Yes, I Know I Haven't Posted in a While, But...

something weird and TV-related just happened to me. I was reading through a TWoP recap of The Amazing Race and Miss Alli mentioned someone being "on her list." A snippet of dialogue from a TV show came to me( "Nothing happens on the list") but I couldn't remember where I heard it. I knew it was a woman, and my first thought was that it was Natalie from Sports Night referring to Dana (or perhaps Dan or Casey). I eventually placed the real reference: it was Donna, referring to Josh in The West Wing episode "Isaac and Ishmael." Both The West Wing and Sports Night are written by Aaron Sorkin. That's the weird thing. I've had the same problem confusing two different actors who sound the same, or two different performances by the same actor, but I've never had that happen with a screenwriter. I suppose it says something about Sorkin as a writer that his voice shines through in such a small piece of dialogue.

My TV Is Talking To Me

First there was the weird confluence of Gregs. Now all the shows I watch keep giving shout-outs to Iowa, my home state:

-In January, The West Wing did a show about Santos, Russell, and Vinick in the Iowa caucuses.

-In March, House had two different episodes where he mentioned Iowa. In the first one, House talked about a mobster going into Witness Protection and ending up working at a Wal-Mart in Des Moines. Then later, he talked to a black Senator about how the voters of Dubuque aren't ready for a black president.

-In the past couple weeks, 24 has had a minor plotline set in Iowa, where terrorist have hijacked a nuclear warhead and launched it from a missile. Incidentally, 24's most unintentionally funny line came in reference to Iowa, when Mike Novick mentioned that it would be hard to track the warhead because of all Iowa's mountainous terrain. Anyone who's been to Iowa would know that this state is so flat you can practically see the Nebraska border from Illinois.

-Last night on Lost, Kate's flashback was set in Iowa, and revealed that she had grown up there.

-Various reality shows have had contestants from Iowa, from Rory and Twila on Survivor: Vanuatu to Kris on The Amazing Race 6, to Tana on The Apprentice. This is noteworthy in two respects. First, until this season, Iowa had never been home to a contestant on a major reality show. Second, Twila and Kris both did very well on their respective shows, both coming in second (which, come to think of it, doesn't bode well for Tana).

-Speaking of Iowa and reality TV, the less said about Invasion Iowa, the better.

Now a lot of this can probably be chalked up to Iowa's role in the Hollywood as the archetypal American state. Certainly, House, a stereotypically jaded coastalite, made his comments in that light. But it is really strange to see all of this Iowa talk at once, especially coming at the same time as great deal of Greg talk. Add to that the fact that Capt. Jonathan Archer on Enterprise apparently went to Stanford and it certainly seems as though the television universe is aligning in one direction: straight towards me. I can see no other rational conclusion to be drawn.

Survivor Blogging: The Endgame

It's now down to the final six--Tom, Ian, Gregg, Jenn, Katie, and Caryn--on Survivor. Faithful readers will notice that this group comprises Greater Koror, plus Caryn. The endgame is always the most interesting phase of the game, not just because it determines who will win, but also because now is the time in the game when strategies start to get more complex. Where before a contestant might base his vote on who is the weakest, or who is outside of her alliance, now people have to start thinking about who they could beat in an endurance challenge, who's going to be on the jury, or who they would have to face in the final two. And in a change from Survivor's past seasons, I could see almost any of the final six winning the whole game. Let's see how each player might accomplish this.

Tom:

The only way for Tom to stay in the game is to keep winning challenges. Everyone in the game knows full well how threatening he is, and so they'll likely take the first opportunity they get to vote him off. He's well-positioned to make it to the final two by brute force alone, and given the way he led his tribe to a perfect winning streak in team immunity, he's got a good shot at winning a jury vote, no matter who he's up against. It's rare on a Survivor for someone to take a leadership role for so long and not ruffle any feathers, and Tom has basically done just that so far. Sure, Coby and Caryn have bitched in the past, but neither of them seem to hate him--in fact, Caryn was well-positioned to vote him off last week, but she didn't. And I can't see anyone else they would be more inclined to vote for. So I think if Tom's in the final two, he wins. The only person who might be able to even put up a challenge would be Ian, so Tom would be well-advised to get rid of Ian as soon as he can. The best way for him to do that, I think, would be for him to win the final three immunity challenge and take whoever isn't Ian with him to the final two. I think Ian would be able to accept that without seeing it as a betrayal, given that his primary alliance is with Katie.

Ian

Being Tom's little buddy has served Ian well up to this point, but from here on out it will be more of a liability. Here's why: everyone recognizes the threat Tom poses, but as long as he keeps winning challenges, the only way to attack him is to attack his allies. And Ian is Tom's closest ally. In fact, if I were in Jenn, Katie, Gregg, or Caryn's position, I would try to get the rest of the four to agree to vote out Tom or Ian, depending on who loses the challenge. Ian's only hope, then, is to either win immunity or hope that someone hasn't thought through their best interests. Katie would be the most likely candidate to do this. She has a pre-existing alliance with Ian that may blind her to the reality that Ian can't help her win as much as vice versa. So if Ian and Tom can get Katie on their side, they only need to flip one more person. Their best bet would be Caryn. She no longer has any allies, and would probably cling tightly to anyone who would have her. This would be a bad move on her part, considering how easy it would be for Tom, Ian, and Katie to boot her afterward, but as I said, Ian has to depend on other people making bad moves to stay alive.

