the ocean

I'm not speaking of the race for people to try to win Oscars, though I'm sure Wagner Moura and Renate Reinsve will be tearing up the talk show circuit. No, I speak of my annual race to try to see all of the Best Picture nominees prior to the awards. Which are on March 15, apparently. That does not give me a lot of time if I intend to insist on continuing to work and eat and sleep and shower and so on.

Luckily, we were already at two when the nominations came out: Sinners and One Battle After Another. Generally one can kind of tell from the critical buzz (by which I mean whatever Emily Nussbaum is blathering about online) what some of the likely nominees are, so we were a bit ahead of the game on those. We did get thrown a curveball by Wicked: For Good (correctly, but somewhat surprisingly) not being nominated, but we'll deal with it.

We have now also watched Frankenstein and F1, both of which were available to us on demand. I enjoyed Frankenstein more than I thought I would based on my experience of being forced to read the novel in college and speeding through a lot of the more descriptive passages. I do think that del Toro tends to make very watchable movies; even that fish sex one that I watched on a plane several years back was watchable despite being repeatedly interrupted by the Dutch man sitting next to me who constantly had to pee. I'll say it again for the people in the back that I think movies that go more than two hours are definitely pushing it, but it didn't feel crazy long. The production design was stunning and Oscar Isaac brought the crazy. It's a true waste for Jacob Elordi to be in anything where his face is covered, but he was appropriately tall. 

F1, meanwhile, was kind of a bop. Hard to dispute the entertainment value of a lot of fast cars. I'm not sure it goes a whole lot deeper than that and yes I do struggle with the whole Brad and Angie of it all, but it's not on me to fix America. (Who is that on now? Sophia Bush?) 

Anyway, four down, six to go. We'll see...