My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Also, if you want to know why I have such bile for King of the Nerds – watch this.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

The crowd was loud, and in orcish fashion, it was constantly teetering on the edge of a riot. Every orc jostled another orc in the tight quarters of the rocky defile, and every orc so jostled shoved and pushed right back. Even Dorral did his share of pushing and shoving; any orc who didn’t push got pushed, and Dorral knew that it wasn’t a good idea to be the only orc who got pushed and didn’t push back. His blood simmered with adrenalin, and he hoped that this “Truthspeaker” that Korb talked about in such glowing terms would come before the first fight broke out. Korb said that he was a stirring speaker, but this crowd was already stirred more than enough.

The crowd had just started to get rowdy enough to make Dorral start feeling around with his feet for a good-sized rock, when suddenly the shoving stopped and the roar grew to deafening proportions. Every head turned to face the lumpy boulder that acted as a makeshift podium for occasions like this. Fists rose in the air, and cries of “Truthspeaker!” echoed off the walls of the defile again and again. The group of sixty or seventy orcs sounded like five hundred as the Truthspeaker mounted the podium.

He didn’t look like much, to Dorral’s eyes. Dorral had never been the biggest or the strongest orc; his family relied on numbers as much as strength or skill to keep the bandits away. But this Truthspeaker looked like he could barely fend off a goblin raider. From the way Korb had described him, Dorral had imagined some sort of massive, broad-shouldered war chiftain who could snap the neck of a troll with one meaty fist. Yet the crowd chanted his name instead of bouncing rocks off his skull. It made Dorral nervous. He felt like the other orcs, the ones who had seen the Truthspeaker talk yesterday, knew something he didn’t.

The Truthspeaker stood on the podium for a long moment as the chants grew louder and louder, before finally raising his hands in the air. The chant stopped so quickly that Dorral’s ears rang with the silence of it. Then, after a pause that felt like an eternity of tension, the Truthspeaker finally began to speak.

“We are all the children of the One God!” he shouted. His voice boomed down the narrow valley, rolling like a thundercloud gathering strength. “Long before the First Age, before the race of Man awoke, our ancestors strode the world in glory!” The cheers of the crowd punctuated each sentence like an exclamation. “And we stood high in the favor of the One God. We stood as his chosen people. Do you remember it now, the name we once answered to?”

Dorral knew, but something in his heart made him still his tongue. He had no great wish for this Truthspeaker to notice him. He hadn’t felt a shove or a push since the Truthspeaker had began to talk, and the lack of it felt like the silence before a storm. He let Korb shout the word that echoed inside his head. “Elves!”

“Elves!” The Truthspeaker’s words sounded like honey, sickly sweet and dripping, but Dorral could hear the sting of bees behind them. “We have heard of elves. How could we not? They were once our brothers, our sisters. We know the legends of their boundless compassion, their sage wisdom, their bottomless love. We have all heard of the elves.” His voice trailed almost to silence, so soft that Dorral strained even to catch their echoes. “But who here has met an elf?”

The crowd erupted into guttural laughter. Dorral laughed too, at the thought of an elven rider trotting through knee-deep mud in the arse-end of the world to visit them. He’d heard of them, of course; there were always stories of raiding parties that had been driven off by elves, or elven sorties down past the border to punish over-bold raiders. But no elf would dare to venture this far south. Even if one found the courage, they had nothing the elves would want.

“Of course not!” the Truthspeaker shouted, and now the bees were stinging in earnest. “Their boundless compassion faded like the morning mist on the day the sun turned its eye from our features! Their bloodless features grew paler yet to behold our darkened skin! Their refined and delicate stomachs grew sick at our newfound hunger for meat! Our brothers…our sisters…our kinfolk! They saw our transformation, and the elves, with all their sage wisdom…they deemed it ‘corruption’! They deemed it ‘defilement’! Their bottomless love turned to scorn in he span of a single heartbeat!” His voice went from an angry shout to a calm, matter-of-fact tone. “Elvish fathers abandoned orcish sons, elvish mothers discarded orcish daughters. Corrupted and defiled we may be, but we can hold our heads higher than that.”

