The Academy Awards

Reporting virtually live from Los Angeles*, Alas Yorick can feel the electricity in the air, as Hollywood begins its annual orgy of self-congratulatory award-giving known as the Oscars. The red carpet is ... well, actually it's still kind of early, so no red carpet yet. But we can still make some predictions, although I should point out that the predictions will be made a bit more difficult by the fact that I have seen very very few of these movies. I'll note which ones I've seen as I go along.

Let's see, Best Picture. Hmm, won't be "The Queen," nobody's interested in giving awards to movies about flamboyant gays, I mean "Priscilla Queen of the Desert" didn't win, did it? "Babel" and "Letters from Iwo Jima" -- what's with all this foreign stuff? "The Departed" is about dead people or something? No way. So I predict "Little Miss Sunshine" -- coincidentally the only one of these movies I've seen.

Best Actor? Let's see, there's one androgynous wimp (Leonard DiCaprio), he won't win. Forrest Whitaker and Will Smith will split the black vote so they won't win. Besides, what is Whitaker doing in a movie about Scotland? Animals never win Oscars, so Ryan Gosling is out of luck. Guess that leaves Peter O'Toole -- plus, they owe him big time. You can bank on it.

Best Actress? They won't give it to Meryl Streep because she was in a movie about Satan worship, far as I can tell. Penelope Cruz is hot, but she speaks a foreign language in a foreign language movie, so she might as well stay at home. Helen Mirren and Judi Dench will split the Old English Actress vote, so Kate Winslet, the only Young English Actress in this category, will win for being in some movie about kindergarteners.

Best Director? I'm kind of hazy on what directors do. Is is something to do with guiding traffic around the set? Sounds over-rated. Some Spanish dude won't win for "Babel," and what the hell is Clint Eastwood doing directing movies about the Japanese postal service? So he won't win. Paul Greengrass has an optimistic name, but films about aviation are boring. I mean, was there something special about that flight? The number sounds vaguely familiar, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Again, something do do with the flamboyant gay thing (or is it a biopic about Freddy Mercury), so that guy won't win. Guess that leaves Scorcese for his movie about dead people, or is "The Departed" actually about airports and planes that have already taken off?

Best Supporting Actor. Hey, I've seen one of these performances! Alan Arkin was great in "Little Miss Sunshine" as the drug-sniffing, porn-perusing, stip-club-frequenting crazed grandfather we all wish we could have had. The rest have no chance, again somebody with Earle as a middle name in a movie about kindergarten can't win. Some foreign dude in a movie called "Blood Diamond," which I guess is a movie about vampiric jewelry -- might be fun, but foreign dudes don't win unless they are English or Australian foreign dudes, who at least speak English and have names that don't look funny to American judges, like Hugh Grant. Wahlberg plays a dead person, no can win. Eddie Murphy was probably really funny in "Dreamgirls," which I believe was about female children who sleep a lot, boring.

Best Supporting acress features TWO MORE foreigners with weird names (Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi, whose mother was an ice cleaner at a hockey rink), the sort of people the Academy nominates to look inclusive but never actually picks. Cate Blanchett is nominated, but for a movie about scandals apparently, besides only one English woman with a name that rhymes with "mate" can win in an evening. I HAVE seen "Little Miss Sunshine" and the girl Abigail Breslin was really good, but Hollywood doesn't give awards to kids. That leaves Jennifer Hudson but will the Academy give an award to a black woman in a movie about sleeping kids? I predict a FIVE-WAY TIE, an unprecedented event.

For some of the other categories... I guess the Academy will give it to Gore for his inconvenient truth. Original Score will go to "A Good German" because of the epic sweep of its oom-pah-pah soundtrack that has toes tapping from Heidelberg to Rostock. "No Time for Nuts" will NOT win best animated short because many of the Academy voters assume the makers are referring to THEM, so one of the other ones will win, and nobody really cares which one. Maybe "The Little Matchgirl" because we all like stories about enforced child labor in sub-freezing conditions resulting in an inspirational death that is fine as long as it isn't MY kid snuffing it.

Original Screenplay is easy. "Babel" won't win because it's misspelled (should be "babble"). "Letters from Iwo Jima" is boring (watch a Japanese mail clerk sort letters, woohoo). "Pan's Labyrinth" won't win because it is based on a ride at Six Flags Over Texas (isn't it?). "The Queen" has a chance because sometimes films about flamboyant gays can be entertaining, but I think "Little Miss Sunshine", which I happened to see, will deservedly win.

So, there you have it. Not too late to place some bets on the Oscar action. Feel free to send me a share of your winnings.

*Surely, some of the electrons used to post this will go thru LA, right? Close enough. I mean, have you priced air tickets from Canberra to Los Angeles lately?

Australian Vocabulary Lessons (IV -- special "S" edition)

More lessons in Australia's unique version of English. I've heard all of these words in daily conversation and/or on TV and radio. Hit the links for the real answers, and try them on your friends and neighbors.

