Raves:
- Up and Precious: two awards for each!
- Kathryn Bigelow’s win: She’s the first women in 82 years to ever win Best Director. Not because she is a woman, but because she kicked ass.
- Mo’Nique and Bigelow’s classy acceptance speeches
- the wonderful tribute to John Hughes

Rants:
- Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin failing: a lot of jokes just weren’t funny.
- the irrelevant dance performance for the original music category
- Acceptance speeches by winners in Best Foreign Feature and Best Documentary short being rudely interrupted and cut short: This angered me the most. If you don’t care about these categories, you should get rid of them and quit faking respect.

Overall, while I was pleased with most of the results, the ceremony itself left me bored. I rather miss Billy Crystal and Jon Stewart hosting the show!

This is my Oscar post without Avatar, which is expected to sweep the awards. Since I haven’t seen it, I am in no position to say if it’d deserve them – but I am going to write about why the others would. My predictions are in bold.

Writing: As someone who is enthusiastic about writing, I’m quite happy with this year’s nominations. It is also quite hard to predict who’ll win because they are all pretty good.

Best Adopted Screenplay:
I love all the screenplays in this category apart from In the Loop, but it’s just because I haven’t seen it. I think Up in the Air will win, I’ll also be pretty happy if District 9 does.

Best Original Screenplay:
Again, I love all the screenplays except for The Messenger, the one I haven’t seen. While I personally prefer The Hurt Locker and Up, my guess is Inglourious Basterds will take this.

Acting: Landa and Mary have it in the bag! On the other hand, the leading man and lady awards look like a fierce battle so I will probably be wrong.

Best Supporting Actor
I kind of dislike Inglourious Basterds², but I do love one single thing… person in it – Christoph Waltz. That’s a bingo! Pretty much.

Best Supporting Actress
Mo’Nique. I like the two ladies in Up in the Air, but Mo’Nique’s portrayal is scarily believable. It’s one that makes you go “wow”.

Best Actor
I have only seen two performances out of the five. Although I think they are exceptional, I am going to bet that they will miss this one. My pure guess here is Jeff Bridges or Colin Firth, based on past performances (Bridges) and the potential of his role (Firth).

Best Actress
My favourite winner would be Gabourey Sidibe from Precious. However, the Academy has a history of picking actresses with a “break-through” role, so Sandra Bullock will probably win. I am quite fond of her character, so it’ll be cool.

Directing and feature: I just realised none of the above entries involved Avatar. These two are going to be completely different.

Best Director
Having zero knowledge in how film directing works, I am going to stick with the Director’s Guild’s decision – Kathryn Bigelow. According to past statistics, it is very likely that the Academy will pick the DGA winner.

Best Picture
All the hype surrounding Avatar is going to make it extremely difficult for any film other than itself or perhaps The Hurt Locker to take this home. If the odds were wrong about this one, Up In the Air would be the bookies’ nightmare. However, I absolutely love The Hurt Locker and want it to win almost everything it’s been nominated for (my review is here). Another reason I want it to win is that if it does, it’ll be one of the lowest grossing, lowest budget films to ever win this title. This might have a positive effect on the quality in film making – producers might start to put more emphasis on originality in plot and writing, wise casting; maybe even start to expect something with merits beyond entertainment alone.

In my opinion, 2009 was a good year in film. All of the nine Best Picture nominees I have seen are exceptional. I was very unhappy with last year’s Slumdog Millionaire, but I like all nine better than that, especially The Hurt Locker, Precious and Up in the Air.

And.. Tonight is the night! I am going to be working away (probably on the ceremony itself), but let’s have a Oscar Twitter party! Who’s in?

1. Because I simply could not get tickets, go figure.
2. The writing was very good, but the film was too long and very annoying in parts.

One of the things that I love about my new phone is that there are many applications available for it, despite it not being an iPhone.

I downloaded an application called PaintPad from Nokia ovi shop yesterday, which is absolutely wonderful! Now I can draw Stress Relief Bunnies on my phone and save them as .jpg files.

Do you have a favourite phone application that makes your life easier or simply puts a smile on your face?

To help myself, I’ve decided to start a personal project called Project Positive, which basically involves doing things to remind myself to maintain a more positive outlook. My only idea so far is a daily practice: when a day ends, I think of one reason to be cheerful and note it down somewhere.

It’s not as “big” as the name suggests, and knowing myself, it might not be easy. However, taking the initiative to change is what really makes it happen, even in tiny steps. And I am writing about it on here so that I will have no excuse to take it back! I am having my fingers crossed.

