the pod bay door

:: Hey, the Geminids are tonight, and promise to be spectacular. Don’t know if I’ll have the energy to check them out, I am SO tired tonight.

:: Earlier this evening, I broke bread with four fellow co-workers of Hungarian descent at a warm, friendly little Hungarian restaurant in north-west Edmonton called The Goulash. My dad’s parents were Hungarian, and came to North America in the 1920s, settling in Winnipeg. Dinner was paprikás csirke with gnocchi, followed by a slice of Dobos torte for dessert, perhaps the most amazing, multi-layer chocolate cake with a hard carmel icing , and it was the best meal I’ve had in months. The food tasted just like the dishes my Grandma Reichardt made when we were little, which means it tasted home cooked, not like restaurant food. God Bless the cook(s)!

:: The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has announced its 2005 Golden Globe nominations. Leading the pack are Sideways with 7, The Aviator with 6, and three films with 5 nominations: Closer, Finding Neverland, and Million Dollar Baby. Overlooked in the Emmy Awards, Deadwood is nominated for Best Television Series – Drama, and Ian McShane is nominated for Best Performance by an Actor In A Television Series – Drama; he should be a lock in this category. The big winner in nominations is Jamie Foxx, with three acting nods for Ray, Collateral, and Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story. What’s odd is that his nomination for Ray is in the category Best Performance by an Actor in Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. There was music in Ray, of course, but the movie wasn’t a musical. That said, the criteria for that category must be, well, very liberal (or bizarre), because the other nominees include Jim Carrey for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Paul Giamatti for Sideways, two films I would call dramas rather than comedies.

:: Other awards have been announced, and Sideways is on a roll. Six The San Francisco Film Critics Circle awards went to Sideways. Sideways also took (at least) three of the NY Film Critics Circle Awards – not all have been announced as of this posting, with live voting still in progress. Sideways (surprise!) won Best Picture from the Boston Film Critics. The American Film Institute announced its official selections for Movies of the Year and TV Programs of the Year. The British Independent Film Awards saw Vera Drake sweep the awards for Actress, Actor, Supporting Actor/Actress, Film and Director.

Complete awards information is available at The Awards Scoreboard at Movie City News, with even more information available at Awards Watch 2005.

It’s a fun time of the year to get caught up in analysis of the movie industry if you are a film addict like me. A good read is William Goldman’s annual Oscar column from the Dec 12, 2004 issue of Variety.

Missing from all the lists – The Passion of the Christ.