Stoush (noun): A) a fight or brawl; B) a foul-smelling by-product from brewing beer that kills fish when poured into rivers, but tastes good on toast; C) the formal name of Tasmania's state legislature

Shonky (adjective): A) of dubious quality, unreliable, dishonest; B) of or relating to the Shonk neighborhood of Brisbane, infamous for its crime rate; C) the word used to describe a foul-smelling by-product from brewing beer that kills fish when poured into rivers, but tastes good on toast

Spruik (verb): A) to manufacture a foul-smelling by-product from brewing beer that kills fish when poured into rivers, but tastes good on toast; B) to hit the uprights on an attempted goal in Australian Rules Football (similar to "to choke"); C) to promote in public, to advocate something

Washington's Speech

Very cool news that Maryland has the original of George Washington's 1783 speech to the Continental Congress resigning his commission as head of the Continental Army. Why was it important? It was an example of a powerful general voluntarily recognizing civilian superiority -- nearly unprecedented in 1783 and still rare enough.

Maryland will display the speech in the state capital, Annapolis, thanks to the generosity of donors who contributed $1 million to pay for the document, and the generosity of the anonymous sellers who took $500,000 less than assessed market value.

It's good that such an important piece of America's political history will remain in the public view, rather than ending up in some millionaire's private stash.

(Inner) Mongolia Comes to Canberra

Canberra has an annual multicultural festival and one of the events was a performance last week by the Inner Mongolia National Song and Dance Troupe. This was sponsored by the Chinese Embassy -- "Inner Mongolia" is the part of the traditional Mongol lands that is now located within China's borders. Reflecting the increasing sinicization of Inner Mongolia (80% ethnic Mongol in 1900, something like 20% now due to Han Chinese immigration), all of the performers but one had CHINESE names, not Mongolian. But still, I must say they looked basically Mongolian.

But one dancer looked exactly like Chiaki Kuriyama, the Japanese actress who played the psycho schoolgirl killer G0-Go Yubari... fortunately, without the weapon.

It was a pretty good show. Lots of dance -- whether it was "traditional" Mongolian dance I really can't tell, because I don't know squat about dance, but they certainly didn't feature the Buddhist tsam mask dances that I recall from Mongolia. At least a couple of numbers didn't seem very "Mongolian" to me -- for example, something called the "Pagoda" Dance with a dozen women dancing with a stack of bowls on their head. Never saw anything like that in my time in Mongolia. And another dance that at one point featured the ladies going "cuckoo ... cuckoo." Huh?

Some of the costumes seemed a bit odd to me. One routine featured a half-dozen guys as "wrestlers" dancing. Their outfits looked like an elaborate exaggeration on the traditional Mongolian wrestling outfit, which is basically a blue pair of shorts shaped like briefs, and a short sleeveless vest, the purpose of which is to leave no doubt that none of the participants are women. Another performance had the same guys in something vaguely resembling the dress uniforms of the Mongolian Army, carrying urgaa (long poles with loops on the end, serves as a Mongolian lasso) and dancing energetically as if they were riding horses. But the dancing was entertaining, even if I'm still uncertain of its authenticity. (Frankly, at times I was thinking of the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii, a Mormon-run place with Disneyfied depictions of Polynesian music and dance featuring students from the Pacific Islands who are on scholarship at Brigham Young's Hawaii campus. )

However, there was no doubt as to the authenticity of the standout performances of the evening. Four men sang a couple of Mongolian numbers, later joined by four women singing some songs that were beautiful and reminiscent of the steppe.

But the highlight, the part of the show that must have been the most foreign to the Aussies in the audience, was the sextet that played the Mongolian horse-headed fiddle and other instruments, and featured throat-singing, aka khoomei. That is a "singing" where a man (although nowadays a few women are studying the art) produce a low, guttural rumble and a high-pitched whistle -- at the same time. The horse-headed fiddle is a bow instrument, with only two strings made of horse hair. It's incredible the variety of music you can get out of such a simple instrument. Anway, these six played and sang for 20 minutes and entranced the audience. When they finished, people rose to their feet -- the only standing O of the evening. The rest of the show was very good, but THIS was the true highlight, a wonderful exhibition of a type of music unique to Mongols and their cousins, the Tuvans.

John Howard vs. Barack Obama

I must admit to being surprised by PM John Howard's comments about US Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. In case you missed it, in response to a question on a Sunday morning press show, Howard said that Al-Qaeda were "praying" for Obama or another Democrat to win in 2008, and had put a circle on March 2008, a reference to Obama's proposal to withdraw American troops from Iraq by that date. (Actually, I do think Howard is wrong about that -- the presence of American troops in Iraq makes it easier for them to recruit potential new terrorists.)

It is unusual for a senior Australian politician to take a public stance on a domestic American political issue, so the Howard vs. Obama thing has gotten a LOT of press in Australia -- all over the front pages and editorial pages for the past couple of days, along with Obama's retorts. Seems the consensus find Howard's intervention to not be wise, pointing out that the alliance with the US is the most important thing in Australia's security policy, and that maybe it isn't smart to get into trading insults with the person and party that may occupy the White House beginning in January 2009.

All very odd and amusing, and a rare instance of the Australian PM hitting the American newspapers.

Austronauts in Love

This Astronauts in Love story is great stuff. How long before the TV movie? Surely this has everything a cheesy TV movie needs -- sex, violence, diapers, and an astronautical love-triangle.

Who will play the diaper-clad astronaut who drives 900 miles, intent on killing her younger rival for Buzz Lightyear’s (or whatever the male astronaut was called) affections? I peg John Turturro for the male astronaut role (look at the photo in the link). Maybe Holly Hunter for the lead female astronaut role, but I'm open to suggestions.

Also, would a space-farer born and raised Down Under be called an Austronaut?