loonyblog.

No, not by the Oscars (although that was pretty shocking…more to come on that), but rather by the Razzies, where Basic Instinct 2 picked up the worst movie of the year (plus several others) but Bloodrayne, the latest masterwork from Uwe Boll, got snubbed. You know it’s a good year for bad movies when Uwe isn’t even in the running. But then, compared to such classics as Little Man, what chance did Bloodrayne have?

Yesterday, I attended the AMC Best Picture Showcase, a day-long event in which all five best picture nominees were screened back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back. Along with admission to the whole shebang, the $30 admission also included all the popcorn you could eat, and all the soda you could drink. Considering that I was in that theater for over 13 hours, that amounted to a metric ton of each (although not, I suspect, as much as the average American consumes during a normal moviegoing experience). It was a great time, if one of the most unhealthy days I’ve had in a very long time.

One of the best parts of the whole thing was as I mentioned in my Oscar pics, I hadn’t seen any of these movies. Having seen them all now, I can actually make an opinion on what I think should win.

I have to say this is a surprisingly good year, if slightly uneven. Of the five, even the one I didn’t like (Babel) is still by and large a decent movie. I just didn’t think it came together in the end, and was a bit jumbled. Which may have been the point, but I didn’t care for it (then again, I loved Crash last year, so take my opinion however you like).

My favorite of them (and the one I would like to see win, even if I’m pretty sure it won’t), is Little Miss Sunshine. It’s just such a great, self-contained little film. Everything about it is just…right. Closely behind that I’d have to put The Departed, although really closely behind that would have to be Letters from Iwo Jima. The Queen was quite good too. None of them is really a spectacular, stand-out, Oscar movie, but I’d say the overall quality this year is much better than in past years, which is surprising.

The festivities are getting underway now, with the traditional bubble-headed red carpet display of inanity, so I’m off to stargaze. Good luck to all of you betting on this year…me, I’m rather nervous, as my father and I only split on two categories (Song and Costume Design), so it’s gonna be tense, but only for about ten minutes. The rest of the time I can just watch. Enjoy the show!

I’ve been dreading this day, but it’s finally arrived…my Oscar predictions are in. This year sucks for predictions, because there are so many bizarre variables in the mix. But I’ve rolled my bones, I’ve consulted my tea leaves, and I’ve even sacrificed a goat to Baal, so let’s get this thing going.

As always, my obligatory disclaimer:

These predictions are who I think will win, not who I think should win. I don’t care who should actually win these things. My fun is in the predictions. Also, even more than most years, I haven’t even seen most of these movies. In fact until Monday (when I finally saw Children of Men, which yeah, was pretty great), the only movies I had seen that were nominated for for any award were Cars and Superman Returns. And you already know what I thought about that last one.

As with every year, these predictions are only for the categories in my annual bet with my father, so I don’t cover everything. I do not recommend putting money on the Oscars, or even participating in office pools. If you must, hopefully I can be of some help, but don’t blame me if you lose (just be sure to thank me if you win). My annual prediction rate hovers somewhere around the 80% line. Some years it’s better (like that golden year of 1998, where I got almost 100%, although that was like shooting fish in a barrel) and some years it’s worse.

Anyway, there’s a lot to get to, so let’s do this thing.

Best Picture: The Departed.

Let’s tackle the big one first, because it shows just how fractured this year’s race is. The producer’s guild award is usually the best indicator, and that went to Little Miss Sunshine. But last year Brokeback Mountain won the PGA, and then still lost the Oscar to Crash, which won the editor’s guild award, but not the PGA. This year the ACE award ended in a freaking tie between Babel and The Departed. Ugh. With little else to fall back on, I’m going with The Departed, because I think it’s going to win another big category (see below).

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, The Departed.

I know I say this every year, but he’s due. This may not be the most acclaimed film of his career, but it’s time. It also doesn’t hurt that there just isn’t as much competition this year as there has been in past years. And he won the DGA. I’m confident in this choice.

Best Actor: Forrest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland.

Nothing would make me happier than seeing Peter O’Toole win this category after eight previous nominations (especially after his acceptance speech in 2003 for his honorary award, when he said he hadn’t given up hope of winning yet), but there’s just no buzz for anyone but Whitaker. That doesn’t mean O’Toole is out of the running…the Oscars always have some shockers, and those voters are a sentimental bunch…but Whitaker’s got the buzz, so he’s got my pick.

