The Red Carpet Diaries

It's Oscar Night - the one night a year where we kind of regret not owning one of those electric "Tele-Vision" machines.  But we're still excited because we're going to take our Mexican friends to the cleaners in the Oscar pool, since we know most of them will pick Javier Bardem (who no one here seems to realize is even less Mexican than we are) as Best Actor, and Biutiful as Best Picture, on the mistaken premise that write-ins are allowed.  Hey, should we play for dollars, rather than pesos?

As we have for four of the past five years, we'll be cheering extra loud for former Burro Hall staff photographer Wally Pfister, who's nominated again for his cinematography on Inception.  With three previous, unrewarded nominations and this year's ASC Award under his belt, he would - in a universe ruled by a just and benevolent God - be a shoo-in.  Of course, we don't live in such a universe, so he's up against the legendary Roger Deakins (nine nominations, no wins) who's in the lifetime-achievement-award phase of his career.  The Oscar pool is no place for sentiment, though, so we find ourselves in the strange position of staking money on Deakins while hoping we're wrong. (And long-time readers of this blog will understand how rarely that happens.)

"I only have four fingers!"

The way the Mexican press makes a such a fuss about the tiniest Mexican-Hollywood connections (seriously, we've seen feature articles on Mexicans that have worked as makeup assistants on some big-budget blockbuster), we're surprised that the press here is unaware that Andres Heinz, who wrote the (unfortunately, not-nominated) story for Black Swan, used to live in Querétaro.  In fact (since this is a blog and therefore All About Us), his going-away party (he was moving to the US with his girlfriend) was one of the first social events we were invited to upon moving our headquarters here.  (Also one of the last, but that's a story for later.)

Bonus Burro Hall/Oscar anecdote: Black Swan's Oscar-nominated director's sister worked with (okay, near) us at CBS, and is married to a cameraman we were very fond of, who (if we're remembering the story correctly) honeymooned in Mexico with his first wife in Sept. 1985, where he unexpectedly spent most of his vacation working.   Honestly, we don't understand why the Mexican press hasn't done a full-page profile of us; we know a guy who survived the big quake, and went on to marry the sister of the director of Black Swan, which was written by a guy we met once when he was living in Mexico!  We really need to start charging the features editors for all these great ideas.

Update:

And we still went 17 for 24 in the pool.