Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Oscar Project 2012

This year's Oscar nominations were announced yesterday, and I've decided I'm going to go for it: I'm going to make a serious attempt to see as many of the movies before the ceremony as I possibly can. I love movies, and I love award shows, and I love making lists and plans and having All Of The Information, so this is exactly my sort of project. I won't be able to see all the movies, but I'm hoping for a solid majority. I made a vague attempt at this last year, but was never serious about it because of my dread of having to sit through 127 Hours. This year, remarkably enough, there's nothing I'm really opposed to seeing, though of course I'm more excited about some of the movies than others.

There are 61 movies nominated in 24 categories, for a total of 119 individual nominations. I've seen five so far, which is 8% of movies but 13% of nominations, because some of the ones I've seen are up for multiple awards. As of now, that gives me 56 movies to see in 33 days; I think I have a reasonably clear path to seeing 40-45 of them. (By that I mean that they're available; I don't necessarily mean that it will be easy to find the time.) I have a spreadsheet to track things and a legal pad on which I'm constantly scribbling movie times at various theaters to figure out the best way to maximize my time and theater trips. I upped my Netflix account to four discs at a time for the month. My soon-to-be-neglected TiVo is... not quite exploding yet. I'm as ready as I'm going to be.

After I see each movie, I'll write a post with a few general thoughts and my evaluation of the movie in the categories in which it's nominated. I'll also say something about how easy or difficult it was to see, as one of the things that interests me about this is seeing whether a regular movie-goer who doesn't live in New York or LA can actually see most of these movies. Once I've seen everything in a category (or everything that's available), I'll post my rankings and reasons for my choices in that category. The day of the awards (unless I finish early - hah!) I'll post a big summary with links, and I'll finish things off with some sort of live blog or chat during the ceremony. Details on that later!

So! Wish me luck! And please, this year, hold me to my annual resolution to see more movies all year so it's not such a scramble at the end.

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