Best Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen.

No doubt in my mind here. Aside from Penelope Cruz, this category is filled with Oscar regulars. This is Winslet’s fifth nomination, Dame Judy already has one Oscar and was also nominated five other times, and well, Meryl Streep is Meryl Streep. She’s been nominated so many times (12) and won twice that that punchline just isn’t funny anymore. Helen Mirren deserved an Oscar for The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (trust me) and not so much so for Caligula, but she’s earned this award. Oh, and she’s picked up every other possible award. This one’s a lock.

Best Supporting Actor: Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls.

Yeah, I can’t believe I wrote those words either. Can you believe this guy is going to win just weeks after the opening of Norbit? Just remember, voting was done long ago. The nutty professor’s gonna win. Maybe now we’ll see less Nutty Professor and more Delirious. (But I doubt it). Djimon Hounsou could be a surprise, as could Alan Arkin, but I don’t see it.

Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls.

I’ve never watched American Idol, so I know nothing about this person. All I know is that the critics loved her, she outshone Beyonce*, and has won every award she’s been nominated for. Lock for sure.

*The only thing I know about Beyonce is that she named her album after an implement for cleaning your naughty bits. WTF?

Original Screenplay: Little Miss Sunshine.

Ah, original screenplay. The token award you give to the well-meaning movie that gets lots of nominations but is the underdog in all of them (remember, Sideways, my children). It won the writer’s guild, the movie is nominated for a bunch of awards, this is a lock.

Adapted Screenplay: The Departed.

Won the writer’s guild award, my pick for both picture and movie. Key word here is synergy. I would love to see Borat win, just to see if Sacha Baron Cohen accepts in character, but I can’t see it happening.

Best Editing: Babel.

As I said above, Babel tied with The Departed for the Eddie award, making this extremely difficult. This award usually goes to a movie that feels like it came together in the editing room. That’s how you get quirky winners like The Matrix (although the fact that Memento lost still stings me). By that logic, United 93 should be a front runner (I had actually expected that to win the Eddie), but so should Babel, as both are films about large numbers of characters. The ACE tie makes me lean towards Babel, but think long and hard before picking this one.

Best Cinematography: Children of Men.

This was a tough call this year, but then Children of Men won the cinematographer’s guild award, and that’s my benchmark. Look for a possible win by Pan’s Labyrinth here…that edged out Children of Men in the Art Director’s Guild awards (something I’ll come back to shortly). But I’m going with Children of Men’s gritty look.

Best Costume Design: Curse of the Golden Flower.

Reeeeally tough call here. Curse of the Golden Flower, The Queen and Pan’s Labyrinth all won at the Costume Designer’s Guild awards. I’m going with Curse of the Golden Flower for its sheer scale and ambition, but Pan’s Labyrinth could win here too. Dreamgirls also has a shot purely because it’s a musical, but it hasn’t won much of anything in this category. Flip a coin between Curse and Pan, with The Queen as the wacky longshot, and Marie Antoinette as the dark horse if anyone manages to get past the soundtrack and remember that it’s a period piece.

Best Art Direction: Pan’s Labyrinth.

Pan’s won the Art Director’s Guild award, and has great buzz, so that’s where I’m going. Dreamgirls could win because it’s a musical, and you sort of take for granted that it’s going to have great art direction, but I don’t buy it.

Best Animated Feature: Cars.

I can’t believe this category is being contested. Pixar always wins, whether it’s for their awesome shorts or full-length movies, and this category just isn’t old enough for anyone else to have that kind of legacy. But Happy Feet, despite it being a quick cash-in on the baffling popularity of March of the Penguins, has a lot of fans. And Monster House is supposed to be great as well. I’m going with Pixar because that lets me sleep at night.

Best Foreign Language Film: Pan’s Labyrinth.

Every year I go with Ebert’s pick because I haven’t heard of most, if not all of the nominees. This year that’s still good logic, but it’s backed up by that phenomenon that happens every so often when a film is nominated for a lot of awards (Pan’s is up for six) one of which just happens to be this category. It can’t win best picture (for one thing, it’s not nominated), so it’ll take the next best thing. Count on seeing one of the biggest geeks in Hollywood go up there for this award. I can’t wait.

