Um, almost free?

The title of this post was going to be "Free at last, free at last!" In reference to my having finished, after two whole months of slogging through it, Bleak House. Alas, I still have about 30 pages left to go as of today. I'm happy that I reread it, though - the movie was excellent, but you miss out on all the little Dickensian details. So anyway, I'm almost finished with it, and I'm eager to get on to my next book which I already started reading on the plane back from Seattle. It's The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro. I wish I could be friends with Alice Munro, although apparently she's in her seventies. Seems like a cool lady, though.

The BF and I (I could start calling him the fie-ancy, but why ruin a good thing?) saw Pan's Labyrinth over the weekend and I really enjoyed it. The allegory is not exactly hard to figure out (have you noticed how many movies/TV shows these days have torture scenes?) but that's OK. It was one of the first movies I've seen in a while where I came out of the theatre genuinely happy about my movie-going experience; i.e. good overall film that absorbed me; characters that I cared about; an interesting story that was sad and scary but not overwhelmingly so; poignant but believable ending. In short: it was good.

We also saw Notes on a Scandal last week, which, while also very entertaining, was kind of like The Queen: good in a "so what?" kinda way. Basically if you see it, you see it to watch Cate Blanchett and Judy Dench act really well, and that's about it.

So about the Oscars, am I the only one who is a) almost so bored with the nominations as to not even want to watch the damn thing, and b) completely mystified about the presence of Little Miss Sunshine on the Best Pictures list and about Abigail Breslin's nomination for Best Supporting Actress? For one thing, LMS was not that good a movie. I would rate it slightly above the Chevy Chase/National Lampoon pictures in the "road trip"/"wacky family" genre of films. I think the voters must be getting tired and lazy--it's like they're squinting their eyes and mumbling as they fill out their ballots, "OK, now what movies did I see this year? Oh yeah, there was that Little Miss Sunshine thing...yeah, that was OK. I'll just put down everyone's name who was in that, rather than spend time watching quality films."

I'm not even going to list out my Oscar predictions since the winners are pretty much completely obvious and, like the hypocrite that I am, I haven't seen most of them anyway.