My friends Sophia Daly and Shanna Trenholm threw down a challenge I couldn’t resist: Purge your wardrobe of the things you don’t love and don’t wear, and then spend only $100 on clothes, shoes and accessories for the rest of the year. They call this the $100 Wardrobe Challenge.

(Sound intriguing? Go to the their website and read more).

Money’s tight these days – hi there, I’m unemployed, how are you? – so I’ll take any incentive to spend less. I also liked the idea of shedding the psychic weight of “stuff.” I set to work purging and sorting through the contents of my closets and dressers, and jotted down some tips for those who want to do the same. Mind you, these tips don’t make the process painless, but they just might save you enough sweat to get you through it, and have a laugh while you’re at it.

PRO TIP #1:
Do the purge on laundry day.

Clothes you need to wash are ones you actually wear, so they automatically count as keepers. While those are sorted elsewhere into piles of darks, whites, and delicates, you can concentrate on applying your keen and ruthless eye to the rest.

PRO TIP #2:
Deduct as you donate.

Before the first blouse goes into the Goodwill bag, crack open your laptop and go to itsdeductible.com. Then as you give each item the boot, note what it is in your record of donations for 2010. It’s Deductible will automatically record the item, calculate its value, and (if you use TurboTax) deduct it properly from your taxes when you do them. If you don’t use TurboTax, just return to It’s Deductible at tax time and enter the amounts. Easy-peasy, and it’s free.

PRO TIP #3:
Take pictures of your most ridiculous items.

Because you have to laugh! Here are mine – a green feather boa and a nun’s habit. Believe it or not, I used to store these right near the closet door in case I needed them quickly!

PRO TIP #4:
Don’t use your husband/boyfriend/significant other as your “objective friend.”

They’ll make you keep all the lingerie, even if you hate it.

Bleccchh.

I looked like crap in this.

 

PRO TIP #5:
Take “before” and “after” pictures of your closet.

There’s nothing better to convince you that the challenge was worth it! Here are mine.

BEFORE:


 

AFTER:


 

For me, the result of all this purging was:

• 14 trash bags of donated clothes sent to the Goodwill.
• Estimated savings of $697 on my 2010 taxes.
• A walk-in closet I can actually walk in.

Now, are you ready to lighten your load and give your most-loved clothes a little breathing room? Excellent! Visit the $100 Wardrobe Challenge website, follow @100DLRwardrobe on Twitter, and let style trump consumption!

The incomparable, irresistible, irreplaceable Rabbit the Cat

I answered, “I did. And Rabbit is a cat.”

Adorable from day one

This led to a tradition at our house of always referring to our sweet, loving, impossibly cute and serene male lilac point Siamese cat as The Rabbit. That’s when we weren’t calling him The Boy, My Boy, Rabbit Boo, Sweetie Boo, Boo Boy, Rabbito, Conejo Feliz, Pretty Boy, Happy Boy, Purring Boy, Darling Boy, Flopping Boy, Sun Kitty, Cream-Colored Kitty, Lord of the Thighs (his favorite place to sit) or Kitty in the Window (his other favorite place to sit). Yes, when we weren’t embarrassing him with all these names, he was The Rabbit. (His sister Noddy has a long list of pet names, too. Collectively, they were known as the Boosome Twosome.)

Like yin and yang

Rabbit really was an exceptional cat. He singlehandedly turned my husband into a cat person. When Ken and I began to date back in ’99, Ken wasn’t sure if he’d like dealing with my cats. He’d never owned a cat or a dog himself, and was allergic to pet dander. Rabbit settled all that in just a few seconds. He jumped into Ken’s lap, rubbed his head against Ken’s hand, gave a purr, and that was it. Ken loved both the cats from that moment. He got so used to their dander that they could sleep on him all night without causing a sneeze.

Instant love

Rabbit just had a sweet and loving way about him that won people over. He was very patient and calm, and didn’t meow much. He just walked up to you, decided you were probably a nice person, jumped into your lap and purred contentedly. He did this with everyone, and everyone loved him instantly. He showed no fear and was never rejected. It helped that he had big blue eyes and the softest fur you can imagine. But it was his attitude that “you and I are friends” that really won hearts and minds.

