Oscars 2011 Red Carpet Liveblog

With absolutely no ado, here we go!

6:05 – Choice between TV Guide and E! for the red carpet. Going with E! for now. Ryan Seacrest asks terrible questions but at least there isn't that annoying scrolling part at the bottom.

6:11 – It is absurd how LITTLE Melissa Leo looks like her character from The Fighter in real life. I still have nightmares about that hair.

6:13 – Hello Mila Kunis' boobs! I love her. I want to see more of her dress, because it looks like there is a high likelihood of nip-slippage.

6:20 – Penny has decided that she needs to be on my lap (but under the quilt, she’s so weird) which, while deliciously warm and snuggly, is making typing more difficult.

6:23 – I LOVE HAILEE STEINFELD.

6:24 – She looks really cute too. And age appropriate. And her responses are great. UGH I love her.

6:26 – Okay it looks like there are some lacey nip covers on Mila Kunis.

6:27 – Brief glimpse of Amy Adams. Give me your hair, girl.

6:28 – I almost didn’t recognize Mandy Moore. She looks GOOOOD. I love the dress. But I am secretly a magpie and therefore covet anything sparkly.

6:32 – Not loving the giant Christmas ball ornaments Mandy is wearing for earrings though.

6:32 – Oh what it must be like to be Russell Brand’s mom.

6:33 – HA. “Perhaps I’ll kiss you.” Russell is so weird.

6:34 – Kelly Osbourne literally could have an entire beehive under that hairdo. I… don’t hate it?

6:35 – Michelle Williams always seem a little sad. But pretty. And her hair rocks. Does she sound a bit British or is it just me? I need a sandwich… That was one of the most awk interviews yet.

6:38 – Amy Adams just told Seacrest, “It’s not that hard for me to find the feistiness.” REDHEADS FOR THE WIN. Also her character was my favorite part of The Fighter.

6:41 – @TheOnion and @tomandlorenzo – best Oscar tweets to follow, for totally different reasons.

6:43 – Back to Amy Adams. I really really love the dress (SPARKLYYYYY), but I’m not loving the necklace.

6:47 – Penny has moved back down to my feet, making typing about 124% easier but keeping me from making myself a sandwich during the commercials.

6:50 – Kelly and Giuliana are a super odd couple.

6:52 – Giuliana just sounded SO judgy about Florence Welsh and her dress. Florence has more talent in her bangs than you do in your whole, overly tanned body, G. Chill.

6:56 – I need a sandwich break, but I don’t want to miss anything good. Especially if it involves a closeup of Cate Blanchett’s dress.

7:03 – Turkey sandwich, cool ranch Doritos and a whiskey/7up. Oscar dinner of champions… [cracks knuckles] Let’s do this.

7:04 – Don’t worry, I ran in and saw Cate’s dress. And then I read a tweet that said, “Cate Blanchett's boobs are wearing a picture frame. God love her. I know I do.” YES. (tweet by @fuggirls)

7:06 – Penny is now trying to eat my sandwich. I can’t shoo you off and type at the same time, kitten! Watch the pretty dresses.

7:07 – Twilight. Musical. Moment. Not okay.

7:09 – Okay, now I just read something that said, “CATE BLANCHETT, WHY ARE YOU WEARING A PORTHOLE ON YOUR CHEST?” Cate’s dress is already the best thing happening tonight. (via Una LaMarche’s Huffington Post liveblog)

7:10 – E! desperately needs some less annoying and less judgmental hosts. Kelly can stay but Giuliana and Ryan gots to go. Hire me, E!

7:15 – I just found a picture of Scarlett Johansson’s dress and it kind of reminds me of this wallpaper in the Art of the Americas wing at the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston. That's not really a bad thing. It's just a thing.

7:18 – “I missed it because I had to take my children to school.” Helena Bonham Carter says this like she’s not talking about the moment her movie became the BEST MOVIE OF THE YEAR.

7:21 – Ugh rambling interview between Seacrest and Hillary Swank. Move on and show me something – like COLIN on the premises!!! Hello Colin!

7:22 – I don’t know who Jennifer Lawrence is, but I kind of like her easy breezy red dress. Although it looks like she’s sucking it in the whole walk down the carpet. Also, it reminds me of Emma Stone’s sherbet Calvin Klein dress, which I LOOOVED. So in comparison this just seems… less. But still good.

7:24 – CELINE!! She looks awesome. Just the other day Brian and I had a conversation about Celine Dion and how her power ballads will NEVER go out of style (well that was my point, he had a different view). Also, why is Celine here but didn’t show up at the Olympics in Canada last year? I kept waiting for her…

7:27 – Halle Berry: a) can’t walk in that dress, b) appears as though an angry cat got to the skirt, and c) meh.

