Monday, February 26, 2007

I’d Like To Thank the Academy

Carol and Louise left around noon, and that left me with the rest of the day to putter around the house, get to know the dogs, continue to focus on that little issue of needing a student visa, and zip over to campus and back before the start of the Academy Awards. The Oscars are like my church, something to be greatly celebrated, and I’d deliberately avoided all news sources all day, determined that the winners would surprise me. Except for Helen Mirren, Forest Whitaker, Jennifer Hudson, Eddie Murphy, Martin Scorsese, and An Inconvenient Truth. But everything else was going to surprise me.

The house to myself, I made a dish of chicken tikka masala, poured a glass of wine, and sat down to watch the ceremony. Now, I’ve experienced a lot of different emotions watching the Oscars. I’ve been nervous, I’ve been excited, I’ve been thrilled, and I’ve been angry. But never, ever before have I spent the entire Oscar ceremony crying. That surprised me.

Oh, and Alan Arkin. That surprised me too.