Inappropriate Content: A Snowy Morning

I had the day off today, and there was a nice light snowfall outside. It's pretty, and you only need a nice thick sweater for warmth, not a bulky jacket. I'm at the Library of Congress, as usual, but I made a stop at the congressional office buildings to check in with the schedulers and policy advisors I met earlier this month. The underground tunnel between the three congressional office buildings is always crowded when it's closed. But the pace is a little slower when congress it out of session, and no one's keeping up appearances for the tourists, who never come this way.

(When I flew into National last weekend, I played myself up to a group of high school kids doing the high-school-trip-to-D.C. thing. My one-day job shadow with Congressman Clay became “working in a congressman's office up on the hill.” I told them that D.C. is nothing like you see in the movies; that it's a lot more like New Orleans. “You see, something like 80% of the people in this city work for the federal government. They understand how our country really works. So naturally, they drink a lot.”)

I got a couple of people who promised to help me find a job when I start sending out resumes in a few months. I could probably find an internship pretty easy, but I'd either need to do both an internship and a night job somewhere like 7-11 (incredible hours, but not impossible) or try and find a real job for the government without a degree or much of a resume (incredibly unlikely, but not impossible).

But that's in the future. For now, I missed the Oscars yesterday. Pity, too—I had very much been looking forward to seeing Chris Rock host.

Oscars are not as big a deal as everyone makes them out to be, but I did have people I was rooting for, of course. Morgan Freeman for best supporting actor was one of them. His speech near the end of Million Dollar Baby is without question the best part of the film. The only person who got even close to his level was Jamie Foxx in Collateral; and hey, he was up for Ray anyway.

Which I still haven't seen, and I am ashamed. I'm sure Foxx deserves it, though. I've seen everyone else nominated for best actor, and none of them impressed me that much—not even Eastwood, much as I loved his directing in Baby. I know my father was rooting for The Aviator, but I still think it was a bit aimless. The scenes were all beautifully constructed (especially the plane crashes) but there was no overall arc tying the story together. (I felt the same way about Gangs of New York and even Taxi Driver, which I finally saw this weekend.) Scorsese should have won best director for the performances he got out of Alan Alda, John C. Rilley, and Cate Blanchett—all of whom surpassed Eastwood and Hillary Swank's acting in Baby—but you can put all the great performances and great scenes in the world in your movie, you still need a real solid story at the bottom of it.

Ah, well. The only award I'm upset about is best actress. Not because Hillary Swank won (although I wasn't that impressed with her) but because it's the only category where I haven't seen most of the nominees' films. After all, the Oscars aren't one hundredth as important as the movies they're for.