Movieacados! It is again getting to be a special time of year for some movie fans, and that time of year is the quest for gold hehehe, gold! More accurately Oscar gold. In my real life I stop watching movies every so often in order to earn money that I can then use to watch more movies, and they way I earn that money is through Science! Or more specifically: Chemistry! As a chemist I know the chemical symbol for gold is Au, derived from the latin name Aurum. I also had the privilege of training under the person who spearheaded the project to gold plate the Oscars. It should not surprise anyone that Oscars are not all solid gold, but they do actually have to have a certain value of gold one them, and as such are plated to within a very high tolerance in order to achieve that number. Figuring out how to figure this out was a very complicated mathematic problem that in the end had a very simple solution (the math is still complicated but attaining the variables was not). Anyways this is probably the closest I will ever come to holding an Oscar myself short of hauling up roots and moving to Chicago to hound the company that does this for a job, and speaking as a small town Eastern Canadian I don’t think the US is a good fit for me at the moment regardless of how deep the dished pizzas are.

Every year this time a bunch of Oscar baited movies are released from late November all the way through December and every year I get interested in a few, but also see very little of them, eventually seeing them on streaming, or in more traditional times home video releases. At the end of the day I only have so much time and money to see movies in theatres and the Oscar types do not usually appeal to me that much (other than best animated feature which I rarely miss, but also is usually not limited to this time of year). Like I will see the trailer and get interested, but Christmas time is busy and I am not often interested enough to drop everything to see one of these movies, but at the same time I do get the appeal that they have for other movie-goers, just as not everyone goes for my favourites either. But a great performance is still a great performance, outstanding work in make-up, costumes, scores and all those categories are still often sights and sounds to behold. In full disclosure I skip a lot of the drama heavy Oscar type movies that tend to win Best Picture, Actor etc in favour of the more genre heavy categories of Make-up, Effects and the like, although at the same time I often see at least half of the movies nominated for things like Best Screenplay and Director.

We all engage with art in our own ways and there is not really a wrong way to engage with movies from an Oscar perspective (avoiding them at all costs still counts as engagement in some form), so this weeks prompt is a simple: How do you engage with award winning movies? I mean most of the time if we see these movies upon initial release they probably have not won too many awards other than film fest awards, but you can often tell when a movie is gunning for one of the big ones, so enjoy, discuss and have fun.