Film preservation is a cause that’s near and dear to my heart, but I suspect very few people are really aware that there’s even a need for such a thing. If average, non-movie-fan-type people think about the subject at all, they probably assume that every movie ever made is already safely tucked away somewhere. But that’s not true. The sad reality is that the physical film prints and negatives that comprise our cinematic history have been treated pretty poorly over the years, and even if they haven’t been abused, they are endangered by their own chemical compositions. There are hundreds of movies made prior to the 1950s that are forever lost to modern eyes because the photographic stock they were printed on has literally crumbled into dust. They’re gone forever, not because they were deliberately destroyed (although that has happened, too) but because of benign neglect. Because no one thought to check on all those reels of film sitting in the warehouses on the backlots, slowly rotting away. Because no one thought they were important.

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I’m glad I didn’t have any money riding on my Oscar predictions, as I only nailed two out of the five categories I considered, namely Best Picture (Million Dollar Baby) and Best Actor (Jamie Foxx for Ray). These two were, of course, the safest bets there were in the major categories, at least according to what little pre-Oscar buzz I heard. However, I think I can salvage a little of my credibility by pointing out that in the remaining three categories, I did narrow the field down to two choices, and, in each case, it was my second choice that took home a statue. Also, my last-second thought that Sideways would grab the Best Adapted Screenplay award was correct. For whatever that’s worth.

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Oscar predictions usually fall from the trees this time of year like overripe fruit, but this year seems to be curiously lacking in buzz. I haven’t really heard or read much speculation at all, possibly because there isn’t a single big film sucking all the oxygen out of the room the way Return of the King did last year. That’s too bad in a way, because it makes the whole event seem a little less compelling — there’s no inexorable pull toward an inevitable finish — but it also makes for more unpredictability in who actually takes home a gold statuette, and that’s always more interesting to talk about than a foregone conclusion.

In any event, here are my highly biased and quite possibly wrongheaded predictions for the major categories at the 77th Academy Awards, which are being presented this coming Sunday night.

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It’s a little late to still be talking about Christmas movies at this point, nearly a week into the New Year. However, I was just catching up on the latest DVD news over at The Digital Bits, and I ran across some interesting information. (Well, I think it’s interesting, but then I’m kinda weird, so your mileage may vary.)

If you’ll recall, I mentioned a few entries back that one of my favorite holiday movies is the 1951 film A Christmas Carol, one of the many different versions of that story that have been made over the years. The Bits’ expert on classic films, Barrie Maxwell, has performed a survey of the major versions of this story and reviewed the available DVDs of them. He includes the following background information, which spells out in more detail what I glossed over in my own recent post:

There have been four live-action sound versions filmed under the title Scrooge, in 1935, 1951, 1970, and in 1978, the latter one made for television. The 1951 film is the famous British Alastair Sim version, released in the United States under the title A Christmas Carol. That title has also been used for 15 other versions, the majority of which were made for television. They appeared in 1938, 1943 (one of the first experimental television broadcasts), 1947 (TV), 1949 (TV), 1950 (TV), 1953 (TV), 1971, 1977 (TV), 1981 (TV), 1982 (TV), 1984 (TV), 1994 (TV), 1999 (TV), 2000 (TV), and in 2004 (TV). Some of these are updated versions of the story (e.g., the 2000 one) and of course there are other updated versions under different titles (most notably Henry Winkler’s An American Christmas Carol [1979] and Bill Murray’s Scrooged [1988]). There are also numerous renditions of the story built around animated or celebrity figures, such as Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962), Rich Little’s Christmas Carol (1978), Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983), The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), and the like.

Like me, Maxwell favors the ’51 version (he says “More so than any other version, [Sim’s] Scrooge runs the gamut of traits believably from youthful eagerness to deviousness, crass superiority, unfeeling indifference, plain meanness, pathetic remorse, and finally giddy exuberance. It’s a tour-de-force performance that never fails to please no matter how many times you see it.”), but he also gives good marks to the George C. Scott version from 1984. For whatever that’s worth…

My little family doesn’t have much in the way of Christmas traditions. There are a lot of reasons for this, most of them involving the dysfunctional dynamics of my extended family and one too many of what my friend Jack accurately calls “family hostage situations.” Without delving into the gory details, I’ll just say that circumstances prevented my folks and me from developing any annual rituals of our own, and now that I’m grown and haven’t yet produced any children for Mom and Dad to spoil, Christmas tends to be a pretty dull affair for the three of us. In recent years, December 25th has consisted mostly of my nuclear trio shuffling around the house and trying to think of some way to tap into the joyful zeitgeist everyone else seems to enjoy, while grumbling quietly to ourselves that there really isn’t much difference between Christmas and any other day off from work. (Like I said in the previous entry, I’m not very sentimental about this particular holiday.)

Even though I don’t share any particular tradition with my parents, however, there is something I personally do every year. Every Christmas Eve, I make it a point to sit down, have a glass of eggnog and watch a Christmas-themed movie. Sometimes one or both of my folks join in, sometimes Anne is there, but even if I’m the only one in the room, the lights go down and the DVD starts to spin right around the time little children are imagining they hear sleigh bells overhead.

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