The Tri-Fecta

It's official. For 3 years in row my favorite of the Best Picture nominees won the Oscar for Best Picture. Even though some people didn't like it, I thought No Country of Old Men was fantastic!

The Oscars

So it's almost time for the 2008 (or is it the 2007?) Oscars.

As I've done for quite a few years now, I make it a personal goal to see all the Best Picture Nominees before the Oscars, so I can have a movie to root for, or at least be in the know when Oscar night rolls around.

Last year and the year before, the movie I selected as being my favorite of the bunch, won the Oscar for best picture. I'm seeing if I can go for the tri-fecta this year.

Here is my ranking of the 5 movies:

No Country for Old Men. I know a lot of people thought the ending of this movie was odd, and left them feeling like the movie was trying to be too smart for it's own good, but I like it a lot. I thought the acting was fantastic, the writing was great, and the directing was very good. I walked out of the theater knowing that it would be one of my favorite of the year, and it was.



Michael Clayton. I have to say, I liked this movie a lot. I was a little torn between picking this or No Country as my first choice. The acting, again, was top notch, and the last scene in the movie was one of the best movie scenes I've watched. For some reason, this movie didn't do so hot when it initially came out, but it's definitely a must-see on DVD.



Juno. I didn't like Juno as much as everyone else seemed to. I actually didn't think it was the best pregnancy movie of the year (I thought Knocked Up was better). While people thought No Country was trying to be too smart, I felt that way about this movie. The dialogue didn't seem realistic, and the main character seemed a bit too witty, which lost some points for me.



There Will be Blood. The acting in this movie was fantastic. Daniel Day-Lewis was great, as is expected, but I was blown away by Paul Dano, who plays a young preacher who, to some degree, is the nemesis of Daniel Day-Lewis' character. What bothered me about this movie was the middle. It dragged a little, and anyone who knows me, knows I don't like long movies that drag. It was nearly 3 hours long, and I think it could have been told in less than 2. I wanted to like this movie more, but was a little disappointed by it.

Atonement. I don't know why this movie was nominated for Best Picture (how it won the Golden Globe is beyond me). The first 45 minutes was very good, and then, it seems, another movie takes place. A sluggish movie, that never gets going, and left me asking what the point of some scenes were supposed to be about. The ending has a nice twist, but the middle hour left me checking the time, wondering when it would end.


Unfortunately, I didn't have time to see many other movies that came out in 2007. I'm sure there are some out there that I would have liked more than any of these 5, but given what the Academy has decided, one math teacher has spoken...

1,000,000,000 seconds

So I celebrated my one billionth second today at 3:37:01 (my dad did the calculation).

As odd as this sounds, that milestone had made me feel old over the past couple of days. I've just felt this kind of melancholy feeling since my dad told me.

In addition, I've been taking a pilates class and I've been feeling old in there also. But not because I can't do the stuff the class requires (I'm amazed that I can do as much as I can - I have pretty good abs, I guess); what makes me feel old is the age of the other students in the class. I think I may be the oldest person in the class. I take the class at De Anza, so it would make sense that there are a number of young people in the class, but I thought that taking a class in the evenings would mean there would be older people in the class with me.

Yesterday, during pilates, I noticed that there was a guy who was wearing a class of 2006 high school t-shirt. I thought to myself, "that guy looks too old to be just out of high school". Thing is, he's not just out of high school; he's been out of high school for 2 years. I would have been insulted if someone said I was just out of high school two years afters I graduated. Looking at his shirt, I realized that when I was a senior in high school, he was in kindergarten. That made me feel old.

One billion and some seconds down, many more to go....

PDL

I've been officially granted a PDL for the Fall of 2008 by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District.

What is a PDL you might ask? It stands for Professional Development Leave, also known as sabbatical.

It took longer than expected for me to be notified, because the person who was supposed to call me in December to tell me my name had been passed on to the College's board, neglected to do so. I had to call/email a couple of people to actually find out.

I'm going to spend the Fall (hopefully) finishing up my MBA at San Jose State. I've been working on the MBA on a part-time basis since August 2006, and I'm looking forward to finishing it up.

I did the math and figured out that the salary I'm going to be paid for not teaching in the Fall ends up being just about the same amount I have paid for the entire MBA program, so I guess De Anza is paying for my MBA (many people I'm in the program with don't pay for classes - their companies do).

Back to watching the Colbert Report....

GO VOTE!!!

That's all I gotta say.