If you aren’t reading John Leavitt and co.’s fun Time 2 Travel tumblr, you should. This was my contribution.

BEST PICTURE: The Artist is a lock, because audiences are crazy for this film’s simulation of nostalgia. (It has all the blissful reverie with half the calories, and unlike those other terrible foreign films you don’t have to read any subtitles!) The Descendants will get in, ditto Hugo and Moneyball. I’m sure about those four. Midnight In Paris probably gets in because it’s Woody Allen’s first actual entertaining film in god knows how long. The Oscars have a lengthy track record of confusing “long and pretentious” with “good” so I figure The Tree of Life makes it into this category. That’s six. Let’s round it out with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Help, which people like for reasons which are sadly not a mystery. I really don’t think there’ll be enough films getting votes to have ten BP nominees this year. Unless the Academy really loved fucking War Horse more than anybody else who saw it who wasn’t a film critic (seriously, I have never seen such a divide between critical opinion and popular opinion as with respect to War Horse. ATTENTION CRITICS: Armond White fucking loved stupid old War Horse. This should have been a big old hint.)

RESULTS: The Artist, The Descendants, Moneyball, Hugo, Midnight In Paris, The Tree of Life, The Help, War Horse and Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close? The FUCK? Jesus Christ, Academy, that movie was shit and people did not like it and critics mostly didn’t either. I don’t get you, Academy.

BEST DIRECTOR: Whoever directed The Artist, because it is so precious and it is such an achievement! Alexander Payne for The Descendants, because it is honestly good and Payne deserves a nomination. Woody Allen, because it’s been a while since he got a nomination and the Academy is mostly made of old people who want things to be like they were when they were kids. Martin Scorcese for Hugo, so he can do what he typically does: not win. (And unlike many Scorcese nominations, this time the not-winning will be richly deserved. Hugo isn’t bad, but it sure isn’t the achievement people are making it out to be.) And probably Terrance Malick for The Tree of Life, because wank wank wank wank wank wank wank. David Fincher deserves a nomination for Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but that shit is not gonna happen, I don’t think.

RESULTS: The Artist guy, Payne, Allen, Scorcese, Malick. This one was easy to predict. At a certain point you get cynical and, as a result, correct about things Oscar.

BEST ACTOR: Clooney for The Descendants and Pitt for Moneyball are both locks, because they are Hollywood royalty and both nominations would be deserved. Jean Dujardin for The Artist, which I am reliably informed will make you believe in miracles again and also cure gout. Michael Fassbender for Shame in the “this is very serious and we must nominate somebody in this movie for being fierce and honest and reminding us that going to the movies should be like going to the dentist” category. That leaves one slot, and it could go to Leo for J. Edgar despite the fact that the movie was terrible and everyone agreed it was terrible, mostly because Clint Eastwood commands that kind of loyalty amongst the people who vote for awards. (Hey, remember how a perfectly average film like Invictus got multiple acting nominations?) However, I’ll bet on a longshot: Brendan Gleeson for The Guard. Because why not. (Gary Oldman for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is also quite possible and more plausible than Gleeson, really, but fuck it.)

RESULTS: Clooney, Dujardin, Pitt, Oldman, and Demian Bichir from A Better Life, which trends off the SAGs. No Fassbender? Huh. I guess 2012 is a feely-goody year for Oscar.

BEST ACTRESS: Viola Davis for The Help, because racism is bad. Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady, because everybody loves Meryl Streep (and not undeservedly), even when she is in a bad movie, and isn’t it time she had another Oscar already, even if we all missed like four or five much better oportunities to give her one (I’m looking at you, LAST YEAR WHEN SANDRA BULLOCK WON). Glenn Close for Albert Nobbs, because she dressed up like a man in a very unconvincing and boring movie, and that must have been a lot of work. Tilda Swinton for We Need To Talk About Kevin because she is this year’s female entry in the Michael Fassbender category mentioned above. Again, one slot left, and it’ll go to a young actress because look at all these acclaimed older actresses, what good are they? So either Michelle Williams for My Week With Marilyn (which is a bad movie, but Michelle Williams has been in so many good ones that she deserves a pass) or Rooney Mara for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but if I had to pick I’d go with Williams because Hollywood isn’t ready for edgy movies about girls with nose rings and stuff in the Academy Awards.