7:29 – I already need to outlaw the word “awesome” from this liveblog.

7:30 – Reece Witherspoon’s hair looks like a) some clip on extensions I had in middle school, b) a Barbie’s and c) GREAT.

7:31 – I normally don’t care much for Penelope Cruz or what she wears, but that dress is fabulous. Red AND sparkly. Also, boobs.

7:37 – Christian Bale was incredible in The Fighter but his beard tonight is less so. He totally sounds like his British accent is fake, because I’m so used to him playing Americans.

7:41 – I like Gwyneth’s dress, except for the weird belt bit. I clearly need to pay more attention to Calvin Klein.

7:50 – Mark Wahlberg just said, “The movie will walk away with at least two.” That seems pretty cocky. Right? Also he referred to his wife as the “statue” he’s “already won.” No thank you.

7:57 – Natalie Portman seems like she is choosing her words carefully, perhaps in order to prevent another crazy laugh heard round the world? Or maybe she took a bunch of Benadryl before hitting the carpet. Probably not though, she’s pretty pregs. I am becoming less enchanted with her as time goes on. The color of her dress is pretty though.

8:00 – Alright, peace E! Over to Tim Gunn, who I love way more than anyone on E! There are less shots of the dresses on ABC though… and are the colors off? Natalie Portman’s dress looks a totally different color here. Ooooh! I just noticed her tassle earrings. Approve. She still seems super out of it though.

8:06 – Brian just brought me chips and dips. I knew there was a reason I love him.

8:08 – Brian also just emailed me an article entitled, “Cats Adore, Manipulate Women.”

8:14: They are talking to all the same people as E!, so here’s some random notes I couldn’t type fast enough the last two hours: 1) I hope my boobs look as awesome as Helen Mirren’s do when I’m her age. Also, I hope I have the brass to show them off when I’m her age. 2) I haven’t gotten to see a closeup of Anne Hathaway or Annette Benning yet, but both look beautiful from afar. 3) I don't think Jesse Eisenberg will ever not look 16 years old. 4) I STILL love Hailee Steinfeld.

8:24 - Why is Halle Berry talking like that?!!?

8:29 - My tentative Best Dressed list (until I see all the dresses in all their glory and/or shame tomorrow): Mila Kunis, Hailee Steinfeld, Cate Blanchett, Mandy Moore and Colin Firth (of course).

Here we gooooooooo!

...and the Academy Award goes to

This is the first year Brian and I have been really excited about the Oscars. Actually, this is the first year I have been really excited about the Oscars themselves (not just the dresses) and this is the first year Brian has known or cared that the Oscars exist.

Part of our excitement is because we have money riding on it. We entered the Oscar betting pool at Brian's work and if we win, our $10 will turn into $80. Eighty dollars, y'all. That still seems like a lot of money to me. 

The other part is that since we are hopelessly old people now, we watch a lot of movies both via Netflix and the Regal Fenway theatre down the road. I think this is the first year I've actually seen more than half of the best picture nominees and it is definitely the first year I looked at things like costume design and cinematography. We loooooooved the King's Speech and the Social Network. We loved with slightly less o's the Fighter and Inception and Toy Story 3 - although they were all pretty amazing. 

So we are pumped. And to share in the excitement, I am going to liveblog the ceremony tonight as practice for any future liveblogging I may be called on to do (hire me, world!). I'll probably miss most of the red carpet pre-shows, because I am off to the Great Bridal Expo (a post for tomorrow, I'm sure) but you can expect my thoughts on the dresses, shoes, movies, winners and losers in as close to realtime as I can manage, with an increading likelihood of capslock yelling and emotional outbursts as we get further into the night and the wine bottle. See you tonight!

lethargy

Sleep is ruining my life.

And not even that I don't get enough of it. No, the problem is that I sleep too much. I try really hard to get up and at 'em with Brian before he goes off to work. But inevitably I wind up back in bed, hitting the snooze button for another hour... or two.

And the lethargy that I feel has been creeping into my waking hours too. I feel like for the past few weeks, I just wander from task to task, doing all of them halfway and none of them to my satisfaction. I feel like I have so many half-begun projects strewn about my apartment and my life that I don't know if I will ever get them all done. There's dishes and reading and laundry and classes and exercise and interviewing and writing and it's all so much. It's more enjoyable to just stay in my pjs and watch Castle online.

I even tried Operation Unplug to get myself to stop reading blogs and watching TV and start achieving things and I was pretty successful at the unplugging, but much less so at the self-motivating. Especially after I downloaded the Angry Birds app...