We called this position double-kittified

We used to complain that his sister Noddy, who is his actual blood sister from the same litter of kittens, really needed to take charm lessons from Rabbit. He always knew how to snuggle comfortably on you or next to you, while she would do something less fun like stand heavily on your chest (or worse, your throat) and meow directly in your face. We used to say that Noddy is 8 pounds of lead, while Rabbit is 9 pounds of feathers. (This led to Noddy’s nickname of Lead Kitty.)

Kitty charm school

Even when Rabbit started getting sick from kidney disease, he found new ways to charm us. He was barfing a lot at that time, and got quite thin and frail. He couldn’t jump up on the kitchen counter anymore, and sleeping in his usual spot behind my knees became impossible because if I turned he couldn’t move fast enough to avoid getting smushed. So he started sleeping on our pillows, usually curled up in my hair. You’d think this would be annoying, but it wasn’t. We called this position Cat Hat.

Rabbit demonstrates Cat Hat

Rabbit’s illness lasted about 2 years, during which I had to administer fluids to him subcutaneously. This involved sitting him in my lap, calming him down though he knew what was coming, inserting a needle from a hanging IV bag into a fold of skin between his shoulders, and keeping him from running away for 10-15 minutes until he’d gotten all 100 mL of the fluids inside him. He put up with it all with grace and only a few meowed complaints. Towards the end, for about 3 months, I had to do this twice a day. In addition, he needed 3-5 medications each mealtime – sometimes pills cut into quarters, sometimes liquids – all of which required forcing his mouth open. I hated doing it, but otherwise he’d die.

A true bromance

Of course, he died anyway. I like to think, though, that he went how he would have wanted to. He was at home, lying on the couch in our bedroom in the sun. We were away in Kansas City, and our wonderful friend and able catsitter Josh found him there, passed away, with Noddy standing guard over him.

It’s been about a month, and I still can’t wash the cream-colored kitty hair off the couch cover, or even move the curtains near the couch in any way. I keep picturing him there curled up, or looking out the window for us. Kitty in the Window.

Rabbit the Cat, September 1996 - June 17, 2010. Rest in peace, darling boy.

The only downside to the story was that after it aired, several folks I didn’t know wanted to connect with me on Foursquare. Not sure why they’d care to know if I was at Viva Pops. They probably just wanted an “expert” to consult about the service.

No offense, but I think I’ll restrict my “I don’t know you but let’s connect” relationships to Twitter.

This particular party was memorable, because it was the day my Dad discovered I could read. He discovered this when I was looking at the word “Fuck.”

Image courtesy of The Realist Archive Project

Our host had hung up a poster over his bar, popular at the time, which said FUCK COMMUNISM. My dad noticed I was staring at it intently, but assumed it would be inscrutable to me. He didn’t count on my daily dose of Sesame Street. “Pretty poster, huh, Peggy?” he said. My reply: “Yes, Daddy. But what’s Communism?”

His first thought: “Oh my God, she can read.” His second: “She probably already knows what the first word means.”

I can just envision my earnest little 3-year-old self, staring at the poster and determined to break the code of what it meant. I wonder what meaning I took away with me that day. Probably that one or both of those words made my dad nervous, and I should file them away as words my mom called “not bad, but impolite.”

Me in 1969 - clearly a subversive

Later, when this story seemed more funny than appalling, my parents told it often. I only have a vague recollection of the incident myself. My dad could recall very little about the poster besides the offending words, except that he seemed to think it had an abstract eagle on it somewhere.

I decided to find it. Which took all of 3.25 seconds, thanks to Google.

It turns out the poster was the work of Paul Krassner, a stand-up comedian, social satirist, cohort of Lenny Bruce, Yippie, and publisher of The Realist, which is where the image first appeared in 1963. More than 30 years later, Kurt Vonnegut called it “a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein’s e=mc2.” He went on:

At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable…COMMUNISM was to millions the name of the most loathsome evil imaginable…By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn’t merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.

My parents and their friends were certainly not Yippies or even hippies – in fact, both Mom and Dad worked for the CIA, and most attendees of the dinner party worked for some branch of the U.S. government. However, what was radical in 1963 was likely more mainstream in 1969. It had the F word, which you still can’t say on broadcast TV and radio, but the sentiments expressed were ones even Ronald Reagan would agree with.

