Stuff

- Thanks to all who congratulated me on the Screengrab gig. It's actually my first paying job writing about cinema, so it should be a learning experience at least. The good news is that Bilge Ebiri has been pretty cool to work for thusfar, and unless I start fucking up there should be no reason why that should change. I'm even going to have a weekly column every Thursday, entitled "The Movie Moment" (sort of a last-minute compromise title), about scenes I love. My first Moment was from Frank Tashlin's THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT (1956), which everyone really ought to see. I'm also "live"-blogging the Oscars™- the quotation marks are due to the fact that Screengrab only posts Monday through Friday. All the same, I'll write as I watch and then send in more or less everything I've written afterwards. It's like watching the Oscars™ with me... only, y'know, not.

- And speaking of Oscars™, I also posted a partial list of prediction on Screengrab Wednesday as my introductory post. But in case you missed it, here's the full list:

Picture- Babel (ugh)
Director- Scorsese
Actor- O'Toole
Actress- Mirren
Supporting Actress- Hudson
Supporting Actor- Arkin
Original Screenplay- Babel
Adapted Screenplay- The Departed
Animated Feature- Cars
Art Direction- Pan's Labyrinth
Cinematography- Children of Men
Costume Design- Marie-Antoinette
Documentary Feature- An Inconvenient Truth
Documentary Short Subject- Rehearsing a Dream (I have no idea what this is about, but winners in this category always have titles like this)
Editing- Babel
Foreign-Language Film- Pan's Labyrinth
Makeup- Pan's Labyrinth
Score- The Queen
Song- "Our Town," Cars
Animated Short Subject- Lifted
Live-Action Short Subject- Binta and the Great Idea
Sound Effects Editing- Flags of Our Fathers
Sound Mixing- Dreamgirls
Visual Effects- Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

- Aside from the Rivette retrospective in April, the Wexner Film/Video event I'm most looking forward to this spring is the Jim Henson series next month. All the biggies are here, of course- The Muppet Movie, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth- but they also have a bunch of rarities and behind the scenes stuff scheduled, plus Henson's one stab at Oscar, TIME PIECE, of which I believe this guy is a big fan. Should be pretty much un-missable.

- Finally, just wanted to announce that all of the individual pages are up at the Muriel Awards web site. So if you want to see how everyone voted, get there now before someone second-guesses his votes and asks for them to be taken down...