Above is a picture of the sign on the door to the washroom closest to my office. In the past few months, I have noticed that some healthy grown men are frequently using these lavatories. As you can see on the sign, it’s for either a female or a disabled person. I often see men coming out of there and think “Sir, you are neither.”

Sometimes when I went inside, I found out, to my horror, that the toilet had not been flushed. One day, when I was waiting outside, I never heard tap water from the sink. The person walked out without washing his hands. I ran off in absolute disgust and haven’t been to those washrooms since.

It’s the year of the Tiger, so of course we have tiger decorations!

1. Kung Hei Fat Choy: It is the most commonly used blessing for the CNY. It means “wishing you a good fortune” essentially. I never get why fortune comes before everything else, but hey.
2. It means “wishing you good health”.

When a new sergeant, James, takes over a highly trained bomb disposal team amidst violent conflict, he surprises his two subordinates by recklessly plunging them into a deadly game of urban combat. (From IMDB)

The Hurt Locker has blown my mind, and completely taken over it.

Watching it was a draining process (since I have minimal knowledge of wars and bombs). When I finished it, my head hurt and I was too tired to formulate opinions. However, it began to hit me the next day when I started thinking about the film. Now I actually have a brain full of essays on what I like about it.

(The following is free of spoilers.)

The Hurt Locker is strictly a drama (a gripping one at that), rather than an accurate depiction of all aspects in the war in Iraq. It doesn’t tell you how agonizing the war is, it shows you how normal men react to such a situation. The film puts you in the characters’ shoes. It puts you in the same suspense and tension they are experiencing in a place where anyone can be your enemy. It puts you in their hesitation, frustration, resentment, regret and most prominently (exclusively for James) – excitement.

What I am most impressed by was the characters’ depth. We have our reckless (anti)hero and his two disconcerted subordinates who are scared for their lives. The conflict is obvious and very simple at first, but as time goes on, more things happen to change them. Some things in their mind are forever changed, some things are forever lost, but yet some things remains intact.

I feel like what I have written doesn’t do the film any justice. Nothing about the directing or the brilliant acting was mentioned! I would like to write a more in-depth entry on it if I have the chance. In short, The Hurt Locker is a great film with actual depth, an original script and excellent acting which provides an awful lot of inspiration. Go see it if you haven’t already!

You will notice that most of the photos are of places in Hong Kong or animals. It’s probably true (to some degree) that your photos tell a lot about you.

To my absolute horror, an apartment building in Hong Kong collapsed yesterday afternoon. Four people were killed and two were injured. Several eye witnesses were evidently still shocked, and they told the news that it all happened within 10 seconds. It’s saddening to think that people were killed at home, which is supposed to be the safest place of all.

This kind of thing is extremely rare and Hong Kong is generally a very safe city. However, on a more personal level, it adds on to the randomness of everything. The building is in a town I visit almost every Sunday for private tuition. I dread to think what it will be like when my bus goes past there next time.

1. Do people care?
I cannot come up with a reason why people would like to know what’s on my mind. A number of celebrities have Twitter accounts, which are generally used for good causes due to their large following. People do care about what famous people are saying. Me? Not so much. Do I have anything of value to say? Rarely. For friends and people who are close to me, we have other ways to communicate and exchange ideas.

2. 140 characters are not enough.
Contrary to how it looks on my blog, I enjoy blogging. What I love the most about it is expression and elaboration. I like the traditional way of stating a point and then bringing up the arguments and evidence to support my point. The suspense of someone stating something and leave it at that kills me. I am interested to know why people think/do things. I want to tell people why I think/do certain things, and 140 characters are not enough.

3. The danger of being spammed.
This is a semi-ranty point. In attempt to “get Twitter” and “get into Twitter”, I used to have a Firefox plugin which instantly updated me with people’s tweets. In the end, the overwhelming number of tweets getting through froze my browser too many times.¹ I also constantly got actual spam messages from “people” who wanted to recommend weight loss meds. All of that aside, although I love reading tweets from Stephen Fry, he tweets just a bit too much that I fail to keep up.

Perhaps this old lady here is not using it properly, but I just cannot get into Twitter. I understand why it has gained such importance but not why it is relevant to me. I know a lot of my friends are going to disagree on this one, though. Feel free to enlighten me.

1. There was also a Twitter contest organised by NameCheap.com. I regrettably participated in it. I went back and deleted my responding tweets afterward, but it didn’t stop my tweets from participating in the immobilization of my laptop.