And the winners are . . .

Yet again, I made my annual Oscars predictions and joined many contests.

Three years ago I correctly guessed 13 categories and two years ago I guessed 14 correctly. (Last year I got lazy.) This year, I didn't take very much time making my picks, and obviously the results show. This is my worst showing yet, as I only correctly guessed 11 of the 24 categories — my first year under 50%. That said, I'm happy with getting seven of the eight major categories correct. I simply did horrendously in the lesser categories this year.

Without further ado, here is how I fared on each of the 24 Oscars categories:

1. Best Picture
   Winner: No Country for Old Men
2. Best Actor
   Winner: Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
3. Best Actress
   Winner: Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose
   My Pick: Julie Christie, Away from Her
4. Best Supporting Actor
   Winner: Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
5. Best Supporting Actress
   Winner: Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton
6. Best Director
   Winner: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
7. Best Original Screenplay
   Winner: Juno
8. Best Adapted Screenplay
   Winner: No Country for Old Men
9. Animated Feature
   Winner: Ratatouille
10. Art Direction
    Winner: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    My Pick: The Golden Compass
11. Cinematography
    Winner: There Will Be Blood
    My Pick: No Country for Old Men
12. Costume
    Winner: Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    My Pick: Atonement
13. Documentary Feature
    Winner: Taxi to the Dark Side
    My Pick: No End in Sight
14. Documentary Short Subject
    Winner: Freeheld
    My Pick: La Corona (The Crown)
15. Film Editing
    Winner: The Bourne Ultimatum
    My Pick: No Country for Old Men
16. Foreign Language Film
    Winner: The Counterfeiters
    My Pick: Katyn
17. Makeup
    Winner: La Vie en Rose
18. Original Score
    Winner: Atonement
19. Original Song
    Winner: "Falling Slowly," Once
20. Short Film, Animated
    Winner: Peter and the Wolf
    My Pick: Madame Tutli-Putli
21. Short Film, Live Action
    Winner: Le Mozart des Pickpockets (The Mozart of Pickpockets)
    My Pick: Tanghi Argentini
22. Sound Editing
    Winner: The Bourne Ultimatum
    My Pick: Transformers
23. Sound Mixing
    Winner: The Bourne Ultimatum
    My Pick: Transformers
24. Visual Effects
    Winner: The Golden Compass
    My Pick: Transformers

Oh well. Better luck next year.

For more details on Oscars prediction contests, read the Academy Awards Prediction Contests page. For the most recent Oscars posts, be sure to check out the Oscars/Academy Awards category page. There, you should find contests, predictions, and results.

Here are a handful of contests I have found since my previous post of contests. The Academy Awards Prediction Contests page has been updated accordingly.

• JoBlo
  Prize: Apple 80 GB iPod classic Silver ($236 ARV)
• AbsolutePunk
  Prize: Sports Night: The Complete Series DVD ($48 ARV)
• York Daily Record
  Prize: $30 gift certificate to Regal Cinemas ($30 ARV)
• Awards Daily
  Prize: Nothing ($0 ARV)

Oscar

For more details on Oscars prediction contests, read the Academy Awards Prediction Contests page. For the most recent Oscars posts, be sure to check out the Oscars/Academy Awards category page. There, you should find contests, predictions, and results.

Make sure you know who's in the running for each category! Print the official Oscars printable ballot.

The Contests:

