The Academy Awards

The 84th Academy Awards aired Sunday night.  If you missed it, well, I did too.  I don't have a TV, so I couldn't watch it in real time, but I do have a computer, so I was able to catch some stuff the next day.

Let me first say that I enjoy movies both as a form of entertainment and as a form of art.  Not that those are mutually exclusive.  Some may say that movies and television have been the death of reading.  I don't know if I'd go that far, but there's probably some truth to it.

I didn't get into the Harry Potter movies until...I think it was the fifth movie.  I watched that one in the theater, and now I own all the DVDs.  Sunny and I watch them all at Christmas time, because to us they're Christmas movies.  Most of them came out around Christmas, they have Christmas scenes, and most importantly, they are fantastic stories.  Fantastic stories really make the best Christmas movies.

It wasn't until this last Christmas that I started reading the books.  Sunny bought them all for me for my birthday, which is right after Christmas (now you know and you have no excuse for not getting me a gift) so I finally started reading them.  I'm on book five right now.

While I'm one of the first people to criticize the film industry for its lack of creativity (How quickly did they remake Spiderman and The Hulk, both of which were adaptations of comic books to begin with?), I do appreciate seeing film adaptations of books that I've read.  And now, I'm learning to appreciate reading the books after having seen the films.  There's so much more story in the books.

For the fun of it, let's look at all the Oscar nominees for Best Picture and see how many were based on books:

     Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close written by Jonathan Safran Foer.
     The Descendants written by Kaui Hart Hemmings.
     The Help written by Kathryn Stockett.
     Hugo, aka The Invention of Hugo Cabret, written & illustrated by Brian Selznick.
     Moneyball written by Michael Lewis.
     War Horse written by Michael Morpurgo.
          Actually, the movie was based both on the book and the play written by Nick Stafford,
          which was based on the book.

Midnight in Paris, The Tree of Life and The Artist (the winner) were original.

When I was a kid, I would get so annoyed when film adaptations of books I'd read deviated even marginally from the original story.  Silly me.  I've now come to appreciate how different media can tell similar stories in different ways.  I'm really looking forward to seeing The Hunger Games.  Although I'm certain a film won't be able to capture the intricacies and nuances that are present in the book, it may be able to add something new.

I enjoy seeing film adaptations of books.  Sometimes I've read the books before seeing the film, and sometimes seeing the film makes me want to read the book.  So no judgment that two-thirds of the Best Picture nominees were adapted from books.

Now if you're going to create a movie based on a theme park ride (Pirates of the Caribbean) or a board game (Battleship), that's creativity.  Good luck.