Dorral almost laughed again–he’d seen his mother abandon two children on the rocks rather than waste food nursing a sickly infant back to heatlh–but something told him to take a look around first. He glanced left, then right, and saw nothing but rapt and spellbound stares. The orcs in the crowd no longer saw a skinny little runt who could barely fight a goblin. They saw an ancient lineage, tracing back to the glory and majesty at the dawn of time itself. A proud heritage cruelly mistreated and neglected by their proud and arrogant cousins. The laughter died in Dorral’s throat as he realized that if it escaped his lips, the crowd would tear him limb from limb.

“And such was the shame of the elves at our imperfections that they punished us for their sins!” The Truthspeaker was in full flow now, his voice painting a picture that the crowd stepped into gratefully. “Did their elders and sages help us? Did they cure us? Did they give us even the hollow gift of pity, a place at the foot of their table?”

“NO!” The crowd shouted with a single voice. Dorral was grateful that nobody could hear him; his voice seemed to have died of fright.

“No!” the Truthspeaker responded. “They drove us from their shining cities! They expunged us from the land of our birthright! They drove us from their sight, lest the eyes of the elves be blighted with even a single reminder of their secret shame!” The crowd howled in anger; if even a single elf had found himself in the valley at that moment, a thousand deaths would not have been enough for him.

“But there are eyes other than the elves,” the Truthspeaker whispered, his voice somehow carrying over the din. “Our elvish kin have banished us from their sight, the eye of the sun now sears our skin…but there is an eye that watches us still. An eye that never blinks. The eye of one that has never forgotten his children, that has never wavered in his devotion to us…even as the elves and their lackeys, the dwarves and the men, tried their best to destroy him for it! But though they weakened him greatly, they could not destroy him. His burning eye has waited for ages to pass, for the elves to grow complacent and forgetful. And now, they have grown soft and decadent, lazing in their gilded towers, resting on their hoarded treasure that is ours by right…while we have become many! We have become strong! We have become mighty!”

The crowd’s roar was a palpable thing now, shaking Dorral like an earthquake. “Now, my friends, my brothers…now is the time for us to take back what is ours! Ours by right!”

“Ours by right!” the crowd cried back.

“Ours by birth!”

“Ours by birth!” the crowd cried back.

“Ours by blood!”

“Blood! Blood! Blood!”

“Now is the time, my brothers. The Burning Eye has opened at last…and his light will lead us from this cursed place to the shining heights of glory once again!” The Truthspeaker held both his hands high over his head, and between his cupped hands, Dorral could see a shimmer like a haze of heat over the mud flats on a summer day. It was faint, almost incorporeal, but Dorral knew it for what it was. A lidless, burning eye. Dorral felt like it pinned him to the spot. It stared at him and him alone, like it knew what he was thinking. Perhaps it did.

Dorral returned home that night and cleaned his sword, ignoring the questions of his family. He had never been much good with it, but he felt certain that he was about to get far too much practice.

So for those of you who do not follow wrestling: the Rock is back, and he is feuding with CM Punk. For some net.savvy wrestling fans, this is sort of problematic, because normally when INTARNET FAVRIT CM Punk is feuding with another wrestler, it is usually someone the internet does not like so much, like John Cena or Ryback. But the internet wrestling fandom is fond of the Rock, because the Rock, back in the day, was quite a fun wrestler before he went off to make movies. So this leads internet wrestling writers to write things like this if they do not like the Rock, or at least if they like CM Punk much better than the Rock. (Which people generally should. See this famous 2011 promo. Or this one from last week, now that he is a bad guy again, which is arguably even better.)

Last night on Raw, the Rock did his Rock Concert. Which is a nice way of saying that the Rock came out with his guitar and sung songs that were full of third-grade-level insults. It was a real “oh man nobody come into the room and see me watching wrestling right now” sort of moment, of the sort I normally only experience whenever Jerry Lawler opens his stupid fucking mouth to babble about pretty girls or make lame ethnic jokes.1 At first, I thought the worst bit would be when the Rock started making fat jokes about Paul Heyman, but then Rock decided to sing about how Vickie Guerrero is an ugly bitch whore. (No, quite literally.)