I thought it kind of funny, then, that 40 years later, my dad implored me not to display such a poster in my house. I had emailed him the link to the image, asking him to verify if it was the same poster we’d seen all those years ago. He owned that it probably was, but said, “IF YOU PUT IT UP IN YOUR HOUSE, PLEASE TELL ME YOU WILL PUT IT ON THE BACK OF A CLOSET DOOR, FOR DISPLAY ONLY IN APPROPRIATE CIRCUMSTANCES.” (Forgive him – he writes in all caps, he’s not really shouting.) He continued, “THE WORD IS TOO IMPORTANT TO THE HUMAN CONDITION TO BE USED AS IT IS, BY EVERYBODY, ALL THE TIME, FOR ITS SUPPOSED SHOCK VALUE.”

He’s right. We really throw around the word Communism way too much.

Melodie Tao, AKA @MyMelodie

Recently I took what some might think is a crazy leap, professionally: I left my comfortable position as a learning technology specialist at Qualcomm without a “next job” to go to. Qualcomm offered me a generous transition package (thanks, QC!) and I decided that a transition was just what I needed.

Having the leisure to read the newspaper all the way through in my yoga pants, I did exactly that. While reading the Business section of the San Diego Union-Tribune I happened upon an article outlining the companies in San Diego with the most revenue in 2009. I was surprised to realize that I had spent the last 12 years of my life working for 2 of the top 3 (Qualcomm and CareFusion, which was called Pyxis when I worked there).

Huh. That’s interesting. Why did I do that?

Well, clearly I was looking for stability, security, and good benefits. Did I get them?

Yes and no. The benefits at both were awesome (though, ironically, my cell phone was paid for at the healthcare company, and my health insurance benefits were  better at the telecom company). Neither company went under or lost much in stock value while I was there, so they were definitely stable.

However, at each place, my run of “feeling useful” lasted only about 5 years. After that, I more or less had to find another company to work for or feel I was stagnating. This is in stark contrast to what my parents experienced: my mom worked as a computer programmer for the U.S. government for 14 years, then transitioned to teaching at the junior college level, which she did at the same school for 25 years, rising to the level of department chairman. My dad was never really unemployed his whole life, spending just one week at home between his two-year stint in the Navy and his 40 years as a government intelligence analyst. Both were promoted numerous times and honored with many awards.

Their career stories are from another time, though. Today’s career cycle is much shorter, no matter where you work. Once you realize that, “safe” choices don’t feel so safe any more, and “risky” choices like freelancing, consulting, working for yourself, or working for a startup don’t seem so scary.

I decided to interview some folks I know who are living on the professional wild side and see if I could glean some wisdom that would help me decide my next move. I arranged to meet with Melodie Tao, a self-employed new media marketing and SEO professional here in San Diego.

Melodie is a consummate coworking and networking pro. Within 5 minutes, she’d made sure we were connected on LinkedIn and Facebook, and prompted me to remove old data from my profile (like my now-inactive Qualcomm email address).  She agreed to share her wisdom with me, which I now share with you.

So, Melodie, what do you do for a living?

I am an online marketing consultant, and I run my own social media marketing company. So I work with companies on how to use social media to strengthen their brand, to engage their customers, and to build customer loyalty. I also am a professional speaker on social media, speaking at conferences and events. I also teach online marketing and social media at Platt College, teaching my students how to market for companies but also how to create their own personal brand.

How long have you been coworking regularly?

I’ve had a consulting practice on the side for about 6 years, but I’ve been working completely independently only since January of this year.

What are some of the advantages of working for your own company?

I have a lot of freedom to choose how I’d like to structure my work and my day. There’s more flexibility. I can cowork with others that are in the same industry but working on their own things, so we can feed off each other’s success and collaborate. I feel that I’m not confined to one place or one project, and that I can take on any opportunity that comes along.

Do you have any favorite places to cowork?

Milano Coffee Company, where we are now, is great. This place has free wifi, it’s quiet compared to a lot of other coffee shops, and it’s clean.

I also like using the library. Most people don’t think to go to the library, but the Mission Valley branch of the library is really nice. It’s right in the Ikea shopping center. There’s a lot of room there, it’s very quiet, they have tables and desks you can use, and it’s the nicest library I’ve been to.

Lestat’s Coffee House is another nice one; they just opened up a second room, so there’s more room there than there used to be.

Downtown there is the HIVEHAUS, which is the coworking place where you can rent a desk. I don’t rent a desk there, because I don’t want to be confined to one place – I have clients everywhere. But every other Friday they offer free coworking through an event called Jelly.

Do you ever work from home?

Sometimes, but rarely. I find when I work from home I don’t concentrate as much. One day I may rent an office, but it doesn’t make sense for me now, becauses there’s a lot of partners I’m working with. Sometimes when I’m working with web developers, I’ll go and work at their office for the day.

