Because, ladies and gentlemen, I know what you’re really talking about this morning.
No Best Picture Oscar for Avatar
The Hurt Locker beat out Avatar for Best Picture (and director – Kathryn Bigelow is the first woman to win) but the sci-fi extravaganza did take statues for visual effects, cinematography, and art direction. I don’t find this particularly heartbreaking: Avatar might have been a fun movie to watch, but Best Picture? Ehh.
Best Picture was really the only uncertain prize going in, so there weren’t many surprises for the genre winners: Pixar’s Up took Animated feature and Music, while Star Trek got Makeup. (District 9 will always have this, I suppose.)
And the rest: Game of Thrones, Razzies, poor King Arthur and Futurama
Winter is actually coming. HBO must have liked the pilot for A Game of Thrones, because they ordered nine more episodes: By cable standards, that’s pretty much an entire season. Filming starts in June, and we can expect the series to debut next spring.
Shocker! Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen took the Razzies for Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay. As for actual entertainment value, Sandra Bullock showed up in person to accept Worst Actress for All About Steve: If she gets an Academy Award tonight (for The Blind Side) she’ll become the first actress to win both a Razzie and an Oscar in the same year.
Nothing new under the sun. Guy Ritchie wants to remake Excalibur “in the tone of Star Wars.” There’s also something going down with Warren Ellis, and didn’t Showtime have The Tudors team signed to do a Camelot series? To all this I say: Haven’t the Arthurian legends suffered enough?
Good news, everyone! Futurama returns to its rightly place as a half-hour show in June.
Harry Potter fans raise $123K for Haiti aid
A recent fund-raising drive by Harry Potter fans has raised enough funds (US$123,000!) for Partners in Health to fill three planes worth of supplies for Haiti.
The first of the three planes, named Harry, has been deployed. Ron and Hermione are to follow.
Congratulations to The HP Alliance and all the Harry Potter fans for this monumental achievement. Other fandoms will be hard-pressed to match this one!
TGIF: Goodnight Forest Moon
Designer Noah M. Dziobecki made a spoof of the classic picture book Goodnight Moon. It’s free to all, in PDF format: All you have to do is assemble it. (via)
EUbits, arty scoundrel edition: Han, Chewie, Lando and Cade
Visions. So I haven’t been unimpressed with the peeks we’ve had of this ‘mystery’ book so far, but I wasn’t really blown away until Raymond Swanland’s ‘Shadows of Tatooine’ appeared today. It may not be ‘The Death of General Wolfe’ pastiche I so greatly desire, but: WANT.
Fate of the Jedi. Why hello there! Get your first look at Lando on the back cover of Allies.
Comics: io9 has the preview for Legacy #46.
Star Wars: In Concert returning to the U.S.
The ‘multi-media event,’ currently trekking through Europe, returns to the States in May, with brand-new dates winding from Florida to California. Tickets will go on sale next week.
Wacky merchandise: Star Wars scrapbooking
Reader Rebel Without A Cause spotted this Star Wars scrapbooking paper, and it didn’t take much poking around to find some kits and even instant albums. I’m sure there are some traditional scrapbookers who’ve jumped on these, but I can think of plenty of uses outside the box.
Win a copy of Backlash from Aaron Allston
Aaron will be giving away an autographed and personalized copy of next week’s release to the person who can guess the below:
So, what’s the contest? I sometimes imagine a specific actor or actress when I’m writing a character. It can be useful to see specific expressions characteristic of that performer, to hear dialogue in the exact voice of an individual. Such was the case when I was writing the Admiral Daala character in Outcast and Backlash, especially the former. Guess who the actress I was envisioning when writing Daala and the copy is yours.
Head over to AaronAllston.com for a couple of hints – and how to enter.
Video: Ke$ha Star Wars video spoof
…Okay, I admit it, this is pretty funny. (via)