It is 2013. There is just no excuse for this crap any more. Not when you can see men and women wrestling against one another like equals:

(Seriously, watch the whole thing, it’s fucking awesome.)

But the worst bit of it is that the Rock should know better. He’s not a stupid man, nor is he particularly Neanderthalic in his social attitudes (as his role choices, candid interviews and general public persona have made apparent over the years). You don’t need to call Vickie Guerrero an ugly bitch whore when you can point out that she (well, her character, but you get the point) is selfish, conniving, egotistical, hypocritical and just plain mean. You don’t need to call Paul Heyman “Twinkle Tits” (which, coming from the Rock, who famously had pectoral surgery to get rid of his man-boobs early in his career, is a little… okayyyyyy) when you can point out that he is two-faced, dishonest, and always looks out for Number One above all else. You can mock people like a grownup.

1. Seriously, I am glad Jerry Lawler did not die from his heart attack. You know what he should do now? Take it easy on his heart and fucking retire forever. [↩]

1a. Which being created clues throughout space and time to ensure their own creation?
Bad Wolf

1b. Who saved at least one President and possibly many more?
Bad Dudes

1c. Who leads a conglomerate of villains much admired by doctors?
Bad Horse

1d. Who possesses numerous toys to compensate for their illiteracy?
Bad Religion (“21st Century Digital Boy”)

1e. Who pretended to each be the other in order to gain an informant’s trust?
Bad Boys

1f. When did a hunter suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder?
Buffy Summers in “When She Was Bad” (s1e2)

1g. Who felt they should have been born female due to their extreme beauty?
Johnny B. Badd

1h. Who dreams of helping to scrub space whales?
Strong Bad

1i. Which New Jersey food products are thirty-two ounces of in your face?
Milk and Cheese, Dairy Products Gone Bad

2a. Which alien was sentenced to spend time with cavemen as punishment for inventing a doomsday machine?
The Great Gazoo

2b. Which rich businessman detonated his livelihood to pursue a dream of performance?
Gonzo The Great

2c. Who bled so greatly that he inadvertently invented a unit of measurement for it?
The Great Muta

2d. What concept requires one to be a navigator across millions of worlds, all with too much of one and not enough of the other?
The Great River (from “Treachery, Faith and the Great River,” s7e6 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)

2e. What is it called when elders from every stedding meet to discuss and deliberate?
The Great Stump

2f. Who shackled the chosen one to the stone of triumph?
The Stonecutters (in “Homer the Great”)

2g. The mightiest of what race had a wingspan of over thirty fathoms?
The Great Eagles

2h. What would a newspaperman utter when startled?
“Great Caesar’s Ghost!” (or, alternately, “Great Shades of Elvis!”)

2i. What was dedicated to fifty dead men?
The Great Escape

3a. Who was trapped by her brother within a diamond-hard prison?
Monet St. Croix / Penance / M

3b. Where may you control the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Senator and the Tax Man?
Saint Petersburg (the card game)

3c. Who gave his people hope in the face of a dying star?
Saint Walker

3d. Who rose to prominence from criminal beginnings after the success of their own brand of energy drink?
The Third Street Saints

3e. Who were taught German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Gaelic, and French by their mother, and used it in their quest for justice?
The Boondock Saints

3f. What did Victor cry out on the sixteenth day?
Saint Victor exclaimed, “This…is fantastic! Oh…this is terrific!”