I don't know if it's the fact that I'm 100% burned out on school or some unknown factor, but getting myself geared up to tackle another day is becoming harder and harder.

Maybe my body and mind are physically rebelling against adulthood.

Last week while I was expressing my excitement about President's Day giving us a day off of school and therefore a week off of writing articles for one of my classes and basically bemoaning the workload, some asshat classmate snarked in a really judgmental tone, "Well, isn't this what we want to do for our lives?" And yes, it is. Or at least I think it is. Or at least I got into grad school to decide if it is. But that doesn't change how I feel.

I bet that classmate doesn't suffer from too much sleep.

Facebook vs the world

Brian and I watched The Social Network one night last week. The same day, I checked my own facebook two or three times, "like"d some things, posted a link on Brian's wall (a little Valentine's gift hint), and was told a story about two old family friends who connected via facebook and then had a (as the story-teller put it) "fairy tale" romance.

I never thought I would hear the words "facebook" and "fairy tale romance" in the same sentence.

Now this week I am essentially giving up facebook (and other internet distractions) for five days in an effort to break my intense time wasting habits. And it is hard.

All this is to say it is absolutely insane that one man and one corporation has so much control and influence over our daily lives. In the communication course I TA'd for last semester I doubt there was a week in which facebook was not mentioned at least once, including the day we discussed a news story in which a man PROPOSED by asking in his status update and his lady accepted by LIKING IT and writing about her excitement in her own status update. Just yesterday we talked in another class about a study asserting that the facebook 'relatonship status' is literally changing the way we as as society go about courtship and casual dating - people are having the "defining the relationship" talk much sooner because they feel pressure to have their relationship 'official' on facebook. Even when Brian and I got engaged (thank you snookums for not doing it on fb!), people were saying to me within a day or two, "Change your relationship status to engaged!!" as if until it was official on facebook, it couldn't possibly be true in real life.

I wonder if we should just skip the marriage license altogether and just change our status to "married" right after saying "I do."

This train of thought leads to some even more absurd pondering. What if, someday, babies are popped out of their mothers and immediately given a name, a social security number and a facebook?

I know The Social Network is of dubious veracity, but there are undoubtably some nuggets of truth in there, and I am just amazed by the story (sidenote: and I think it is a really really good movie). Zuckerberg, this incredibly socially awkward (did you see him on SNL?!) guy stumbled on some innate truth about us as people in this moment and it just exploded.

When I got a facebook I always assumed it wouldn't last past college. Back then, it was only for college students. Now, even with everyone and their grandmothers on it - literally - I can't imagine getting off. Even Brian, who is ardently anti-facebook, keeps his technically active just as a way to reach out to people he might not be able to contact otherwise. It has gotten to the point where if one of my facebook friends fails to upload pictures of some event, I am mad. What do you MEAN, I can't stalk the wedding of this random person from high school that I wasn't invited to anyway?!?! This is utterly irrational behavior, and yet, I challenge most people to admit they haven't felt that way at least once.

I said Zuckerberg found an "innate truth" about us. I think that's true. I don't think we ever realized how much our society feels the need to share, to be heard and seen, before facebook. But I also think the facebook phenomenon is shaping us, changing some innate truths about us. And not just in the way that we look at a picture and say, "OMG, new profile pic!!" In some deep way I really think facebook is affecting our culture and even the world. Only time will tell how much.


Operation Unplug Update: I have been doing pretty well, but not amazing. I watched a little extra TV with Brian on Valentine's and today snuck in some etsy time to send wedding ideas to one of my best friends. I've been missing reading my blogs the most. Unfortunately I discovered the Angry Birds app over the weekend and that has replaced a good bit of the time I would be getting back via this experiment... Must work on that.

Operation Unplug

Confession time: I am a time-waster. Not just a procrastinator, but a serious time-waster. The devils on the shoulders of this vice are the Internet and television. It is just sad how many times I sit down for a mere hour of blog-surfing or to check out an episode of CSI (just one, I tell myself) and the next thing I know, it’s 4:00 in the afternoon and I’m still in my pajamas and haven’t accomplished anything.

I have been thinking about this problem of mine and also about what people did before there were 9079858796 channels of satellite TV and 3028439025329840 million pages of Internet info to consume every minute and brain cell of the day. I can only imagine how much more productive life was. And how much reading got done! I miss reading for fun.

So this week I am conducting an experiment on myself. Introducing Operation Unplug: For the next five days, Monday through Friday, I am disengaging from my devices. No TV and no Internet (almost). No mindless smartphone use.

Obviously, anything academic is still okay. I literally have to use the Internet or I will fail my classes. Likewise, I feel like watching the news in the morning is something fairly necessary to stay on top of national and world goings-on.