Do you often meet with clients?

Yes, but it’s usually virtual. I do a lot of GoToMeetings with a client of mine in San Francisco. If I need to meet face-to-face, I’ll often do it at a coffee shop or at their place. Clients usually like meeting at their place anyway, because that way they don’t have to travel.

What are some of the disadvantages?

I wouldn’t call them disadvantages, I’d call them challenges. Some challenges are that I have to be my own manager – now, I’m an entrepreneur so I’m used to that, but that might be a challenge for some people who aren’t. You have to motivate yourself, set up a schedule, so that you know every day that you’re going to start work at 9:00 or whatever time you’ve picked. The benefit is you can often stop when you want, go for a run or take a yoga class. You have to have structure, but you can create that structure. It can be a lot more flexible.

I like to start a little bit later on Monday mornings, and plan my week. A lot of people don’t like Mondays, because they have to get back to work and they’re stressed out. I step back instead and plan the days ahead. Monday’s reserved for regrouping.

Do you have any tips for coworking beginners?

I would recommend doing what you’re doing, connecting with a lot of people in your industry who are doing similar things. Ask them what’s working for them. Networking, doing informational interviews. Networking is key. When you’re networking be very clear about what is your goal. If you tell that to people, they’ll be able to help you, and if any opportunity comes up, they’ll think of you immediately. Be very clear about what you’re doing.

Make sure your LinkedIn profile is updated, and that you’re available for freelance opportunities (if you are). Keep up with your online portfolio if you have one, your blog, be active on social media. Be a resource for people. Give tips to people. If you want to be an HR manager, say, then tweet HR tips. People will think of you as a resource then, and when they’re looking to hire someone like you, you’ll come to mind.

I hear you’re going to Hong Kong soon. Tell me about that!

Yes! I am speaking at an online conference through the Internet Society (ISOC). I’ll be giving a presentation on search engine optimization and social media, on how to improve your search results with social media, and how to optimize your domain name through having a good website and good social media presence. That’s next week, and I’m excited about that.

Well, have a great trip, Melodie, and let’s cowork again when you get back!

Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds

State of the Oscar Run (updated 3/8/10): Saw all but 2 films. Which Way Home eluded me completely. Ajami I couldn’t find with English subtitles, and I don’t speak Hebrew. Squeezed in Un Prophete and El Secreto de Sus Ojos before the Oscars. All told, I saw 32 full-length films and 10 short films in 34 days.

We’re nearly there, folks. The 2009 Academy Awards will be given out tonight starting at 5:00 PM Pacific time. The world holds its breath: Will Peggy see the last two movies on her Oscar Run list?

Okay, no one cares about that. They really just want to know, after seeing all these movies, who I’d predict to win and who really deserves it. That’s why I watch all these movies, really – so you won’t have to. You’re welcome.

NOTE: This list is now updated with actual winners starred (*). I made 17 predictions, got 12 right, and 4 wrong. (I gave myself a half point each for Documentary and Costume Design as for each I was split between two films.)

Best Picture

My pick: Avatar
My prediction: Avatar

Check my reasoning here. Up in the Air was a close second. (Winner: The Hurt Locker*)

Best Director

My pick: James Cameron, Avatar
My prediction: James Cameron, Avatar

Check my reasoning here. Kathryn Bigelow* (The Hurt Locker) might be an upset win, in more ways than one – she’s Cameron’s ex-wife.

Best Actress

My pick: Helen Mirren, The Last Station
My prediction: Sandra Bullock*, The Blind Side

…which would be ironic, given All About Steve.

Best Supporting Actress

My pick: Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air
My prediction: Mo’Nique*, Precious

Very tempted to pick Maggie Gyllenhaal for Crazy Heart, but I think Anna squeaked past. And no, that pick was not Twilight-influenced.

Best Actor

My pick: Colin Firth, A Single Man
My prediction: Jeff Bridges*, Crazy Heart

Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) might pull off an upset win.

Best Supporting Actor

My pick: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
My prediction: Christoph Waltz*, Inglourious Basterds

I so wanted this to be Stanley Tucci, but no one wins with a movie like The Lovely Bones - including the audience.

Best Original Screenplay

My pick: The Hurt Locker
My prediction: The Hurt Locker*

I actually liked The Messenger better, but I think that was because of the performances, not the screenplay.