3g. Who spoke to the audience at the beginning of every episode?
The Saint

3h. Who created a group of assassins and named them after the angel of death?
The Order of St. Dumas

3i. Who ended up having boat drinks thanks to the actions of a man with a plan?
Jimmy The Saint

4a. Whose return led to a magical renaissance in England?
John Uskglass

4b. Which exhibitor suffered from osteogenesis imperfecta?
Mr. Glass

4c. What requires you to look into the Eye of Eternity?
The “Through A Glass, Darkly” Quest In World of Warcraft

4d. Who was responsible for introducing people to a life of thievery?
Looking Glass Studios

4e. In what work did four gunslingers arrive at Topeka?
Wizard and Glass

4f. What commences with a story about Kanubai?
The Serpent Bride by Sarah Douglass, first in the Darkglass Mountain Trilogy

4g. What is said to be effective against the walkers from the north?
Dragonglass

4h. What was the most important aspect of Castalian social life?
The Glass Bead Game

4i. What 70-ton machine was designed expressly to counter the threat of invading clans?
The Gallowglas-class heavy ‘Mech

5a. What film was a coming-out party for a dead man named Smedley?
Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things

4b. Which social butterfly found themselves forced into a difficult situation involving a super-suit?
Ms. Thing

4c. Who alternated twice between being a man, and being not a man?
Swamp Thing

4d. What killed the Norwegians first?
The Thing From Outer Space

4e. Who caused a man to find himself traveling through time, due to an anomaly which never existed?
Q in “All Good Things” (s7e22 of Star Trek: The Next Generation)

4f. From where do you return to find the hot supper your mother made waiting for you?
Where The Wild Things Are

4g. Whose secret rings of power were only known to his best friend’s little sister?
Benjy Grimm, Owner of The Thing Rings

4h. Who played a convict on death row who was able to escape his sentence thanks to an extremely unusual medical procedure?
Rosey Grier in The Thing With Two Heads

4i. What was the name of the Znutar‘s mascot?
The Ook / “dat Ook t’ing” in The Awful Green Things From Outer Space

6a. What was the ultimate goal of the research centre in Sprodj?
To send a rocket to the moon

6b. Who refused to wait for Eliza?
Sam Bell in Moon

6c. Who went to Las Vegas and returned alive?
Tom Cullen (M-O-O-N, that spells Tom Cullen)

6d. Who befriended and managed a collection of curious oddities?
Luna Vachon

6e. What was the last act of Circadia Senius before he was killed?
To launch a gravity module to replace the destroyed moon

6f. Who pursued two hunters through Heaven to satisfy his own agenda?
Zachariah in “Dark Side Of The Moon” (s5e16 of Supernatural)

6g. What company specializes in the construction of artificial memories for the dying?
The Sigmund Corporation (in To The Moon)

6h. Who created the hit TV show “Legends of the Khonshu”?
Marc Spector (Moon Knight)

6i. Who always had trouble finding work due to a problematic medical condition that was largely his father’s fault?
Remus Lupin (AKA “Moony”)

7a. What adventurer found that her secrets were preventing her from speaking clearly?
Haley Starshine

7b. Which ship was both the largest traditional capital warship ever when it was built, and an expression of tyrannical might?
The Super Star Destroyer Executor

7c. Whose would-be nemesis wished to raise their son as his enemy?
The Mist (in Starman)

7d. Who did not recognize his sentient ship when she took human form?
Peter Quill, the Star-Lord

7e. In the foretellings of a dead god, what was the instrument of prophecy to contain within her flesh?
“All the starry universe”

7f. Who was eventually revealed to be an angel, even though she denied it fiercely?
Starbuck

7g. Who swore to fight the Instrumentality for as long as he lived?
Vanth Dreadstar

7h. Who eventually became the immortal ruler of her husband’s kingdom?
Yvaine (in Stardust)

7i. Which ship cannabalized the fleet it was guarding for supplies?
The Battlestar Pegasus

—

So, this was a fun exercise, and I do believe I’ll repeat it again next year. (Now that I have an idea of how difficult this one was – expect next year to be much harder.)

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

(Major spoilers in this post, obviously, for the whole Wheel of Time series, and for the fourteenth book specifically. You have been warned.)