RESULTS: Close, Streep, Williams, Mara, Davis. My comment about Swinton being this year’s lady Fassbender was correct, but in the wrong way.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Christopher Plummer for Beginners is a lock and should win because he is old and has had a damn brilliant career, and I am rooting for my fellow Torontonian. Kenneth Branagh is widely considered to be a lock for My Week With Marilyn, as is Albert Brooks for Drive, and can you believe none of these guys has ever won an Oscar? That is crazy. Let’s see, who else? Jonah Hill for Moneyball? Could happen. And I’m gonna go into left field and predict that Ryan Gosling gets a nom here for Crazy Stupid Love, because Ryan Gosling had an incredible year but he’s not going to win anything.

RESULTS: Plummer, Branagh, Hill, Nick Nolte for Warrior (which was a good performance in a good movie, but come on) and Max von Sydow for Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, and all nominations of this sort should from now on be referred to as Ghost. As in “I can’t believe they nominated the shitty 9/11 movie for Best Picture, that’s so Ghost.“

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Whatsername who was in The Artist and OH GOD do I ever hate that movie so much. I want to punch everybody involved in the making of The Artist in the face. I am owed that, dammit. Also Jessica Chastain and Octavia Spencer for The Help, because racism is bad. Shailene Woodley has some mojo for The Descendants, so why not. Finally, let’s finish with Janet McTeer in Albert Nobbs, who is getting a lot of praise for dressing up like a man in a boring, boring movie.

RESULTS: Berenice Bejo for The Artist, McTeer, Chastain, Spencer, and Melissa McCarthy for Bridesmaids, which almost but not quite makes up for all of the other shitty nominations this year.

THE ACTUAL BEST FILMS OF 2011 WERE, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER: The Muppets, 50/50, Win-Win, A Better Life, Attack the Block, Crazy Stupid Love, The Guard, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Fright Night, Moneyball, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Captain America: The First Avenger, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Young Adult.
NUMBER OF NOMINATIONS IN THE “BIG SIX” CATEGORIES THOSE FILMS WILL GET: Not a lot of them

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Recently, the whole “Nice Guy” topic came up again, well after the initial post had become a thing of legend. Many people jumped in on the new discussion, but it always seems like the same people respond in the same way. The phrase, “Yes, they’re being jerks, but they’ve got a point…” keeps getting bandied about in these conversations, with one user posting an old joke about the supposed underlying truth behind the complaints that Nice Guys have. As I am not yet an accomplished disembowler of bad ideas, I thought I might take a practice run at this one…anyone else want to join me behind the cut?

So far:

• Chuck Norris
• TaleSpin
• Abiogenesis
• True Story Swear to God
• Final Fantasy XIII
• Hetalia: Axis Powers
• Gorgeous George
• Ex nihilo
• Costa Concordia disaster
• List of unusual deaths (I sometimes read this when I’m bored)
• Adolfo Tapia
• List of websites participating in January 18 SOPA protests (d’oh!)
• Sliders

One clear lesson from this event is that I can kind of live without Wikipedia, which may run counter to the stated goal.

Also: If you try visiting any of Wikipedia’s pages, you’ll notice the article appears in full for about half a second before the standard blackout message appears, without redirecting to a new page.  That would suggest the blackout is being implemented with client-side scripting, and that I could probably override the whole thing with GreaseMonkey.  But that’s too much work just to check who replaced Jerry McConnell in the last season, or whether the guy on Sliders was even named  “Jerry McConnell.”

So today Wikipedia and Reddit and WordPress and a bunch of other sites have all “gone dark” for 24 hours to protest SOPA. They’re right to do so and if you’re one of my American readers, you should make sure you voice your opposition to the bill. Not least because it would be exceptionally easy for me to get SOPA-blacklisted. After all, I am foreign (from an American perspective), and I make use of an exceptional amount of copyrighted material.¹ That it might be fair use is besides the point: SOPA does not discriminate. Why, I could be SOPA-blacklisted just for embedding this awesome tribute video to La Parka, who as we all know is the greatest wrestler of all time (as well as a brilliant political pundit).

Now, granted, if La Parka were President²³ he would just hit Jim DeMint with a chair and do a little dance and then SOPA would fail, because that is what La Parka does. But since La Parka is not President, it is instead up to you American readers to put down your RC Colas⁴ and get up and make yourselves heard. Although you probably shouldn’t hit Jim DeMint with a chair. I suspect that would not turn out well, and you probably wouldn’t even get to do the little dance.

