Tonight's FNatM is by chingchongchinaman.
Yes, 'tis the Friday night before the Oscars, but 3CM the loser (hence his regular DK series - but he digresses) hasn't seen all the major nominees (not even close), so he doesn't have the knowledge to discuss them in detail. I'll leave that for you guys in the comments below, as basically an Oscars open forum.
Instead, the focus of this FNatM is a special event tonight in Chicago, at Orchestra Hall, which is running just as this diary posts (thanks to the wonders of DK 4.0). It's part of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's series called (what else?) Friday Night at the Movies, and is A Tribute to Roger Ebert. Yes, the Great Thumb himself gets his own night at the symphony, with....
....to quote the CSO's page:
"....performances of music from Ebert's favorite films, including Casablanca, The Third Man, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Gone with the Wind, as well as works by Ebert's favorite film composers plus many special surprises.
The Chicago Sun-Times' main classical critic (if not full-time as such), Andrew Patner, has this article in the Sun-Times featuring an e-mail discussion with Ebert, in advance of the CSO event tonight. Patner introduces Ebert thus:
"Roger Ebert has always been about 15 or 20 people: film critic, broadcaster, raconteur, bibliophile, prolific author, interviewer, historian, essayist, Anglophile, gourmand, chef, journalist, walking enthusiast, opera buff, Chicagoan, Illinoisan, Illini, prose stylist, Pulitzer Prize winner, sentimentalist, optimist, realist, lecturer, teacher, trivia buff, friend, husband, stepfather, grandparent. And since technologies took off and he has faced health setbacks, he’s added Internet memoirist, television producer, cookbook author and Twitterer extraordinaire."
From looking at his own blog, Ebert hasn't mentioned this CSO event that I could find. It isn't clear from Patner's article or the CSO's page if Ebert himself will be attending. That would seem to be a no-brainer, but given his health problems of late, I wasn't sure. One would think so; one would hope so. So, on a whim this week, I called the CSO to ask if he would be there. The answer was that this was the plan. If, by the utterly near-impossible chance that someone in Chicago is reading this diary well after the posting and went to that CSO event, please leave some thoughts here.
Speaking of Ebert's health problems, and sort of tying back to the upcoming Oscars, you can watch his interview with Oprah Winfrey from last year:
Ebert has his Outguess Ebert column to round up his Oscar predictions. You can see if they tally with yours, although he's honest enough to admit that his prediction for the live-action short film is based only on the trailers. This is the rare point where I can say I'm ahead of Ebert, since I have seen the live action shorts. OTOH, I'm not at all sure which one will win. However, if one takes the tack that the "socially relevant" topic tends to win, then Ebert may well be right.
With that, the film forum below is yours, to talk about Oscar-nominated movies, or any other movies you've seen recently......