• Oscars.com — ABC.com membership required
  Prize: One Women’s Right-hand ring from the Kwiat Star Collection, set in 18k white gold with 1.53cts or round brilliant and marquise cut diamonds.; One pair of Men’s Cufflinks from the Kwiat Men’s Solaris Collection, featuring black and white diamonds set in 18k white gold with 1.28cts or round brilliant diamonds. ($11,720 ARV)
• CNN.com
  Prize: 47" Flat Screen HDTV ($1,500 ARV)
• eFilmCritic — Unique method of entry for this one, as you can vote for multiple films in each category
  Prize: 50 DVDs (Est. $1,000 ARV)
• DE Concierge
  Prize: $100 gift certificate to Burke Williams Day Spa in CA, a $100 restaurant gift certificate, and a $100 gift certificate to the Arclight Cinema in LA ($300 ARV)
• AroundCinci
  Prize: Movie showings from Movies on Demand for an entire year — probably only redeemable by customers of Time Warner Cable in the Cincinatti region ($179.64 ARV)
• the-numbers.com
  Prize: All five Best Picture Nominees on DVD. (Est. $100 ARV)
• Kentucky.com
  Prize: $50 in movie tickets and a $50 gift certificate to a Lexington-area restaurant ($100 ARV)
• Movie City News
  Prize: Stanley Kubrick Box Set of DVDS and an MCN Know It All tee ($87 ARV)
• PredictTheOscars.com
  Prize: $50 VISA gift card ($50 ARV)
• Scuba.com
  Prize: $50 scuba.com gift certificate ($50 ARV)
• Fort Worth Public Library
  Prize: Two AMC movie passes, The Departed DVD, 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola Classic, and a box of Orville Redenbacher's Microwave Gourmet Popping Corn (Est. $35 ARV)
• web-goddess
  Prize: One Striking Writer sock monkey (Est. $30 ARV)
• The Daily Camera and The Video Station
  Prize: Dinner and a movie for two (ARV unknown)
• The Augusta Chronicle
  Prize: An entertainment prize package (ARV unknown)
• The News Tribune
  Prize: Unknown
• Practicalmadness
  Prize: Unknown
• Box Office Mojo
  Prize: Nothing?
• Variety
  Prize: Nothing ($0 ARV)
• Entertainment Weekly
  Prize: "Bragging rights" ($0 ARV)
• TheEnvelope.com (Los Angeles Times) (Coming soon???)
  Prize: $1,000

Good luck to you, and have fun! (And if you win a prize, please feel free to share it with me!)

Borat Sagdiyev, Kazakhstan's sixth most famous man, is headed to America in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The movie releases on November 3, 2006 and stars Sacha Baron Cohen, best known for Da Ali G Show, in which he plays a wide variety of characters, including Borat.

According to an MSN article, Cohen may be headed for an Oscar:

Critics of all ages love it and we mean love it. So much so that Time magazine's Richard Corliss has suggested that actor Sacha Baron Cohen, who created and plays the title character, should be nominated for, of all things, an Oscar. . . . But he's not the only one who jumped on the bandwagon. Variety's Todd McCarthy started his festival recap with mammoth praise for the flick, and even People magazine's Leah Rozen floated the Cohen nomination buzz as legit.

Just a helpful hint: If you play in Oscar Nomination Pools, don't get too excited about this lead. Of course, given the Academy's recent lust over pseudo-documentaries, anything is possible.

Even though it was just a click away, I finally discovered Lists of Bests, which is part of the 43 Things family. Read more about my 43 Things at Random Fodder.

Lists of Bests allows you to create and find lists of products, places, goals and people. From the Pulitzer Prize to the Oscars and beyond; you can start the list yourself or find existing lists. For example, I have already added myself to several lists, such as:

• Academy Award's "Best Picture"
• Roger Ebert's "The Great Movies"
• 50 States of the USA

You can also start your own personal lists like "My Top 10 Favorite Books," "My Films for Computer Geeks," etc. There are three types of lists: award lists (lists of particular award winners), definitive lists (lists from other publications that are set in stone), and personal lists (created and edited only by you).

The most fun part about Lists of Bests is that when you add or create a list to your profile, you can easily check off your progress item by item. Especially useful is that, when I checked all of the Academy Award Best Picture winners that I had seen, those movies were already checked off in the "Roger Ebert's 'The Great Movies'" list when I visited it.

Here are the lists I have completed:

Here are the 5 lists I am still working on, but closest to completing:

What are you waiting for? Go get started today!

This story is coming a bit late, but the day after the Academy Awards, Ben Stein wrote a scathing yet well-deserved review of the Oscars this year and Hollywood in general.

