Low-Budget Oscars

I'm in a cheap but celebratory mood. Possibly because the Kindle website DailyCheapReads.com chose Mourning Becomes Cassandra as one of their four favorite reads of 2010. Yippee! I'll admit, I think the book is the most fun you can have for $2.99...

Scott and I haven't done jack for New Year's Eve, we estimate, since 2000. We don't even watch the ball drop in New York City at the respectable hour of 9:00 PST. On the agenda tonight, I believe, is to finish watching Rendition with Jake Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon--a movie we forgot we had started until I finally checked on Netflix to see why we had nothing besides Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Oops. I think Rendition is about a guy getting mistakenly profiled and arrested. Kind of a snooze but a decent backdrop while I play Words With Friends on my phone (username: Chrustt).

For those of you without extravagant New Year's plans I thought I'd award some Netflix Instant Play Oscars. (Except they'll be more like People's Choice Awards, since I pick my own categories.) Maybe you'll see something you haven't already watched or that you've long forgotten. Wash the movie down with some non-microwaved popcorn and leftover, formerly-sparkling cider from Christmas, and you're good to go, Dudley-style!

Best Former-Best-Picture. Shakespeare in Love. As delightful as I remembered. Why did Joseph Fiennes career go nowhere after this? oh, whoops. Scratch that--it's no longer on Instant Play. Streetcar Named Desire continues to amaze. Ste-e-e-e-elllllla!!!!

Best Comedy (Classic). A toss-up between Carole Lombard's To Be or Not to Be and Marilyn Monroe's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Ingrid Bergman in Cactus Flower was fabulous, but it's off IP now.

Best Comedy (Recent). Dang--this post is harder than I thought because they keep pulling things off IP that we watched on IP. Defending Your Life is still there. As is The Proposal (B/B+) and Eddie Izzard: Dressed to Kill if you like stand-up (foul language, of course). Oh, and The Agony and the Ecstasy is on IP, although I don't think it counts because I suspect they didn't mean it to be comic.

Best Documentary. Just watched Ken Burns' The Brooklyn Bridge. His National Parks is also available. Food, Inc. is a good kick-in-the-pants to set New Year's food resolutions.

Best Drama. Hmmm...Cool Hand Luke? About a Boy is more of a dramedy but also good.

Best Movie Based on a Classic. Go with Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters or North and South. The former is longer but the latter has tough accents to follow.

Best Kids' Recommendations. If you like martial arts and Eastern-religion-mishmash, the Avatar series is a big hit. As are the Jackie Chan Adventures. For the whole fam, there's Up and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

That's all I have for you today--except to say that I'm reading Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and it deserves every bit of the hype. A fascinating book. Read 2/3 in one day! And what could be more low-budget than reading a library book?

Happy New Year!