Oscar Addendum

I stumbled upon this after writing this post and it was too good to leave out. For a sober look at the nominees and the Hollywood publicity machine see Morgenstern's beautiful article on his own movie experiences. He writes,
"Whichever movies and performances win Oscars Sunday night, they won't be the ones I reviewed. For better or worse -- and I do think it's worse -- you and I don't see the same stuff. What I see at advance screenings is prebuzz and prehype. I'm privileged to see movies pretty much pre-everything that's calculated to transform entertainments, or occasionally works of art, into cash cows."

He perfectly summarized my attitude regarding reading movie reviews beforehand:
"The essential point is to protect one's authentic and precious responses to a new experience from those who could or would program them in advance, and then to see with clear eyes what's there to be seen on the silver screen."

I should frame this sentence.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmm..

Anonymous said...

By the way, what is the Physics of Superheroes about?

hirak said...

Physics of Superheroes is a great concept. James Kakalios wanted to teach students the basic concepts of physics but found that examples like,
"Throwing balls off cliffs" did not really get the students to relate material to the beauty of the physics around them.
He decided to use comic book heroes to illustrate concepts. More often than not, the superheroes get their physics right and in the end he found that students really concentrate in the class.

Anonymous said...

Nice :)