Oscar Quest 2017 is Cancelled

When I first saw the slate for this year, I was a bit worried about finishing all the films. I decided that, even with my vacation, if I cut a few categories, I could make a strong push at it.

Unfortunately, two things have happened since then in addition to the fuller vacation schedule than anticipated. Perhaps the biggest blockade is that the failing graphics chip on my laptop seems to crash much more frequently in warm weather, and thus, outside of late nights and early mornings, my computer has a tendency to crash every few minutes. It has crashed nearly a dozen times writing this article (often a few times in a row). Secondly, en route to Mexico, the TSA took one of my bags aside for a "HAZMAT threat," and by the time I received it, everything valuable had been stolen including, most pertinently, my hard drive with all nominated films.

Thanks for tuning in, but I'm signing off to enjoy myself without so much tethering me.

Oscar Quest 2017

Like every year, I swear to myself I am going to watch more film and be better prepared than the last year, but come nominee announcement time, I've only ever watched a few. To be fair, I spent my time in film in December catching up on Academy Award nominated films that I never got around to in 2013 and 2014. Mostly they've been documentaries, and that's my most viewed category (at all of two) headed into this year. There are forty-seven films, and I have thirty-two days with a seven film head start. I am going to be out of country during almost this entire project, though, so that presents a two-fold challenge. Firstly, I will likely be able to access far fewer films. Secondly, I don't want to spend a vacation to Mexico inside a theater. I am almost certainly going to cut the original song category which, unfortunately, only saves me two films this year. Expect this year to be less formidable than my past couple of years, but hopefully, I can still get through a fair amount and have fun with it. Primarily, though, I'm on vacation, so we'll see.