So my copy of A Memory of Light arrived on Tuesday and I basically spent the last week reading it, and – as the post title indicates – it is great. Basically the reason for this is that is pulls off a full Return of the Jedi juggle – by which I mean in Jedi, Richard Marquand and Sean Barton (and okay, George Lucas) spend the last third of the movie cutting back and forth between three exciting action sequences – the battle on Endor between the Ewoks/Rebels and Stormtroopers, the battle above Endor between the Rebel Fleet and the Imperial Fleet, and the battle in the Death Star between Vader, Luke and the Emperor – and the film does this while also using those action sequences to build in its character beats, which is why Jedi is a satisfying end to the trilogy.1

The reason AMoL is so fun is that it does what Jedi does, except instead of cutting in between three action sequences, it cuts in between as many as twenty to thirty.

But that’s hardly the only reason. AMoL is the final payoff for a fourteen-book-long cycle. Now, granted, this is the point in the discussion where the haters will all pop up to brag about how they quit at book nine or book seven or whatever2 but all they are doing is belaboring a point. I don’t think there is anybody who is really willing to stand up and say that the middle of the series doesn’t drag on and get tedious, because oh my do they ever.3 But that is the point I am making here: AMoL actually manages to make up for all of that wasted time and flabby middle-third writing, because it is simply just that entertaining. Just about every sequence in the nook is payoff for some element of the series – of course given that we’re talking about fourteen books that shouldn’t be surprising because, well, that’s a lot of elements to pay off – and because of that every part of the book is filled with grade-A one hundred percent fuckyeah.

Every baddie gets their comeuppance, of course, but the body count for the good guys is extremely high, like Pelennor Fields-level high (or even moreso since, let’s be honest, most of the named people who died in the Pelennor Fields weren’t characters with a lot of speaking time – and some very major characters end up biting it). The baddies are very, very bad and the book sells, mostly successfully, the entire Last Battle as a giant game of wits between the two sides, with both of them getting major tactical successes. Demandred finally shows up in this book after all of us waiting for thirteen books to wait and see how he was going to live up to the hype, and while Rand is off fighting the Dark One, Demandred serves as the Final Boss for basically everybody else in the book as the general of Evil Army and holy shit does he ever justify all his buildup.

Anyway. I’m glad I didn’t wait for the remainder bins on this one, because the entire book is like one extended guitar solo with lasers and fireworks and Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy and then more lasers. Not that I was going to do so (as I have previously admitted), so I guess it is more appropriate to say “I’m glad I bought it immediately and it justified the purchase.”

1. Yes, even though the Ewoks suck and Empire is the better film, yes, we know… [↩]
2. Or of course the ever-popular “I knew it sucked from the beginning!” [↩]
3. Generally speaking, the general agreement among people who like the series but are willing to be honest is that books five and six are bulky but still entertaining, book seven is where it starts to drag, books eight and nine are the low point, book ten shows a few signs towards the end of poking out of the molasses, and book eleven is where the series kicks back into high gear as if to make up for lost time. [↩]

When I said that to my wife a bit ago, she looked at me and said, “I have no idea what you mean by that.” I’m kind of assuming you feel the same way, so I’ll explain.

A traditional ‘alternate universe’ story, which is something that just about every sci-fi/fantasy series gets to from time to time, is like pornography in that it’s really just the same thing each time with very little variation. Each AU storyline purports to focus on a single point of divergence that has sent history down a different path…but the differences are never so great as to preclude instant audience identification. (For example, in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise”, twenty years of war with the Klingon Empire hasn’t resulted in any advances in technology beyond the Galaxy class starship, the Enterprise hasn’t been destroyed and replaced by the E or F, and all of the bridge crew have not only survived but have wound up in the exact same command positions on the exact same ship. Likewise, Giles is still assigned to the Hellmouth and despite the subtext of many episodes involving the idea that what separates Buffy from other Slayers who’ve died young is her friendships and connections with the everyday world, the only sign that Buffy is any less skilled as a Slayer is the little scar on her lip.)

