Hollywood Takes a Gamble
By Mary Beth Gentle
This year when the Academy Awards come to town it won’t be LA that they come to, it will be more like Las Vegas. And I say that only because the Hollywood Cube Dweller Oscar pool ballot is due any day and I have not seen one movie. I know that is hard to believe – I do work in Hollywood after all – but it is true. I have my list of the five nominated movies for best picture; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk, Frost/Nixon, The Reader and Slumdog Millionaire. And amazingly enough, I haven’t seen one of them.
The nominations were announced on January 22nd and I thought I would have more than enough time to see everything on the list. I have always prided myself on the fact that I see all the top movies and then I sit down with my office pool ballot and I vote with my heart. I never listen to who Vegas predicts as the odds on favorites or who the Hollywood insiders guarantee to pull out the win. But, this year I may just be out of time. It’s been almost a month since the announcements were made and I still have not seen anything.
I quickly started making the calls around town to see who might have an Academy Screener or two that I could borrow. For those of you that don’t know what those are – they are DVD copies of the nominated movies that go out to Academy and Guild members all over town. Academy Screeners are one of the biggest gambles the Studios take throughout the year. These DVD’s have always been a top source for piracy rings. The Studios have taken steps to secure their product by putting in security codes on the discs and sending out scary legal letters to all the recipients about not losing track of or sharing their copies. Needless to say, the DVD’s still make their way all over town.
But, as with anything in Hollywood, the lists to borrow any of the top movies on DVD were a mile long and I was, as always, on the bottom of the list. So, I have done the only thing I could do, I went on line with my office pool ballot at my side and decided to throw my heart out the window and vote with the best odds I could find. I mean come on, my hard earned five bucks was at stake and during an economic downturn, a girl has to do what a girl has to do.
So, I read about the Vegas handicaps. I went to all the Entertainment sites and read their predictions. I tallied what pictures had won at the Golden Globes, which actors had won at the SAG Awards and which Guild awarded what to who in their Academy Bake-off’s. And I basically came to the following conclusions: I am not Vegas material, the internet is filled with people with too much time on their hands and most importantly, I really just need to go to a movie theatre and see the movies.
So, this year I made the decision not to join the office pool. I figure if I can’t vote with my heart there is really no point voting at all. I will just have to tune in to root for my favorite actors, rate the nights best and worst fashions and enjoy the show. Next year, I will make sure I see al the movies, so that this Hollywood Cube Dweller is ready for next office pool.
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