Oscar's Best Picture "Lasts"

In my previous post, I wrote about Ocar’s Best Picture Firsts. Now that the Academy Awards have come and gone and the Oscar went to 2011’s Best Picture – yes, the “King’s Speech,” Raining Acorns thought it would be a good idea to follow that post with a list of “lasts” in the same vein. Lest we forget, these are the things that we won’t be seeing again when the Best Picture is awarded in the future:

Oscar's Best Picture Firsts

The very first movie to win an Academy Award for Best Picture was a war film. It was 1927, the first year that the Oscars were held, and the winner was “Wings.” The most recent Best Picture winner was also a war film, “The Hurt Locker.” The shared genre is just about all that these two movies, 82 years apart, have in common. “Wings” was a silent movie shot in black and white and directed by a man, while “The Hurt Locker” was very much a “talkie” shot in full color and directed by a woman, Kathryn Bigelow. In fact, “The Hurt Locker” was the first film directed by a woman to win an Oscar for Best Picture.

"The Accidental Billionaires"

“I'm trying to make the world a more open place by helping people connect and share” Mark Zuckerberg

Today there are over 500 million people connecting and sharing on Facebook. In fact, about one out of every fourteen people in the world has a Facebook account, including the founder of this ubiquitous online world. Mark Zuckerberg turned down an offer of a billion dollars for the company in 2005. “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich chronicles the founding of Facebook, from its Harvard dorm room beginnings to the conclusion of the numerous lawsuits brought against Zuckerberg by fellow students who claim he stole the idea for Facebook from them.

Summer Camp

As I previously opined, I think every small town in America has its own claim to fame. "Blobfest" is the event that has put little Phoenixville PA on the map. For those of you unfamiliar with cult classic films, Blobfest celebrates everything associated with the 1950's camp classic movie The Blob.

Listening to Ulysses

Before he was anybody special (well, at least before he had his own show), Stephen Colbert stood on the stage at Symphony Space in New York City and flexed his arms in preparation.  He was about to read two chapters from James Joyce’s Ulysses, Calypso and the Lotus Eaters.

For He Was Welsh, You Know: Reading Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth

Fluellen:  And I do believe your majesty takes

no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy’s day.

King Henry:  I wear it for a memorable honour,

For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman.

As I listened to John Metcalf’s Mapping Wales, I conjured a sky thick with Welsh archers’ arrows.  The arrows weren’t the stuff of my imagination, but a scene from Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V.  As one thing so often leads to another, I thought it time to give the film another look.

Avatar

This movie signals our entry into the second decade of the new millennium. Writer and director James Cameron conceived of the project 15 years ago, though he had to wait this long for technology to catch up with his vision - he even invented a new camera in the process.

Invictus - My Memory of the Game

INVICTUS

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul

William Ernest Henly


It is said that Nelson Mandela drew inspiration from this poem which he kept on a scrap of paper in his prison cell for 27 years.