Best Adapted Screenplay

My pick: Up in the Air
My prediction: Up in the Air

(Winner: Precious*)

Best Foreign Language Film

My pick: El Secreto de Sus Ojos*
My prediction: Un Prophete

Ojos had the most incredible single-take tracking shot I’ve seen all year, and the best story. Prophete, however, had the distribution. Who knows? Last year, that didn’t matter to Oscar.

Best Art Direction

My pick: Avatar
My prediction: Avatar*

However, I really liked The Young Victoria for this, and thought Bright Star should also have been nominated in this category.

Best Costume Design

My pick: Bright Star
My prediction: Either Coco Before Chanel or The Young Victoria*

Clothes were more of a character in itself in Bright Star, even more so than in Coco Before Chanel, oddly enough.

Best Makeup

My pick: Star Trek
My prediction: Star Trek*

Three words: Zachary Quinto’s eyebrows. But bravo to Il Divo for the nomination.

Best Animated Feature

My pick: Up
My prediction: Up*

But damn, if The Princess and the Frog wasn’t a great return to classic animation for Disney!

Best Documentary Feature

My pick: The Cove*
My prediction: Food, Inc.

Actually, they tied for both pick and prediction in my mind.

Best Cinematography

My pick: Avatar
My prediction: Avatar*

The White Ribbon was deservedly nominated here, and was also the most painful movie to watch – that counts.

Best Original Song

My pick: “The Weary Kind” from Crazy Heart
My prediction: “The Weary Kind” from Crazy Heart*

But Marion Cotillard singing “Take It All” was the best part of the otherwise-awful Nine.

Best Visual Effects

My pick: Avatar
My prediction: Avatar*

Check my reasoning here.

Note that I am leaving off categories where I have no opinion: Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Film Editing. I’m also skipping Best Original Score because that would take more independent listening than I have time for.

What are your picks and predictions?

Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish pine for each other in Bright Star

I’ve noticed I’m writing fewer reviews of individual movies this year, and by fewer, I mean “not a single one yet.” Sorry, movie fans. Here’s some (I hope) useful info that I can jot down quickly.

We’ve seen 26 of the 34 Oscar movies we intended to, so I can now recommend which you should see and which you should shun.

DON’T MISS:
District 9
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Up in the Air
Avatar
The Messenger
In the Loop
Bright Star
Star Trek
Crazy Heart
A Single Man
The Last Station
Up
Invictus
The Princess and the Frog
Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince
Food Inc.
The Cove
Burma VJ

DON’T BOTHER:
The Lovely Bones
Nine
The White Ribbon
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

GOOD, BUT FOR NICHE FANS ONLY:
Precious
Coco Before Chanel
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Blind Side
The Young Victoria
Julie & Julia
The Secret of Kells
Coraline

I STILL CAN’T DECIDE:
A Serious Man

Podcast alert: If you prefer your movie talk in a visual format, go check out my husband Ken’s new video podcast That Movie Was…, where he and his friend James give their opinions on current movies.

Ken and I have reached a point in our Oscar Run where we’ve knocked out all movies in a few categories, so I can make some picks with confidence. These are not predictions, just who or what would get the Oscar if I were giving them out.

Forgive me if I skip Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing. I don’t even know the difference between those last two categories, so clearly I’m no judge there. I’ll also skip Best Original Score, as I’d have to go back and hear them back-to-back to decide (no time, I have 21 movies to watch!). However, I will tackle Best Visual Effects, Best Director, and Best Picture.

Best Visual Effects

• Nominees: Avatar, District 9, Star Trek
• My pick: Avatar

It isn’t just because James Cameron has spent so many years on this film (his last film was in 1997) and claims to have actually invented the means for new digital effects along the way. And it isn’t just because the list of people credited for special and visual effects for Avatar is so long (1232, versus District 9′s 291 and Star Trek’s 481). It’s my pick because the result was so jaw-dropping, so seamless and stunning, so outright beautiful and so completely involving that I forgot I was even looking at something digitally produced. As good as the effects in the other films were, my brain would still click to the inner comment, “Whoa, that was an incredible special effect” when an alien would blow up or the Enterprise would go through a black hole. With Avatar, the effects were so good that I forgot they were effects. It was like I had ingested them in my Diet Coke, rather than watching them on the screen. They were miles better than the laughable aliens in The Abyss. Good job, Jim. And kudos for dedicating the film to the late, great Stan Winston, whose company worked on it.