Best Documentary Feature: An Inconvenient Truth.

Yeah, it’s a powerpoint presentation, but it’s won a ton of awards, and Hollywood loves to have their little political moments. No, I don’t think Al Gore will announce that he’s running for president when he accepts this award (however much I’d like him to), but he’s gonna win. Hopefully his acceptance will be a little more dignified than Michael Moore’s, although I think I might pay good money to see Gore get up there and act righteous and obnoxious. I just don’t think it’s in him.

Best Original Score: The Queen.

Yeah. Don’t ask me why. This category sucks. I could see this going to Babel or Pan’s Labyrinth (which I hear has a catchy score). There’s virtually no data to work off of for this category. The Queen has won the LA Film Critic’s award (not a good indicator) and the Golden Globe (totally not a good indicator), while Babel has won the BAFTA (not a good indicator). That’s two bad indicators against one. I’m going with The Queen. I used to judge this one by listening to the music, but either my ear doesn’t work that way anymore or the academy has different ears than I do.

Best Original Song: “I Need to Wake Up” from An Inconvenient Truth.

Here’s another crazy category. There are three songs from the same movie nominated in this category. Three! WTF! Then you have a Melissa Etheridge song and the obligatory Randy Newman song. Randy Newman’s out. He’s won before and been nominated 12 other times (I think, I may be miscounting by a few). I decided (at the last minute) to go with Melissa Etheridge, but I could easily see this going to “Listen,” the song from Beyonce/Dreamgirls.

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Phew. That’s a whole lot of awards. And I don’t even do all of them! As always, best of luck to you, and feel free to post your thoughts below.

Now here’s some awesome news…Fantagraphics has announced plans to release The Complete Pogo, a series of 12 volumes starting in October of 2007. Format-wise it will closely resemble their Complete Peanuts series (which by the way, you should be reading…the volumes have gotten past the early, quirky stuff, and are now hitting Schultz’s best decade).

This is great news. I absolutely adore Pogo, but much like Peanuts, there’s never been a really good way to read the whole thing. I had a couple of scattered volumes from both Fantagraphics and Eclipse, but nothing chronological, and certainly nothing complete.

As a strip, Pogo is up there with Peanuts. It’s funny, exceptionally well drawn, and unusually socially relevant (or at least, as much as a strip about talking animals in a swamp can be).

Hopefully they’ll get a good bunch of people to write introductions for the 12 volumes. The Peanuts books have had some great ones so far (Walter Cronkite, Matt Groening, Jonathan Franzen) and the next volume has none other than Bill Melendez (the producer of all those animated Peanuts specials) lined up. And if we’re lucky, at least one of them will be by historian R. C. Harvey, who has written about Walt Kelly/Pogo on numerous occaisions.

This is great, great news. I can’t wait for October.

According to Reuters, Japanese researchers have created “bilk”, a combination of beer and milk, developed to help combat declining milk consumption. It contains hops, is 30% milk, and is produced in a similar process to beer. Supposedly it “tastes like ordinary beer” but I find that extremely hard to believe. Can you imagine what a bilk hangover feels like?

The latest ShackArt topic (or at least, the latest one I participated in…I skipped the last one) is live over at Unsee.org. This one was fun, I’ll admit. The topic was “Hanna Barbera Cartoons,” a subject I know at least a little bit about.

I’m not 100% happy with how it turned out, but I ran out of time. Had I another week I would have changed it into a square composition (that weird mural shape just sort of evolved…it really wasn’t intentional), but I’m glad I was able to find room for the requisite hot chicks (Josie, Daphne), relatively well-known characters (Gloop/Gleep, El Kabong, Scrappy Doo) and a couple of lesser-known characters (characters from “Help! It’s the Hair Bear Bunch!” and Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch, two shows that I’m not sure anyone but me remembers).

There’s a cross-section below…for the full image head over to Unsee.org or my personal ShackArt gallery at loonyphotos.

For the record, if you’re wondering why Jabberjaw is leering at Josie, just remember that his short-lived series was one of the few HB shows about bands solving mysteries (and let’s face it, for a while, they were all about bands solving mysteries) in which the hot chicks were downright shrill.

