Oscar time!

In order to enjoy one of the most important American traditions, Oscar Night – my equivalent of the Super Bowl – a lot of planning needed to occur.

Meredith has a slingbox; basically a box that’s attached to her fiancée’s cable box in Ohio that she can, through this amazing invention called the internet – interweb – tap into the cable box in Ohio and watch, on her computer, anything on American cable. She can use DVR, OnDemand, you name it. It’s pretty miraculous. So, Meredith recorded The Oscars, which aired Sunday night American time; very, very early Monday morning in Israel. And so Monday night, I assembled a small group of classmates (along with Ari’s twin sister who was in town visiting) to watch the Oscars.

There’s an episode of How I Met Your Mother where the gang can’t watch the Super Bowl on super Bowl Sunday because of a very long funeral. They plan to watch it Monday night as if it were Sunday, and in order to make the experience as “real” as possible, they (try to) go the entire day without hearing anything about the game – the stats, who won, MVP, etc. With very humorous results. My Monday was very similar. I sent an e-mail to our class asking them NOT to spill any details. And while there were some very close calls, no one spilled. But it was tumultuous and nerve-wracking to get to Monday night, sushi dinner, and Oscar Time. But it was well worth it.

I thought the ceremony itself was good; Hugh Jackman did a fine job. I was mostly pleased with the winners – I’ve only seen very few of the nominated films; Slumdog was the only Best Picture nominee I’ve seen so far; I enjoyed it but thought it was overhyped. I was a little upset and surprised at the loss of Waltz With Bashir, but the Foreign Language film award is always a bit of an oddball. But again, it was really nice to do something reminding me of home, but with an Israeli twist.