The “twists” to this reality are designed, like porn, to provide simple and visceral thrills. They are less intended as logical consequence of any particular point of divergence as they are to give the audience the specific excitement of breaking well-established narrative rules. The premature death of Charles Xavier, for example, doesn’t lead to the dystopia ruled by Apocalypse because Charles Xavier did anything in particular, it leads to the dystopia ruled by Apocalypse because it’s the only chance that Marvel has to show a world where the bad guys won and the heroes are a desperate resistance movement. In the much later “Here Comes Tomorrow” storyline, Beast isn’t a villain because it’s a logical extension of Scott’s retirement from the team; he’s a villain because showing a fan favorite hero as the villain is a staple of alternate universe stories. (Another common trope is best exemplified in the ‘Magik’  series, where the cute and winsome Shadowcat is shown, in the alternate dimension of Limbo, as being a hardened warrior. The series also shows charming and friendly Nightcrawler as a lecherous villain…basically, you can chalk up 95% of alternate universe stories to the combinations of “set in a dystopian reality”, “well-liked hero is a villain”, “infamous villain is a good guy”, and “comic relief/peril monkey character is a total bad-ass”.)

And, like pornography, alternative universe stories have their own version of the “money shot”. If you accept the idea that the breaking of series narrative conventions in an AU story is the sci-fi/fantasy series equivalent of the sex in porn (and roughly the same amount of time is devoted in AU stories to showing how different and unexpected the alternative timeline is as is devoted to the sex in a porn movie), then the natural “climax” is the ultimate breaking of narrative convention, the death of characters who normally are given a protected status by their role in the story. Buffy is always safe in the Buffyverse (and possibly the only person who is)…so therefore, she has to die at the end of ‘The Wish’. ‘Days of Future Past’ has to end with a bloodbath, because it’s the only time Chris Claremont can get away with incinerating Wolverine, Storm, Colossus and Magneto in a single issue.

Does this mean that alternate universe stories are without merit? No. Like porn, there are wide variations in quality. (‘Days of Future Past’ would be qualified as “erotica” in this analogy, for example.) But it is worth remembering that stories like these always start out with a huge advantage in fan’s affections because that’s really all they’re intended to do. They are stories made to give long-term followers of the series “fangasms”, no more and no less.

BEST PICTURE: Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Miserables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty
Crashie Rating (out of 10): 3. Beasts of the Southern Wild is a giant fucking gimmick of a movie, but it’s harder to get irritated about Best Picture nominations when there are so many of them – good play, Academy! One notes that the “up to ten” gimmick for Best Picture has now changed its content, because this used to be an excuse to get mass-popular flicks into the Best Picture race, at least in appearance if not in substance, and this year the locks were Django, Zero Dark, Les Miz, Argo, Life of Pi (ugh, Life of Pi) and Lincoln, and instead of putting in The Avengers or something stupid like that, instead we get a couple of arthouse films (I haven’t seen Amour yet but I hear it is Critically Brilliant) and Silver Linings Playbook, which is pretty good. Would have liked to have seen Looper or Brave get the tenth slot, but oh well.

BEST DIRECTOR: Michael Haneke for Amour, Benh Zeitlin for Beasts of the Southern Wild, Ang Lee for Life of Pi, Steven Spielberg for Lincoln, David O. Russell for Silver Linings Playbook.
Crashie Rating (out of 10): 8. No Quentin Tarantino for Django is criminal; if you’re nominating Django for all those other awards then it is ludicrous not to give Tarantino a nod, but it looks like Django has pissed too many members of the Academy off because it committed the sin of having people in the 1850s South say “nigger” a lot when referring to black people, or something. (Yes, I know there are more serious criticisms of the movie. No, I don’t think the Academy members were really thinking about that.) Leaving off Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty smacks of “we gave the chick an award like, two years ago, what else do you want?” Ben Affleck definitely deserved a nod for Argo and that sucks too. See above for my feelings about Beasts of the Southern Wild and Life of Pi being overrated garbage.