By the way, WETA is the new ILM.

Best Director

• Nominees: James Cameron (Avatar), Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds), Lee Daniels (Precious), Jason Reitman (Up in the Air)
• My pick: James Cameron (Avatar)

Even though I’m happy to see a woman get nominated for making a war movie, and even though I’m happy to see Jason Reitman focus his considerable talents on recession angst, and even though I love seeing Quentin Tarantino do anything at all, the winner in my mind is still James Cameron. Yeah, he’s the King of the World, and yeah, this movie breaks no ground in terms of storyline (spoiler alert: the good guys win) – it doesn’t matter. Avatar was what the prize is actually named: an achievement in directing.

If I had my druthers, I’d have nominated Lone Scherfig for An Education, but still given it to Cameron. Not that I’m trying to expand any categories, because that would be just stupid. Speaking of which…

Best Picture

• Nominees: Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, Up, Up in the Air
• My pick: Avatar

Oh crap, look what I just did there. It’s an all-Avatar lovefest. Not what I intended. So let’s talk about this “10 Best Picture nominees” thing for a minute.

I mean, what? Ten nominees? What for? Because The Dark Knight was unfairly left out last year? Okay, more nominees might prevent future gaffes like that, but it also makes the nominated movies seem less special. Ten Best Picture nominees a year, and in ten years, there will be 100 Best Picture nominees (but probably not 100 really good movies). It will become a sad trivia question: “What were all the Best Picture nominees in the 2010s? Betcha can’t name ‘em all!”

But let’s get back to Avatar. In a sense, it won by default. The other pictures just didn’t reach the same level. Precious went where other movies won’t go, but even though the heroine was smiling in the last frame, she’s still completely fucked, so I’m not sure what we were supposed to learn. A Serious Man dumps you off at the metaphorical bus stop with both cancer and a frickin’ tornado inexplicably coming at you, so I can’t reward that. The Hurt Locker gives you a fresh perspective on work stress – are you standing in the middle of a flower-like arrangement of 7 live bombs? No? Then STFU – but not alot more.

The only serious contenders for my affections besides Avatar were District 9 (a classic and very good sci fi film), An Education (an English coming-of-age film that ought to do wonders for Carey Mulligan), and Up in the Air. Considering Avatar’s somewhat hackneyed storyline – note to Sigourney Weaver: YOU CANNOT TRUST CORPORATIONS IN SPACE! – this means that 2009 was actually not a great year for movies.

• Ajami (from Israel)
• Burma VJ
• El Secreto De Sus Ojos (from Argentina)
• The Messenger
• The Milk of Sorrow (from Peru)
• The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
• The Secret of Kells
• Un Prophete (from France)
• Which Way Home

Current state of the Oscar Run: 28 more movies to see in 25 days.

As Ken and I have discovered over many years of trying to see Oscar-nominated movies, a nomination doesn’t guarantee that a movie will stay in theaters long enough for you to see it. It helps that there are more movies on DVD and available via cable On Demand services every year, but there are always those that fall in the cracks.

Here are the movies that we advise you see ASAP, as they may be nearing the end of their theater run, and they don’t have a DVD release date yet.

Fantastic Mr. Fox – Most theaters that are still showing this are doing so at “kid times” – just a few showings early in the day. That’s a sign that theater managers think it’s got a limited audience, which means it’s doomed. We’re going to try to see it today. Never miss a Wes Anderson flick!

Invictus - Though this came out only in December and has many big names, it’s being overwhelmed by other, bigger releases, and got few nominations. See it to decide if Morgan Freeman should get Best Actor or Matt Damon should get Best Supporting Actor.

Nine – I suspect this one is going fast because it stank up the joint. Seeing it will be one of the things I do for the love of movies. If you’re not a completist like me, maybe don’t bother. If you do see it, check the art direction, costume design, and possible Best Supporting Actress performance by Penelope Cruz.

The Lovely Bones – This is still playing in a bunch of places, but even with Peter Jackson attached to it, it’s been giving off eau de fail. See it for Stanley Tucci’s performance, nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

The Princess and the Frog – Playing in many theaters, but like Fantastic Mr. Fox, it’s playing at “kid times” – the kiss of death.

Any nominated documentary or foreign film – These are notoriously hard to find. Last year’s winner for Best Foreign Film, Departures, we couldn’t find anywhere – and we were REALLY trying.

Happy film hunting!