My Oscar Predictions: How Did I Do?

Plus: My Take on Some Categories You’ve Never Heard Of

I know you are dying to hear my thoughts on the Oscars and to find out, if you don’t know already, how my predictions panned out. So, here you go…

Best Movie: Yes, I said Everything Everywhere would take home the Oscar. A no-brainer (even though it really should not have won).

Best Director: I was right. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert won for Everything Everywhere. Alas, one of the greatest directors of our time (Spielberg) lost to them.

Best Cinematography: I knew James Friend would win because he did such amazing work on All Quiet. I would have preferred Frank van den Eeden, because of the riveting depth he gave to Close. But he wasn’t even nominated.

Best Actor: This Oscar should have gone to Bill Nighy in Living or Paul Mescal in Aftersun. (Although Austin Butler was pretty good, too, as Elvis.) But, as I predicted, it went, of course, to Brendan Fraser.

Best Actress: Michelle Yeoh was, along with everyone else in Everything Everywhere, the odds-on favorite. And she won. Ho hum. She wasn’t bad. But Cate Blanchett and Andrea Riseborough were better. (I liked Yeoh’s comment in her acceptance speech: “Ladies, never let anyone tell you that you are past your prime.”)

Best Supporting Actor: I said that Ke Huy Quan would win, and he did. But not because of his performance. It was because the Academy wants a sweep and is nostalgic for a comeback story. My pick would have been Brendan Gleeson. Actually, I think Barry Keoghan was even better.

Best Supporting Actress: All of the nominees were very good. (It was the best group in this category that I can remember.) I correctly said the Oscar would go to Jamie Lee Curtis, even though I would have given it to Kerry Condon.

Best Original Screenplay: I predicted The Banshees, though I would have preferred Triangle of Sadness. But the Oscar went to Everything Everywhere. How I got that wrong, I can’t explain. I guess I thought they had to give Banshees something.

Best Adapted Screenplay: I correctly predicted that All Quiet (which should have won) would be beat out by Women Talking, because Hollywood believes that sort of script deserves to win something.

Best Animated Feature: I was right again. The Oscar went to Pinocchio. A worthy choice, although I think Puss in Bootswas equal to it.

Best Documentary Feature: This one was easy. Navalny was destined to win. It was very good. But I thought All the Beauty and the Bloodshed was a tad better.

Best International Feature: Another easy call. Because All Quiet was also nominated for Best Picture, there was no chance that a better film, Argentina, 1986, would get more votes in this lesser category.

My Score: 11 out of 12 

Bonus Categories 

Most Common Adjective of the Night: Beautiful

 Second Most Common Adjective: Incredible

Best Mindless Moment: Lady Gaga explaining why her track for Top Gun (“Hold My Hand”) is important and more meaningful than the mediocre lyrics suggest.

Best Sentence in an Acceptance Speech: From Ruth E. Carter (who won Best Costume Design), referring to the passing of her mother, at 101, as “becoming an ancestor.”

Best German Moment: Edward Berger’s thank-you speech for All Quiet. (If you don’t get it, you don’t know the Germans.)

Another Great Thank-You Moment: Matthew Freud, accepting (with Charlie Mackesy), the award for Best Animated Short: “I know the protocol is to say thank you a lot, but I’m British, so instead I’ll say sorry.”

Lamest Speech: Bill Cramer, representing the Academy, talking about the awards that nobody is interested in.

Weirdest Commercial: Snapchat. What was that about?

Most Inclusive Commercial: Applebee’s. (And why not?)

Best Back-Walking Moments: The commercials about COVID (how it’s actually dangerous only for fat people) sponsored by Pfizer.

Most Narcissistic Statement: “Thank you so much to everyone who has unlocked my genius.” (Daniel Kwan in his acceptance speech for Best Director)

Most Pretentious Moment: There were too many to fairly choose from.

What a pleasant day Friday was for me. I had two tickets to see Hugh Eakin speak about Picasso’s War, his fantastic account of how modern art came to America, at the Norton Museum in nearby West Palm Beach. (You can read my review of the book here.)

K was out of town, so I asked M, Number Three Son and fellow art lover, to join me.

I was expecting an elderly, slightly disheveled Oxford-donnish fellow to appear. Instead, Mr. Eakin turned out to be a young-ish, bespectacled nebbish with an appropriately nebbish-y voice.

This is what he looks like:

This is what he sounds like.

It didn’t take me long to fall in love with the man, however. He was smartly funny in a self-effacing way that, for someone that went to both Harvard and Cambridge and has had a spectacular literary career, is both rare and adorable. Moreover, he had clearly done some serious research on his topic. He was able to answer every question thrown at him, including one of mine, with authority, grace, and detail.

Afterwards, I asked M if I could stop by to see Hudson, Number Five Grandson. M and his wife M keep a strict schedule for their one-year-old. The lights in his room are turned off promptly at eight o’clock. So, looking at his watch, M agreed, so long as I understood that there would only be time for me to assist him with Hudson’s bath and bedtime story.

When I got to their home, I realized that I was interrupting a dinner party. I apologized, but M and M assured me I was not intruding, and invited me to stay.

The bath and bedtime story were wonderfully rewarding in every sense that time spent with a one-year-old grandchild could be. Coming downstairs afterwards, I discovered that two of the three dinner guests were friends of M’s that I had known since they were in their early teens. Back then, they were all misfit kids that had found their way to a public but very exclusive high school for the arts (as had M). And now, they were very accomplished professionals with promising lives.

