A Jumbled Mess of Jumbled Messiness
So the Oscars were on last night. I watched them on mute, only unmuting to listen to a couple of awards but I gave up pretty early on. The only award I really cared about is the animated feature because my favourite movies are always animated. I was hoping Kung Fu Panda 2 would win, but I hadn't seen any of the others in the category and therefore I can't really say if I feel that Po and Co. were robbed. Last year I was adamant that How to Train Your Dragon should have won over Toy Story 3 (which might be a controversial thing to say but I don't care, TS3 was too melodramatic to be as charming and entertaining as HtTYD in my opinion), but I was most irritated about Tangled, Megamind, or Despicable Me not being nominated. And the year before that I was furious that Slumdog Millionaire swept and robbed Wall-E of the sound award it more than probably deserved.
I hate whenever a movie sweeps, even if they only sweep a little bit (if that's even possible). I felt that they let The Social Network sweep a little bit last year to make up for going conservative and giving the big award to The King's Speech, and that's why HtTYD's music didn't win. That might just be me dipping a little into bat-shit insane conspiracy theorism, and I hope that it's only because I'm subjective and the Academy just had differing opinions than mine. But last night Hugo did the same thing, and noticeably Harry Potter STILL hasn't won an Oscar, and the very snubbed (in my opinion anyway) Andy Serkis didn't even get to watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes win for its technical achievements.
I haven't seen Hugo, but now I'm going to, and hopefully it'll impress me. To be honest, I was hoping it would win for Best Picture just because it's a family film (read: "for kids") and those movies are often neglected just like animated features. But of course The Artist won. I'm sure it was good, but still. It's one of those movies that "of course" wins the Oscar.
This year there are a bunch of movies I'm really looking forward to. Pixar's new one, Brave, looks like fun (even if it looks pretty much like HtTYD with a female protagonist and with bears instead of dragons). And DreamWorks' new one, Rise of the Guardians, looks pretty much like the best thing ever. Disney has one coming out this year, Wreck-it-Ralph. I'll have to wait and see for that one. Obviously there's also The Hunger Games coming out soon, and then The Dark Knight Rises as well as The Amazing Spider-Man. Usually as the year starts up I'd only have a Harry Potter movie to look forward to as well as dread, because that's just how that film franchise went, but this year I'm pretty excited.
Next on my list of topics is Nigel. I may be at school and therefore an hour away as the car drives, but before I left I got him up to stage two in harness training: I set the harness loosely on him and fastened the buckle around his neck (which is not where it's supposed to go, but it was just to get him used to it). He wasn't very impressed but he stayed and let me give him a treat and pet him, and then he didn't fuss too much when I unbuckled it and left him to his own devices. I think this may actually work!
o.O This is Nigel after a rigorous play session with the catnip-filled banana. One of my issues now is that I can't harness-train him and brush his teeth around the same time because he has a very very very low threshold for irritation and both activities trip it almost immediately.
My last topic is vegan baking. I wanted to make a slightly complicated pie from the cookbook Vegan Pie in the Sky by the chefs at Post Punk Kitchen. My sister and I made the Maple Pecan pie over Christmas break and it rocked. But this Boston Cream Cake Pie required agar powder which is something that nobody but Asian grocery stores have. I googled it and discovered that T&T would have it, so my dad brought me over. And yeah.
So we looked for it, and they probably have it, but we couldn't find it. We found some sort of red dried agar thing, but that was clearly not what I needed. My dad asked one of the employees and he brought us over to the food colouring. There may have been a reason for this, but I couldn't understand what he said, and my dad later suggested that he brought us there because it was the only product in the store with packaging in English. So we left. And I bought twenty ounces of it online for about fifty bucks. Stupid agar. You'd think Whole Foods at least would carry it seeing as it's the best vegan alternative to gelatin. I think I'll write them a letter if I'm not way too lazy which is unlikely.
Once I get my agar I'm making that pie. And also this because I have been too long without jello.