some thoughts on my own, but I mostly agree with Slate's assessment.

Feb 18 Edit: Having now seen the show, I feel like - probably ironically - the New York Times's review is the more accurate assessment. But, I'll add that the show probably would have been bearable 15 years ago back when Marion Berry, Suzanne Somers, electric cars, and prison rape were funny.

Feb 19 Edit: The 1/2 Hour News Hour airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on Fox News Channel.

Commercial Break

For some reason, this ( http://woodenporchrailings.blogspot.com/ ) made me laugh. It's a one post blog about the wonders of wooden porch railings. I would normally dismiss it as some SPAM marketing attempt, which it probably is. But there doesn't seem to be a particularly company endorsing the blog. There's no links to a website, where one could buy a wooden porch railing. There's just the myriad of reasons why everyone should. So, I'm choosing to believe that there's someone out there who REALLY loves wooden porch railings and could not go another day without letting the world know it. But just the one time.

In other more overt ad news, I over heard a commercial for an insomnia treatment last night as I was reading the newspaper. The commercial was standard television drug commercial fare, but something struck me as odd. One of the possible side effects was drowsiness. I'm not a doctor - I didn't even take the MCATs - but shouldn't drowsiness be an intended effect?

Toe-tappingly familiar

Despite the fact that they’ve never been paired together on screen before, there’s something familiar about Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant together in Music and Lyrics. Maybe it’s the ‘80s nostalgia, which Barrymore first successfully tapped into in The Wedding Singer, or Grant’s stock romantic persona that feels like that oldie you forgot you liked until you heard it again.

In Music and Lyrics, Grant’s stuttering charmer is Alex Fletcher, a has-been from the fictional ‘80s’ pop band called, conveniently enough, Pop!. He gets the opportunity to break free from playing high school reunions and on small amusement park stages, when the new teenaged bubble gum popstress, Cora Corman (Haley Bennett), taps him to write a new song for her, if he can do it in a week. Enter Barrymore’s endearingly eccentric Sophie Fisher to serve as muse and love interest.

The team of Fletcher and Fisher – a name not quite as smooth as Lenon and McCartney – meet their deadline with her lyrics and his melody. A melody that has shades of “Killing me Softly,” which was featured in Grant’s earlier film, About a Boy. Lyrics works best when looking backward. Most of the songs evoke the feeling of the decade of excess rather than mock it outright. On the other hand, Fletcher’s final solo sounds like a bad take-off of “Trapped in the Closet.” He’s not in a musical though, and singing your feelings directly doesn’t work in real life.

Barrymore and Grant slip into old roles with ease. Both know their way around the genre, and make the most out of writer-director Marc Lawrence’s script, which focuses so much on the comedy element of romantic comedy that it ignores the other side. Fletcher and Fisher will get together as they, or people like them, always do. When free from the binds of the plot, Lyrics makes tight pants, bad rhymes, and the Jeopardy theme sing.

Music and Lyrics feels a lot like 80s music. It’s not too serious, it’s not quite good, but so wonderful that you start humming along despite yourself.

Music and Lyrics opens Valentine's Day in theaters across the country.

Not Your Older Brother's 'Road Rules'

Fourteen years ago, MTV set out to find out what would happen if you took seven strangers and made them live and work together all while taped. Twelve years and fourteen seasons ago, MTV tried to find out what would happen if you did that with five people in an RV. Road Rules was born. Road Rules 2007: Viewer’s Revenge – the first season since 2004 – brings MTV’s classic reality show back from the dead. Or, it tries to at least.

This season’s “Roadies” still band together in a tiny RV while driving through exotic locales in order to attempt elaborate and “extreme” challenges – car bungee jumping, wrestle alligators, be a human mannequin in a store window wearing only body paint. But, that’s about all that’s left of the initial premise.
Six strangers has morphed into six Road Rules alumni. The RV is still around, but it has a new name. Gone are the mission mayors – replaced with a bland but overly enthusiastic host. The biggest, and must obnoxious change, is an over-elaborate elimination system, which involves viewer participation and takes forever to explain in the premiere episode. The cast nominates one guy and one girl, the viewers then decide which one they would rather see leave, that person has to compete against a member of ‘The Pit Crew’ for their spot on the RV. And that’s the short version.

Road Rules is not the only reality show that eliminates its characters, and it’s not even a new concept to Road Rules (the show’s producers first added the elimination angle in season 11.) However, those other shows managed to keep some sort of continuity in the larger group by starting with a large number that gets dwindled down as the season progresses. Now a rotating cast of characters is virtually assured with the potential for elimination every week.

With the success of other MTV reality shows, which don’t kick people off every week – Laguna Beach – it seems an opportunity to go back to the basics was missed. Instead the setup is more complicated and unnecessary than ever. As enthusiastic as the alumni were to have Road Rules back, you’d think someone involved might have glanced at another season.

Road Rules 2007: Viewer’s Revenge airs Tuesday nights at 9 ET on MTV. The show reruns various times throughout the week. Photo courtesy of mtv.com