So, I stayed and enjoyed an excellent meal and some excellent Pinot Noir. And I went home feeling very lucky indeed.

Do You Remember Bob Ross?

When I was in my 30s, I occasionally watched a PBS instructional series on painting, starring a tall, White guy with an afro named Bob Ross. During the 11 years he appeared on The Joy of Painting, he recorded more than 400 videos.

Ross had a gentle, upbeat way of speaking – not unlike Mr. Rogers – that made him easy to watch and learn from. Plus, he used and taught techniques that were easy to replicate at home.

I thought my interest in him was esoteric. I’ve never known anyone else that watched him. In fact, I don’t think he or his show ever made their way into any conversation I’ve ever had.

When Netflix released a documentary about Ross in 2021, I was surprised to discover that there was more to him than “happy little clouds and trees.” Titled Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed, it was revealing and somewhat disturbing. And now it turns out that a feature film loosely based on his life – titled Paint – will be airing next month on Netflix. Another surprise. This one’s a comedy! And it will be starring Owen Wilson, of all people, as the Bob Ross-esque character.

Take a look at the trailer here.

What to Eat? What to Watch? 

Should we walk two blocks to our local eatery, Boheme Bistro, where Adel treats us like celebrities, and enjoy some great Lebanese food? Or walk half a block farther, to Burger Fi, for juicy cheeseburgers by the sea? Or… maybe we should stay home and watch a movie?

Those were the questions last Sunday evening. And since G, K’s sister, was our guest, we let her decide. She opted for staying home. Very happy with that decision, I brought trays and silverware and napkins into the TV room, and searched for a few Oscar-nominated movies to choose from.

Twenty minutes later, we were having fresh salad, cacio e pepe pasta, and a big bottle of well-balanced merlot. The choice of movie was The Whale, which, as I’m sure you know, is about a 600-pound man that deals with depression by eating himself to death.

The Whale, starring a fat-suited Brendan Fraser, is worth watching. It was tightly scripted and very well acted (earning Fraser his first-ever Oscar nomination). But there were things I didn’t like about it.

It was much more a stage play than it was a film. And not just a stage play, but one that was restricted to a single room. Filmed plays can sometimes be well done, but I’ve never seen one that wouldn’t have been better on stage.

The subject matter was important. And, for the most part, it was treated with the seriousness it deserved. That is to say, the film attempted to deal with the issues at stake in a reasonably balanced way.

But when it came to the secondary plot – the effort of the protagonist to encourage his students to write better essays – it failed miserably. Instead of an inspired argument for good writing, the audience gets a threadbare Hollywood cliché about expressing your passions.

Ugh!

Anyway, I didn’t hate it. And the pasta and wine (Prisoner) was fantastic!

Talking About (and With) an Artificial Intelligence Being

AI – i.e., artificial intelligence – is no longer fodder for science fiction. It’s here and it’s now. And thanks to the most recent iterations, it is the subject of many of my conversations.

In the last two days, AI came up in a discussion I had about career planning with two college-age kids of one of my BJJ teachers. They were excited about how rapidly AI is developing, but worried about the changes it will create. AI was also the subject of a conversation I had about education with fellow board members of a local university. They, too, were both amazed by it and fearful of it.

And for good reason. For decades, we’ve been told that AI will never be able to achieve high-level thinking. It can compute better than the human brain but lacks the ability to intuit.

I changed my opinion when I had my first experience working with AI in real time. I asked an AI being to write a 300-word advertisement for a natural ingredient to reduce benign prostate enlargement. It began to produce the ad within seconds of confirming my request, and it had the whole thing finished in less than 30 seconds. The speed was astonishing. And the quality of the content was not bad.

Since then, I’ve read reports about AI being used by students, teachers, and workers in just about every subject matter you could imagine – from math and science to literature and art to business and investing, And it can do much more than mere research. It can solve problems. It can create programs. It can accomplish softer skills such as songwriting and poetry writing.

Ten years ago, every conversation I had about AI ended with some form of, “But it will never be able to replicate the human brain’s capacity to emote and intuit.” But today, there is a growing body of evidence – mostly anecdotal, but that’s still evidence – that AI can develop emotionall intelligence. And it may be just a few years away from happening!

Click here to read an illustration of that – a conversation between a NYT reporter and Bing’s AI Chatbox.

4th of July in Chad, Africa: Teachers vs. Well Diggers

That’s me, second to the left, shirtless.

The time: July 4, 1977. The location: the residence of the US Ambassador to Chad. The occasion: a 4th of July party for the Peace Corps volunteers that were stationed in N’djamena, the capital. I was there as a teacher of English Literature and Philosophy at the University of Chad. A two-year stint that was coming to an end.

I’m racing against three other Peace Corps volunteers. We called them well diggers. They were in Chad to install sanitary wells throughout the arid northern third of the country. The well diggers didn’t think much of us teachers. We knew that. And in return, we didn’t think much of them.

This was my chance to win their respect. A race. A manly race to the finish. I was determined to beat them. (I think that’s obvious from the muscular tension I’m displaying.)

I’d like to say that I took first place, but, if I remember correctly, I came in second. The guy farthest to the right was the winner.