The commentary appeared in The American Spectator on March 6, 2006:

. . . there was not one word of tribute, not one breath, to our fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan or to their families or their widows or orphans. There were pitifully dishonest calls for peace — as if the people we are fighting were interested in any peace for us but the peace of the grave. But not one word for the hundreds of thousands who have served and are serving, not one prayer or moment of silence for the dead and maimed.
Basically, the sad truth is that Hollywood does not think of itself as part of America, and so, to Hollywood, the war to save freedom from Islamic terrorists is happening to someone else. It does not concern them except insofar as it offers occasion to mock or criticize George Bush. They live in dreamland and cannot be gracious enough to thank the men and women who pay with their lives for the stars' ability to live in dreamland. This is shameful.
The idea that it is brave to stand up for gays in Hollywood, to stand up against Joe McCarthy in Hollywood (fifty years after his death), to say that rich white people are bad, that oil companies are evil — this is nonsense. All of these are mainstream ideas in Hollywood, always have been, always will be. For the people who made movies denouncing Big Oil, worshiping gays, mocking the rich to think of themselves as brave — this is pathetic, childish narcissism.
. . .
Hollywood is above all about self: self-congratulation, self-promotion, and above all, self-protection. This is human and basic, but let's not kid ourselves. There is no greatness there in the Kodak theater. The greatness is on patrol in Kirkuk. The greatness lies unable to sleep worrying about her man in Mosul. The greatness sleeps at Arlington National Cemetery and lies waiting for death in VA Hospitals. God help us that we have sunk so low as to confuse foolish and petty boasting with the real courage that keeps this nation and the many fools in it alive and flourishing on national TV.

There's plenty more great commentary within, so head over and read the entire article.

For those who are unfamiliar with ::wikipedia("Ben Stein")::, he first achieved popularity for the monotone teacher in ::amazon("B00001MXXH", "Ferris Beuller´s Day Off"):: and a similar character in ::amazon("6305053987", "The Wonder Years")::. He later obtained his own game show, Win Ben Stein's Money. Before all that, however, he was a speechwriter for Nixon and Ford, and he received the 2003 Pro-Life Award.

And the winners are . . .

I made my annual Oscars predictions again. For the second year, I am opening myself up and showing exactly how horribly I do on these predictions. Last year, I went 13 of 24. This year, I improved my record by one: 14 of 24!

I missed many of the odd categories, as do most people. I also missed the huge upsets that many, many others missed. I missed on my upset predictions, too, which didn't help much.

1. Best Picture
   Winner: Crash
   My Pick: Brokeback Mountain
2. Best Actor
   Winner: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
3. Best Actress
   My Pick: Reese Witherspoon, Walk the Line
4. Best Supporting Actor
   Winner: George Clooney, Syriana
   My Pick: Paul Giamatti, Cinderella Man
5. Best Supporting Actress
   My Pick: Rachel Weisz, The Constant Gardener
6. Best Director
   Winner: Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain
7. Best Original Screenplay
   My Pick: Crash
8. Best Adapted Screenplay
   My Pick: Brokeback Mountain
9. Animated Feature
   My Pick: Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit
10. Art Direction
    My Pick: Memoirs of a Geisha
11. Cinematography
    Winner: Memoirs of a Geisha
    My Pick: Brokeback Mountain
12. Costume
    My Pick: Memoirs of a Geisha
13. Documentary Feature
    My Pick: March of the Penguins
14. Documentary Short Subject
    Winner: A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin
    My Pick: God Sleeps in Rwanda
15. Film Editing
    My Pick: Crash
16. Foreign Language Film
    My Pick: Tsotsi
17. Makeup
    My Pick: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
18. Original Score
    Winner: Brokeback Mountain
    My Pick: Memoirs of a Geisha
19. Original Song
    Winner: "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp," Hustle & Flow
    My Pick: "Travelin' Thru," Transamerica
20. Short Film, Animated
    Winner: The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation
    My Pick: The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello
21. Short Film, Live Action
    Winner: Six Shooter
    My Pick: Ausreisser
22. Sound Editing
    My Pick: King Kong
23. Sound Mixing
    Winner: King Kong
    My Pick: Walk the Line
24. Visual Effects
    Winner: King Kong
    My Pick: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

I would also like to report that I was able to (intentionally) incorrectly guess 22 of the 24 categories. I accidentally picked the winners for Original Song and Animated Short Film.