Quite an Oscar Night for “The Hurt Locker”, as the little movie that could shocked the world by becoming the lowest (relative) grossing movie ever to win Best Picture, with Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first woman ever to win Best Director.

My predictions were spot on for the acting and directing awards, but the anticipated split vote between “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar” that would have allowed “Inglourious Basterds” to sneak in didn’t happen.  I also missed on both writing awards as “Up in the Air” was upset by “Precious”, and Tarantino lost out to “The Hurt Locker” writer Mark Boal.

I was 7 right and 4 wrong for the lesser categories…not that anyone (including me) cares.

On to this week.  Forget the movies coming out today…there is only one release that has my attention this weekend, and that is the first episode of HBO’s “The Pacific”.  Made by the same people who created what many (myself included) consider the Greatest Mini Series of All Time, “Band of Brothers”, Episode One debuts this Sunday at 9 PM.  From everything I’ve seen, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks have done it again, as it looks as if they have spared no expense in creating as magnificent of a story of the Pacific battles of WWII as was shown of the European Theater efforts in Band of Brothers.

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There was no best man at Jack Bauer’s wedding, Jack Bauer is always the best man.

I will readily admit that I have been exceptionally hard on “24” this season.  We’ve always known that it was a guilty pleasure with continued leaps of logic, boring subplot, dislikable characters, and oft-repeated components, but we still loved it due to the often inventive ways they’d pull things out, the unexpected twists, several likeable (or at least interesting) secondary characters, and of course, Jack Bauer himself.

This year?  Through ten hours, it was obvious to most that this was “24” weakest season.

But things might be looking up, as tonight’s episode might have been the best one of the year, and MIGHT bode well for saving the rest of the season.

It better.  I still have 13 hours to cover after this one’s in the bag.

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This year’s Oscar Awards look to be the wildest we’ve seen in years.  First and foremost is the decision to open up the Best Picture race to ten films.  But that’s not enough wildness for them, so the voting has been changed to a very complex forumula.

Instead of just voting for the movie they think is best, voters instead are asked to rank the movies from 1 to 10.  If no movie has more than 50% of the first place votes, the movie with the least amount of #1 votes would be eliminated, and all of their votes would then go to the film ranked #2 on their list.  If that re-allocation doesn’t result in a winner, the process is repeated for the next lowest vote getter, until a movie finally crosses the 50% mark.

Confused?  Can’t say that I blame you.  The gist of it is that a movie could end up winning based not upon having more initial #1 votes, but by having more #2 and #3 votes.

So what does that really mean?  I think it might be bad news for “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker”, as supporters of those two films have one thing in common; they really HATE the other film…enough so that I could see many “Avatar” fanatics ranking “The Hurt Locker” at #10 and vice-versa.  This will, I think, lead to the winning picture being something other than the two I just mentioned.  We’ll get to that later.

Earlier this week, I recapped the four films I think are in true contention for Best Picture, as well as re-running my review of “The Blind Side”.  So let’s quickly touch base on the other five.

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Jack Bauer made a brief cameo in the film "Stand By Me" as the local bully. His character got so pissed off when the boys didn't let him take the dead body that seven years later, he killed River Phoenix. Jack Bauer never forgets.

(Was that Jack Bauer Fact a little over the line of good taste?  Perhaps, but good taste and Season 8 of ‘24’ are mutually exclusive terms as well).

I’m really wondering if the fact that I couldn’t watch this episode until this morning is a sign  As noted earlier, my business travels and a screwed up delay in my least favorite city in the country, Detroit, got me to my hotel Monday evening, too late to watch the show.  No problem…I’ll simply watch it online the next day.  Oh, wait…that would require my outrageously priced hotel to have good enough Internet service to actually be able to stream the show.  As it was, I’d seen 9600 baud rate modems run faster.

Fine…whatever.  It’s not like I have anything better to do on a Saturday morning after I’d been gone all week.  And no, I’m not even slightly resentful when I look outside and see that it’s be nicest day, weather-wise, that we’ve had in six weeks.

I’ll just blame Michigan.

Then I’ll probably actually HOPE for a crappy episode, because am I ever ready to get the knives out.

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