I am also allowing myself a few indulgences, since quitting cold turkey is never advised. Under the rules of Operation Unplug (rules which I just wrote), I can have one indulgence per medium:

• Computer - I can access my blog, but for no more than 30-45 minutes per day. 
• Phone - I can use twitter, but again, only once a day. 
• TV - I can watch Jeopardy with Brian from 7:30-8 (yes, we really do watch it almost every day) and Glee on Tuesday.

But that's it! No CSI or random TLC shows. No Food Network. No online shopping for shoes I can't afford. No wedding blogs and random etsy surfing. No checking my facebook on my phone every other hour.

In order to prepare for this experiment, I have taken several precautions. I have created an extensive blacklist on the Self Control app on my computer. I seriously wish I had known about/had access to this in college – you set up a list of sites, set a timer and for that amount of time the app will not allow you to access the sites. There’s no way to break it, as far as I know, unless you just uninstalled the whole thing I guess. You just have to wait for the clock to run out. Every morning I plan to activate the app for the next 24 hours.

I have also moved the distracting apps on my phone (facebook, RSS feed, etc) to a page wayyyyy in the back so I do not just automatically open them when I look at my phone and put a big note on the TV that says DO NOT USE ME, KATHLEEN. GO READ A BOOK.

But this is still going to take a considerable amount of self-discipline – an amount I’m not positive I have.  We shall see.

how you know you're old

The scene: A typical Thursday night (last night, to be exact).
The players: Brian and myself. Penny was probably sleeping somewhere she's not supposed to be sleeping.
The time: Late evening, sometime after our nightly Jeopardy ritual.

Brian: Baby, while you're in the kitchen, will you get me some Tums?
Me: God, I love it when you talk dirty to me.

sensationalism, or why American news sucks

Poor Michelle Obama. This morning she appeared on the Today Show (along with a dog that knows over 1,000 words and Russell Brand - what a motley crew) and while I felt that her answers were predictably PR, I found Matt Lauer's questioning to be bordering on the absurd. Maybe it wasn't Lauer's fault - he probably didn't write the questions and he wasn't the originator of some of the ideas he asked about. But he still asked them.

Lady O was supposed to be appearing to talk about the "Let's Move" campaign, which is a year old now (correct me if I'm wrong on that). Lauer mentioned school lunch legislation for about a second before bringing up the supposed hypocrisy she is accused of for initiating and promoting "Let's Move" while also allowing buffalo wings, beer, burgers and more to be served at the White House Super Bowl party. NOT BUFFALO WINGS AND BEER. Good god, anything but buffalo wings and beer!! Apparently people are equating this to the Obamas saying drugs are bad and then stuffing a kilo of cocaine up each nostril.

WHY IS THIS NEWS?!?! Encouraging healthy eating in schools and raising awareness about the dangerous levels of childhood obesity does not mean you are shackled into a life of only eating celery sticks. There is no hypocrisy here. Michelle and her family are all healthy and in shape. If they want to have buffalo wings and beer on the one day when it is basically un-freaking-AMERICAN to do so, they can!! (Except Malia and Sasha of course, on the beer).

Speaking of the first daughters, Lauer also had this to say:

Matt Lauer: I was thinking, I was trying to do the math here a second ago—if your husband is fortunate enough to win reelection, that's six more years in the White House for your family. Sasha will be 15, Malia will be 18, she'll be ready not only to leave the White House, but to leave the house. This is their only childhood, and I know you've said to me in the past that you're making it as normal as possible, but you don't get a re-do. At the end of six years, you can't go to someone and say, now I want to re do this in a quieter and more private way. Does that concern you?

DUDE. Chill the hell out. Lauer makes it sound like the girls are growing up next to an active crackhouse, or worse - as a tween star on the Disney Channel (see: Miley). Sure, Sasha and Malia are experiencing an untraditional childhood but they aren't losing their childhood. There are millions upon millions of young girls in horrible living situations, who don't have enough to eat or a safe place to live or the comfort of a real family. THE OBAMA GIRLS HAVE BARBIES IN THEIR IMAGE. They are going to be okay.

Ole Matty also brought up the fact that the girls aren't allowed to be on facebook, per the Secret Service. OH MY GOD THEY ARE SO DEPRIVED HOW WILL THEY EVER LIVE OR BE NORMAL OR EVEN EXIST???

All of this, on the heels of the brouhaha Oscar de la Renta kicked up about Michelle choosing to wear a non-American designer (Alexander McQueen) to the gala for the Chinese president (GOD FORBID the most stylish First Lady since Jackie O wear a designer who isn't you, Oscar), is just absurd.

Let's talk about issues, people. Let's not talk about buffalo wings and beer.