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Slumdog Millionaire Takes Home 8 Oscars
Ben Burtt was robbed of his overly deserved Oscars for the sound on Wall-E, and Heath Ledger's Joker unsurprisingly got a posthumous statue, but the big winner for the night was Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire with Picture, Director, Song, and five others. Go ahead movie nerds: talk amongst yourself.
Would Slumdog have been even noticed had it not been made by a British Director? Thousands of movies have been made about poverty in India. They get as much attention as movies made about drugs in American cities. People deal with this shit in their everyday life and dont want to watch it when they pay to enter a theater for some relaxation. Only people who have never seen poverty get their rocks off by watching something like Slumdog. Then again probably why Rambo and Die Hard were so popular outside the States was that guns are a big deal in countries with gun control.
**Life is too short to be serious**
The main Academy Awards may not be news for nerds, but the Sci-Tech Awards are certainly full of /. fodder.
- Jasen.
The Nobel Prize has been inflated in the minds of some (with help from the media, no doubt) to be far more than it is. It is not designed to be awarded to people who just make mind-blowing life-changing discoveries. Nobel's will specifically stated that it be awarded annually:
The capital shall be invested by my executors in safe securities and shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind
It then goes on to stipulate what categories each award is for.
So, the Nobel Prize was originally intended to simply be sort of a "man of the year" competition in various fields, and was supposed to pertain to work that was done during the preceding year. In that spirit, Gore's prize was proper, since he was being awarded for stuff he had done during the previous year, while those prizes given to scientists for discoveries made years or decades earlier were technically in violation of Nobel's original intent, since it was supposed to reward only work done during the preceding year.
If the Nobel Prize was awarded as a "Man of the Year in x field" rather than "person who made earth-shattering discoveries in x field", you wouldn't have near the controversy it always seems to generate.