BEST ACTOR: Bradley Cooper for Silver Linings Playbook, Hugh Jackman for Les Miserables, Daniel-Day Lewis for Lincoln, Joaquin Phoenix for The Master, Denzel Washington for Flight.
Crashie Rating (out of 10): 1. I thought Flight was a mediocre movie at best, but Washington’s performance is excellent and the only reason it is watchable other than the part where the plane crashes. There is basically nothing bad here. Maybe you would want to see John Hawkes get a nod for The Sessions – I did – but it’s not a criminal oversight to go with who they did.

BEST ACTRESS: Jessica Chastain for Zero Dark Thirty, Jennifer Lawrence for Silver Linings Playbook, Emmanuelle Riva for Amour, Quvenzhane Wallis for Beasts of the Southern Wild, Naomi Watts for The Impossible.
Crashie Rating (out of 10): 5. Wallis is a very cute child but she was not really “acting” in any sense of the word (as those involved in making the film have made quite clear) so… come on, acting is a THING, it’s not just “being onscreen while in a movie” or else Morgan Spurlock would be going for Best Actor nominations and I don’t think we can take that. Everyone else is a fine choice. But come on, Academy, have some standards.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Alan Arkin for Argo, Robert DeNiro for Silver Linings Playbook, Philip Seymour Hoffman for The Master, Tommy Lee Jones for Lincoln, Christoph Waltz for Django Unchained.
Crashie Rating (out of 10): 2. Basically this category has given up any pretense of being anything other than “the category for older, mostly white actors who we want to give an Oscar for either being the most entertaining bit of the movie or because they deserve a lifetime achievement award that isn’t just our lifetime achievement award.” Hoffman is this year’s attempt to try and disguise that fact. Samuel L. Jackson for Django would have been a far better choice to do that job, but eh.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Amy Adams for The Master, Sally Field for Lincoln, Anne Hathaway for Les Miserables, Helen Hunt for The Sessions, Jacki Weaver for Silver Linings Playbook.
Crashie Rating (out of 10): 1. Because does it really matter? We all know Anne Hathaway is winning. It’s not even going to be close, because she sang her big song in a Dramatic Single Take With No Edits.

MOVIES:

• Looper. Rock-solid performances from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt, a fun turn from Jeff Daniels (including the year’s best movie one-liner), and a plot that, while not scientifically consistent, delivered on the emotional arcs of all concerned while providing a healthy supply of action. Easily my favorite movie of 2012.
• Chronicle. I was gonna write something about how Chronicle is the only “superheroish” movie to really confront superhero tropes and how bullshit they frequently are, but someone else already did so, well, go read that I guess.
• Safety Not Guaranteed. Which, I suppose, makes two movies on my end-of-year favorites list that are about time travel, although the time travel is more of a side thing to the human stories they use it for. Which I prefer, frankly, to a dedicated time travel movie like Primer which simply seemed designed to give you a migraine.
• The Five-Year Engagement. I liked this because it was drawn-out and, for a romantic comedy that you know by design will have to have a satisfying ending, it was messy and relatively realistic about how real life so frequently gets in the way of relationships. Also it has a killer cast: Jason Segel, Emily Blunt (again? Is she gonna be in everything I like now? I mean, she was in The Adjustment Bureau and I liked that awfully), Alison Brie, Chris Pratt, Rhys Ifans… David Paymer, Jackie Weaver, Mindy Kaling… one could go on.
• Lincoln. I get the criticism that it is another movie about slavery that principally features white people, but that is not really a very astute criticism because this is not about slavery per se; this is a movie about politics, and how people are driven to use it to their ends, for good or ill. Daniel Day-Lewis lines up yet another well-deserved Oscar (unless Hugh Jackman gets it for Les Miserables, but that would be a traditional Oscar robbery) and Tommy Lee Jones steals every scene as Thaddeus Stevens.

