I posted a long-winded review of Howard Shore’s Oscar-winning score to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring to the rec.music.movies newsgroup. It can be read, via Google, here.

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I keep repeating to myself, like a Zen mantra, “The Oscars are meaningless….the Oscars are meaningless….the Oscars are meaningless….” Or, I borrow from William Goldman: “There is no ‘best’….there is no ‘best’….there is no ‘best’….”

….and yet I’m still annoyed that Ian McKellan didn’t win an Oscar. Oh well, maybe the Academy is waiting to see what he does in The Two Towers, when Gandalf the Grey becomes Gandalf the White….or maybe they’re just a bunch of dingbats. I’d like to believe the former, but I fear that the “dingbat” theory will have to hold sway for now.

But at least they made up for it by finally giving Randy Newman an Oscar. What a fine, fine songwriter and musician. What belated recognition. (Not so belated as Cary Grant, who was the Ernie Banks of Oscars, but still belated.)

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Until today, if asked to name the single worst decision made by a sports figure in the last year (meaning decisions directly related to onfield-happenings, leaving out things like Jeff Kent’s apparent motorcycle ride/truck washing), I would have named St. Louis Rams head coach Mike Martz’s bizarre decision in the Super Bowl to only give Marshall Faulk seventeen carries, despite the facts that Faulk averaged 4.5 yards per carry in that game and the Patriots played the entire game in a defensive scheme that practically rolled out the red carpet for a power running game. That was a godawful decision, and because of that the Rams are runners-up.

But the worst sports decision has to be Michelle Kwan’s dismissal of her longtime coach, Frank Carroll. Kwan lost again to Irina Slutskaya, this time at the World Figure Skating Championships in Nagano. Her skating since she decided to go it alone has been tentative and sloppy, nothing like what had previously been expected from Kwan. As for Carroll? His current star, American Timothy Goebel, like Kwan took bronze at the Olympics and silver at World’s. But Goebel’s star is on the rise. Kwan’s is supposed to be shining brightly; instead it is on the wane.

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One of the better writers of the space opera subgenre in science fiction is Timothy Zahn. His novels set in the Star Wars universe are probably the best available, and I’ve just finished Conquerors’ Heritage, the second volume in his Conquerors trilogy. This is the story of a war between spacefaring humanity and what is at first presented as a ruthless conquering alien race called the Zhirzh. However, the second book of the trilogy is told from the Zhirzh point of view, and the war takes on a new light as it becomes clear that the whole thing is the sad result of a series of unfortunate mistakes, blunders, and failures of understanding. One of these errors is fairly obvious well before it is revealed at the end of Book Two, and the Zhirzh — despite some interesting cultural habits — don’t seem “alien” enough. Zahn hasn’t quite met John Campbell’s challenge of showing an alien who thinks as well as a man, but not like a man. Those are really mere quibbles, though. Zahn tells a tight story with interesting subplots that come together in unexpected ways. I’m looking forward to reading the third book in this trilogy.

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Congratulations to Timothy Goebel, who just won the silver at the World Figure Skating Championships in Nagano, Japan. (Of course, had Evgeny Pleshenko competed Goebel probably would have finished bronze.) As for the new World Champion, what can be said? Alexei Yagudin is far and away better than anyone else skating right now.

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Just finished: Piano Lessons: Music, Love and True Adventures by Noah Adams. Adams, a commentator for NPR, wrote this book to recount a year he spent attempting to learn how to play the piano. It’s a charming book that tells the story of what might be considered a kind of “midlife crisis”.

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There is always something kind of goofy about the World Championships of Figure Skating during Olympic years. They’re always held just a month or so after the Games, and they invariably feel a tad anticlimactic, especially since just about all of the skaters use the exact same programs with which they competed in the Olympics, and some of the newly-crowned Olympic champions or runners-up end up not competing at Worlds. Notable absences this year include America’s Sarah Hughes and Russia’s Evgeny Pleshenko. (Not that it matters in the latter case; Alexei Yagudin right now is the skating equivalent of the 1990s Chicago Bulls.)

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It’s funny how we long to visit places that are far away, and yet we so often don’t know what’s in our own backyards. Years of living in Western New York, and I didn’t know anything about this place until today.

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The Simpsons delivered its best episode in quite some time last night, a hilarious take on three classic stories: The Odyssey, the tale of Joan of Arc, and Hamlet. As is usually the case in these types of episodes, the Simpsons themselves play the main characters with the regular townsfolk rounding out the supporting cast. Having Mayor Quimby as Zeus and the Old Sea Captain as Poseidon were brilliant touches, as was Moe as Claudius in Hamlet. The show doesn’t hit these heights nearly as often or as consistently as it used to, but it’s nice to see that they can still pull one out once in a while.

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The second installment of NPR’s annual survey of Oscar-nominated filmscores is here. This week’s discussed scores are Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone (John Williams) and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Howard Shore).

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