And yes, the apology to Dan DeCarlo is sincere. Both of the sexy poses are lifted right out of classic DeCarlo drawings. Can you blame me?

Gathering of Developers vets Mike Wilson and Harry Miller have unveiled their new company, and it’s called…Gamecock. Yeah. Game. Cock.

I love Mike Wilson. Two of my favorite E3 memories are of him: one year, I fondly remember him being carried around the convention center like a king, relaxing on the shoulders of four strippers in schoolgirl outfits. He had a beer in one hand, and let out a belch that echoed throughout the show floor. But the best was the last year of the G.O.D. promised lot, when he carried a heavy wooden cross on his back, featuring the logo of the company he had sold G.O.D. to (it was, as he pointed out, his cross to bear).

I wish these guys nothing but the best, but also hope this venture has a little more longevity than the spectacular, grand scale failures that were G.O.D. and ION Storm.

Our marketing people are working on a logo for an upcoming game, so they’ve posted a bunch of sample fonts on the wall. Just walking by, one of them caught my eye, and I recognized it as the font from the logo for the long-dead Omni Magazine.

Yeah. I’m hopeless.

Last night we had a party here at the loonybin. Unlike our last two, this one wasn’t an absinthe party, but instead was centered around Wii and Guitar Hero. Since most of my friends aren’t in any way gamers (and the few who are are at best casual), this was an interesting experiment to see if Nintendo’s much-touted plan to nab non-gamers would work. Sure enough, it worked like a charm. People who haven’t played any games since the invention of 3D accelerators took to it remarkably fast. Guitar Hero went over pretty well, but was a bit more intimidating to the complete gaming novices.

But Wii Sports was a hit, and WarioWare was as well. WarioWare was extra-specially fun to watch, as pretty much everyone was equally astounded at how insane that game is. But really, if I doubted Nintendo before (and I didn’t, to be sure), I certainly don’t any more. I’ve now seen it with my own eyes: the Wii makes gaming fun for people who don’t “get” video games. Also it’s just really fun at parties, and the amount of fun goes up proportionally with how much alcohol is in your system. On the other hand, my skill at Guitar Hero apparently goes down with alcohol.

Anyway, some pictures of all of us acting like morons are up over at loonyphotos. Most of them are my friend Mike, who not only showed up ready to rock and not only played more of everything than anyone else, but I now have a Mii that looks just like him too (so I’m all ready for him next time).

I got my new RAZR V3xx this week, and sure enough, it’s better in every possible way than my brief experience with the craptacular Cingular 3125/HTC Star trek. Aesthetically, it’s basically the same as my previous, first generation RAZR, only instead of being silver, it’s charcoal-black (black being the new silver, which was itself the new white). Yes, everyone and their brother has a RAZR these days, but there’s a reason for that…it’s a damn good phone.

This model is almost exactly the same. It has some new silly features…its camera is now 1.3MP, but since the photo lens is such crap, that just means your lousy pictures will be larger. It has a fancypants NVIDIA GPU, which means my new cell phone quite possibly has a better GPU than my laptop. I really don’t care about that, but some of the available games are pretty cool. I’ve got Lumines (naturally), Lemmings and a surprisingly good version of SimCity. It’s a 3G phone, which means its crappy web browser goes superfast. But it’s still a crappy browser. And it can access Cingular’s mobile video service, but while I might be able to enjoy movies on my PSP and even my video iPod, watching movies on a vertically-oriented screen that’s barely larger than a postage stamp seems a little silly.

It took me a little while to get this phone working with iSync, as it’s so new that there isn’t native support yet. But there’s a third party plugin out that that works (once you figure out where it’s supposed to go), so that’s fine.

As I said before, all I really need is a phone. I don’t use this for e-mail, barely for games (pretty much only when I’m somewhere without access to any of my many other game-capable devices), certainly never for photos, and I wouldn’t be caught dead using this as a real web browser. But unlike my last fiasco, this one can handle regular plain old phone duties like a pro. Hallelujah.

Oh, and yes, it closes programs when you quit. I still don’t know who came up with that brilliant feature for Windows Smartphone (for PDAs, I get it…but a phone?). So thankfully I won’t need to worry about running out of memory, or being forced to reboot daily just to check my voicemail. Yeesh.