Month: March 2005

I don’t appear to have much to say this week, and I have a few other items I want to get off the desk (both physically and metaphorically), so posting here may be a bit light over the next few days.

(Or it may not. You never know. I’m a capricious fellow.)

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Is it that good gates make good neighbors, or good fences? I can never remember. Hmmmm…anyway, here’s Greg Sandow on The Gates:

In all these ways, The Gates transform the park. They make you see and feel it differently. That’s art enough for me.

I didn’t see The Gates, obviously, but I have a pretty inclusive view of what is art and what is not, and I might well have viewed them thusly. Maybe we can get the creators of The Gates to come to Buffalo and do something similar in one of our parks. (If we have any parks left, that is. Ye Gods.)

(Although, I have to admit, that as well-received as The Gates were, I’d much rather lay my eyes upon these Gates. A Elbereth!)

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Yup, time to talk about Oscar. He was a pretty good boss to Lee Majors, wasn’t he?

OK, fine, on the Academy Awards last night — I saw very few of this year’s films (Finding Neverland, which I enjoyed immensely, was the only one), and I really didn’t care all that much. Still, it was nice to see Morgan Freeman win — every day that I look up “dignity” in the dictionary and don’t see Freeman’s picture there strikes me as an injustice — and other than that, I don’t much care. I liked Chris Rock a bit, although really, I don’t care who hosts the show. (As long as it isn’t Whoopi Goldberg. I lost my taste for her Oscar hosting a few years back.)

As a film music lover, the Best Original Score category always interests me. This year the award went to Jan Kaczmarek’s score to Finding Neverland, which along with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the only one of this year’s scores I heard. I found Kaczmarek’s score lovely, and I don’t really have a problem with it taking the award. It’s fine by me, actually.

But then, of course, you can cue the film score community — see here and here — to bitch about the fact that James Newton Howard didn’t win, yet again, and about the Academy’s continued failure to grovel at the feet of Jerry Goldsmith (this time, some people bitch that Goldsmith’s music wasn’t featured during the telecast, and some don’t feel that the applause his name received during the “In Memoriam” segment was enthusiastic enough). Oy.

Oy.

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