TV:

• Key and Peele. It has been so long that I have had a sketch comedy show that I considered a must-watch that I almost forgot what it felt like, and it feels so good. Whenever anybody tells you a show other than Key and Peele was the funniest show of the year, this means one of two things: either they have not seen Key and Peele or they are A SECRET RACIST. Thus, Key and Peele is also useful for rooting out secret racism. I bet the Smothers Brothers couldn’t do that.
• Happy Endings. Not to dismiss more story-driven shows like Parks and Recreation or Community (both of which were brilliant this year, of course), but Happy Endings made Elisha Cuthbert into the funniest part of a very funny show, which seemed impossible a season ago, and besides it just packs more gags into every episode than just about any other show on television. Well, except
• Archer. Which has the same gag-per-minute ratio as Happy Endings or even better, plus an engaging ongoing plot line and, because it is animated, can do much wackier and more hilarious things. Burt Reynolds in real life is boring; Animated Burt Reynolds does kung fu.
• Fringe. Still epic in its last season as it barrels home to the close we’re all waiting for.
• Survivor. Two good seasons this year; One World had a clever gimmick, the worst human being in Survivor history in Colton, and a very deserving winner in Kim, who played an absolutely perfect game. Granted, against a male tribe who were total idiots, but even so. And then came Philippines, which, other than having a dreadful jury episode (after hopes were raised that this group of excellent and level-headed game players wouldn’t resort to being The Usual Bitter Jury) was as good as Survivor gets.
• Bunheads. Because it’s basically Gilmore Girls Earth-2 and really, there are few things I want less than that in this world.
• Game of Thrones. Because duh.

VIDYA GAMES:

• Dishonored. It is a first-person stealth game where you can teleport and the teleportation power is just about perfectly executed in the game’s control scheme. I was zapping all over the place in this game and loving the hell out of it, because the game astutely recognizes that, in real life, people rarely look up unless they are being alert and careful. The game’s level design gives you lots of freedom to pick your own path to your objectives, whether that is sneaking around like a clever bastard or murdering legions of schmucks with your awesome magic powers. Best stealth game since the original Thief.
• Mark of the Ninja. No, wait, this is the best stealth game since the original Thief – this 2D platform/sidescroller is a near-perfect stealth game, with lots of cool ways to play each level, gorgeous character animations (I was shocked to discover that Genndy Tartakovsky was not involved with the project as it felt very him), and a good storyline. Wonderful little game. I actually bothered to replay it, which I almost never do any more.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown. So fucking good. Purists who whine about how it is not exactly like the original need to be hit with a baseball bat.
• The Walking Dead. Critics will complain that this was mostly an interactive movie rather than a game, but so what? It was a supremely involving interactive whatever-it-was – the relationship between Lee and Clementine felt so real as to be downright visceral as you watched it. So, so good.
• Civilization V: Gods and Kings. Although I hope they have at least one more major expansion for Civ V in the works before they move on to Civ VI, this expansion put a lot more of the complexity of Civ IV that was missing from the game and stuffed it back in. Civ V still isn’t as complex as IV was – but it’s getting there. (The AI could still be better, but Civ is always Civ no matter what.)

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

And that is how we wrap up issue five of the comic.

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Voting is now open for the 2012 rec.sport.pro-wrestling awards.

Following the nominations period, we have compiled all of the nominations into pulldown menus to make voting faster and easier (since the pulldown menus should include most, if not all, of the most popular candidates for each award), while still allowing for write-in votes for those who don’t see their favorite choices as nominees. (Write-in votes are equal in value to nominated votes, for those wondering.) We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. We’ve also given fans the opportunity to include their own commentary on their voting choices for each award or just The State of Wrestling in General in 2012, if you like: those comments can be sent to rspw@mightygodking.com.

(Also we did images because it is 2013 and maybe we should have pictures on our internet, how about that.)

The deadline for getting votes in is January 23, 2013. We’ll hope to have the results up before the end of January.

All thanks are due to :

• James “The MGKDotCom Tech Guy” Young for helping set this up
• Justin Henry and Mad Conservative Crimefighter for keeping the RSPW Awards alive as well as helping us set up the nominations process this year
• Herb Kunze, Christopher Robin Zimmerman, and everybody else who ran the Awards in previous years
• Scott Keith, Brandon Stroud, Chris Sims, Pudie from Wreddit, and everybody else who was eager to assist in getting the word out on this year’s Awards
• and you! Because you’re special.