Now we emerge to face the morrow.
Let the cameras begin to roll.
87 times to show.
This is the year of the 88th Academy Awards ceremony to be held on February 28, 2016, in Hollywood, California. The best films of 2015 will be honored there and the Best Picture selected.
To date, there have been 87 Academy Award ceremonies and 87 Best Pictures selected and carefully place waiting on their shelves to be viewed again.
So starts “The Marathon of the 87 Best Pictures” and “EthnoSocioFamilyMovieOgraphy.”
Before we start, let’s visit the things that started the year.
One person defined a New Year’s resolution as a promise made at the beginning of the year and carefully kept for two weeks. The suggestion is that short-term resolutions are of small merit. Can this be true? The collective experience of the masses is that most resolutions are of a brief and passing nature – seldom reaching to year-end. Are those resolutions for their limited lives of little value?
In a past New Year, I resolved to eat more salads. After a brief period of time (let’s say two weeks to honor our humorous naysayer), my intent flagged and the green leaves wilted to brown on their plates. Was this from a failing commitment on my part? “Nay,” I say, “No!” I had in my weakened state experienced an epiphany, a revelation: I cared little for salad, and salad cared little for me.
Without the initial, if short-termed, resolution, there would have been no longer-term revelation. I would have been a lesser person lingering in continuing fear that lettuce was absolutely essential to my life. It is not.
The experience of my salad revolution birthed a revelation of personal understanding. I experienced a better appreciation of me. Resolution led to revelation. I now understood that lettuce was not as important as my own reasoned selection of foods. To eat less green was the wiser, happier and healthier personal choice.
In being broken, my New Year’s resolution had worked quite well!
We see then that what is important to the New Year is the honest experience of resolution, not blind commitment to a 365-day goal.
Some might say that this is just a rationale to justify broken resolutions. It is if you did not learn something about yourself in breaking the resolution. If you did learn more about you, it is not a rationale. If you learned the resolution is not compatible with you, it is a requirement to break that resolution.
Having said all of that, I am glad I did not make “The Marathon of 87 Best Pictures” a New Year’s resolution. It is not. It is a hope.
A “hope” is much more mysterious and less demanding than a “resolution.” Hope focuses beyond me to the future. Resolution focuses on me in the present.
I hope to watch all 87 Best Pictures in 2016. I am not resolved to learn anything about me in the process. I do hope to learn more about what those movies mean to friends and family who watch the shows with me.
That is the “EthnoSocioFamilyMovieOgraphy” part: “ethno” for people, “sociofamily” for the community of family and friends doing the watching, “movie” for the Best Pictures we will watch, and “ography” for my recording and tabulating the results.
We start this Friday by watching “Wings,” the first Best Picture, filmed in 1927 and winner at the 1st Academy Awards held on May 16, 1929 in Los Angeles, California.
Reports will be posted, and I do hope we go the distance.
But I’m not making any resolutions.
Cheers,
Grandpa Jim