My Oscar Project

When my nest became empty in 2001, I found myself with more time to go to the movies. To determine what to spend my movie dollar on, I started to read a lot of articles and reviews .... IMDB became my favorite source. As time went on, I found I needed a little more direction and turned to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I don't think the Oscars are the be all and end all of determining film excellence, but they are an interesting barometer. I started to try to predict Oscar nominees as early as January, and have a lot of fun trying to see as many Oscar nominated films as I can in a given year. Some years have been chock full of candidates, others, not so much. 2004 in particular has been rather sparse, I only have handful of films on my Oscar contender list so far, and only 2 would I expect to see on the Best Film list. We'll see what happens by Dec. 31st. Last year was a great Oscar year for independent film, maybe the lack of good blockbusters from major studios will open the door wider for those films in the Oscar ranks. A few predictions are being made already, it won't get really interesting till January.