1. Ironically, the reason I swore to forever host myself on a Canadian server was so that I could avoid unfair takedowns under the DMCA. American copyright law on the internet: It never stops getting worse! [↩]
2. Having found a way to get past the natural born citizenship requirement, of course. [↩]
3. NOT THAT THIS STOPPED SECRET KENYAN MUSLIM PRESIDENT BARRY SOETERO!!!!!!11!!!1!!!one! [↩]
4. Or whatever Americans drink. [↩]

Macleans has been getting a lot of hits the past week for its 99 Ways The Government Wastes Your Money series of posts, which is about what you’d expect from Macleans, a magazine that for the most part started downhill in the late 90s and never looked back, instead deciding to celebrate itself for championing free speech by publishing Mark Steyn’s vaguely racist twaddle instead of, and this is just a thought, publishing a counter to it.¹

But, even by the standard of “look at all the ways government wastes your money” articles, this one is really amazingly slapdash. First off, it’s just a laundry list of governmental spending at all levels: municipal, provincial, federal, et cetera. This makes it sort of meaningless, because the article isn’t a complaint about how a specific government wastes money. It’s a general complaint. It’s like writing “99 Reasons We Hate Cloudy Days And Not Looking at Puppies.” It’s generic and doesn’t actually describe any specific solution. It’s just free-form bitching. When Jim Demint writes Here Is 350 Instances Of Government Spending That I Hate, Vol. 6, he at least makes sure to stick to the federal government, because then he can actually use his findings – intellectually bankrupt as they may be – to make something resembling a point.

Worse, it’s free-form bitching that’s all over the place. The article conflates government spending that is wasteful (giving a high-paid management official an enormous pension, for example) and government spending that is malfeasant (the Tories spending government funds to advertise their policy initiatives in the run-up to the most recent election) and government spending on subsidies, economic stimulus and infrastructure that the writers even admit might have purpose, but hey it’s a recession and we all need to tighten our belts and yadda yadda yadda (spending money to build a footbridge in rural Quebec). This is ridiculously sloppy. It’s getting offended at the government spending money not because the writers object to the government spending in any particular way (wastefully, borderline illegally, to promote policies with which they disagree, whatever) but because whatever, it’s gubmint spendin’ and gubmint is baaaaaaad.

But worst of all, it’s free-form bitching without context. We ran a budget deficit of about $33 billion in Canada in fiscal 2010-2011. The spending Macleans is bitching about adds up to maybe a couple of hundred million dollars, using the most generous math and the largest figures for each item. But it`s worth remembdering that the Tories`GST cut is probably responsible for at least $10 billion of that deficit. If runaway government spending existed – and that is a premise Macleans has most certainly not proven – it is to some extent a manufactured problem. Not acknowledging this is bad journalism. But these days, unfortunately, one expects little more from a cover story in Macleans.

1. Seriously, the constant backpatting by Andrew Coyne during the whole Steyn thing was kind of nausea-inducing. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

A sixty-second remake of The Thing but with Pingu?

Hey, remember the “Internet Nice Guy” post from 2007? Well, it still gets traffic and the occasional comment, and I felt I should share this one, from “doesntmatter” (although I added some paragraph breaks to his wall of text):

So funny how everbody jumps on the bandwagon an the females aplaud the author for being totally one sided and saying exactly what they want to hear, while he totally disregards the other side of the story, that some females indeed are bitches who just use males when they are in the need, e.g. if their asshole boyfriend dumped her again (because he just wanted sex and nothing more, and that was clear from the beginning for everyone except for her), perfectly knowing that the guy they are using is loner who wants a girlfriend (and sex, of course) and will do pretty much anything for her, and instead of saying “You? Never!” or just talking to another person they just throw him away after use and forget it.

TL;DR: There are always two sides to a story, and it DOES matter if you are in a relationship and can talk down to people who are not, or if you are part of the folks which are not in a relationship and try like crazy to get into one only to see all their efforts crumble to dust. A rich man can lightly say that money does not really matter in life, while the poor man will certainly say the opposite. So don’t be so fucking full of yourselves because you were lucky and others were not.

Have fun with it, everybody!

In email, colby (from Survivor? We may never know) asks

Why is Sinestro so popular now? Up until a few years ago he was the dorky evil ex-Lantern, but now he’s one of the most popular villains DC has. Maybe even one of the most popular characters. Why did that happen?

Hey, remember the early 1990s, when antihero villains like Venom became so popular because they were basically like the heroes they fought except they were total badasses, because they had a good (if brutal and unsympathetic) point? Take that as your starting point. Then recall that over the last decade, DC has gradually made it more and more clear that the Guardians of the Universe are now conspiratorial baddies. Therefore, when Sinestro rebelled against them, he had a point. And unlike Venom, who had to compete with Spider-Man (who is beloved by nerds), Sinestro only has to compete with Hal Jordan, and I am not the only person out there who loathes Hal Jordan.

That’s why.