We've been in the process of gathering our materials to start the second round of the Oscar Project, and we've both agreed that one of our failings in the first round was a lack of contemporaneous note-taking during the process. By the end of the massive movie list, some early parts of the project were a bit blurry around the edges.

As my friends can attest, I just went all zappy and silly about The Two Towers after reading James Berardinelli's review (in which he gave it four stars out of a possible four). Like last year, I waited impatiently to get my hands on Berardinelli's review, knowing that his taste in movies so closely mirrors mine as to be eerie.

The words that I'm hearing most about the first two installments of the Lord of the Rings trilogy indicate that we may be in the privileged position of watching one of the great events of cinema history as it happens.
But, no matter how good The Two Towers is (and I have not seen it yet, so I cannot speak with firsthand knowledge), I don't believe Peter Jackson will come home from this year's Oscars with anything more than token awards for technical achievement.

So, Andrew asks, what did I think of the Oscar nominations? I think my overwhelming feeling was a complete and utter lack of surprise. I saw a lot of choices that could only be described as "safe." We rant about this every year, he and I, and for once I thought I'd be brave and daring and post my initial commentary today, before all the ad campaigns kick in to try to sway opinions. I'll feel a bit better about my choices after I get to see a couple more movies, but I'm going to talk about all this in my usual pseudo-knowledgeable way. Hey, I pay enough in movie rental fees to finance a low-budget film or two; with that and a tiny dose of misplaced chutzpah, you too can be a movie critic! Enjoy.

Well…looks like everything's mostly back up to speed. For this I"m pleased; the implementation was pretty smooth.

I'm still going to try to hack together a page that looks something like this page for the users whose browsers hork on valid 4.0 code. I'm not going to spend a ton of time on it, though. But surely there's some sort of way.Saw Traffic tonight. That completes the list of all five Best Picture nominees. My picks, in order of preference:

1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
2. Traffic
3. Gladiator [tie]
4. Chocolat [tie]
5. Erin Brockovich