Gregg & Jenn

Gregg is in a good position to win the game. He's number three on the threat list, behind Tom and Ian, so he can fly under the radar to a great degree, simply because they'll draw all the fire. In any event, it's impossible to get rid of either of them without his help (unless they betray each other, which doesn't seem likely at this point) so he'll get a pass to the final five. Once in the final five, he'll need to beat whoever is left between Tom or Ian, because with the women in the majority, they'd be smart to go after the remaining men. If he succeeds in this, he'll be the last man standing, and will have an advantage in the next remaining challenges, provided they are largely physical. If he makes it to the final three with two women, he could probably win a jury vote no matter who he takes with him, but it would be smartest to take Jenn. First, everyone knows they're an item, and it will be seen as a betrayal if he doesn't choose her. Second, he doesn't want a woman scorned on the jury. While this strategy didn't quite work for Rob in All Stars, he was a much more polarizing figure than Gregg is, so the jury would probably rather award the person who did all the work to get there than the remora who coasted. Nevertheless, Jenn's best play would be to stick with Gregg and hope he steps on enough toes on his way to the top, that there will be a Rob & Amber Redux. Any other scenario would have to involve her not only winning immunity challenges, but having some assurance that she would be able to do so, both unlikely.

Caryn

Surprising as it may seem, Caryn actually has a decent shot to win here, if she's smart. (It doesn't look like she is though. Her best bet was a women's alliance, but she blew that last week when she had a choice between Steph and Tom.) Caryn's greatest strength is actually her weakness as a player. Any of the men would love to be opposite her for the final two; conversely she's probably the only one Katie or Jenn could beat. It seems, from the previews and the last episode, that she's trying to ingratiate herself in with the men, and poison them against Katie. This is probably her best play; if it succeeds, she'd take Katie's place in the Tom-Ian-Katie alliance, meaning that after they get rid of Katie, she'd be the swing vote between the Gregg-Jenn axis, and the Tom-Ian axis. Since she'd probably realize that she couldn't win the final three immunity and that if she went with G & J, they'd probably choose each other over her, it would be smarter to stick with Tom and Ian, and try her luck with the jury.

Katie

Katie's strategy for the win should be the same as Caryn's and she ought to be more secure in it, except she spent the last episodes trying to oust Tom and failing. At the same time, she was showing disloyalty to Tom, Caryn was showing loyalty. Add to that the fact that Caryn has no other options but to play ball with Tom and Ian, and it would make sense for Tom to try and swap her for Caryn. Her only hope is that Ian has some loyalty to her and tries to save her.

In the end, I think the scenario I outlined for Caryn is most likely. I'm thinking Katie, Gregg, and Jenn will be the next three to go, in that order, and the final two will be Caryn with either Tom or Ian.

Oscar Watch 2005: The Upside of Anger and Sin City

I know it's extremely early to be worried about the 2005 Oscars, especially when you consider that the median release date for Oscar nominees is approximately Thanksgiving. Nevertheless, the Spring movie season is drawing to a close, and I thought now would be a good time to go over the deserving films that will be long forgotten by next January.

First up is The Upside of Anger. I'm not particularly in the mood for a detailed review, but I will say this: I loved this movie. It reminded me of Wonder Boys, not necessarily because of any similarity in the plots or anything, but because they're both what Quentin Tarantino has called "hangout movies". That is, they're movies with characters so well-drawn and likable that you watch the movie over and over again, just because you like hanging out with them. I look forward to the DVD release of Upside, for this very reason.

I don't know what the studio was thinking, releasing this movie in March. It could have easily been this year's Sideways, i.e. the independent critical darling that opens in New York and L.A. in October and coasts on the word-of-mouth buzz to an Oscar nomination, before opening wide in the winter. Honestly, it's like it was tailor-made for this release-plan. In addition, they could have capitalized on all the "Costner's Comeback" stories that would have inevitably followed this movie's release. If this movie had come out in October, it would have been a shoo-in for nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor (Costner), Best Actress (Joan Allen), and Best Original Screenplay (it's an original screenplay isn't it? If not change that to adapted.) As it is, I think the best it can hope for is the latter two. There are so few decent performances by women in a given year that a performance as good as Allen's won't be forgotten. The same is somewhat true of screenplays, the biggest reason it has a shot here, but not in Best Picture is that there are ten slots for writing nominations instead of five.

Another movie I hope doesn't get forgotten come Oscar time is Sin City. I don't think it will; it's a remarkable achievement on the technical level, and that's all it would ever get nominations for anyway. Regardless of the films merits or release date, there's no way the Academy would ever give serious consideration to a pulpy comic book movie. (Too bad Mickey Rourke). I think Sin City is a solid lock for nominations for Visual Effects, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, and Makeup. Voters in these categories tend to have longer memories than voters in the rest of the categories, for the simple fact that no studio would ever change a release date on a film in the hopes that it can get nominated for Best Makeup. As a result, there's no December logjam like there is for Best Picture nominees. Best Editing and Best Cinematography are another story. Here the logjam is a problem, because movies like Cold Mountain are made so they can rack up big numbers here and the ads can say "nominated for seven Academy awards", even if none of them are best picture. This is where the critic's prizes come in. If Sin City manages to make a lot of year-end top ten lists, or win a lot of critic's awards, voters beyond the ones in the tech categories will give it more consideration. Who knows, it might even have a shot at Adapted Screenplay. It wouldn't be the first comic book movie to get a nomination here; American Splendor and Ghost World both managed the feat, and with relatively early release dates to boot.

Long Time, No Post!

I apologize, dear readers, for the recent drought in posting. I'm thinking of taking this blog in a new direction, and I haven't wanted to post until I figured out exactly what that was. The drought should end soon though, so take heart: the wit and wisdom of BanjoSteve will be coming soon. Thanks.

Still More Survivor Blogging

If I'm going to continue to write about Survivor, I should probably program a macro, because typing "Koror's winning streak continues" over and over is going to get tiresome. Koror is in a good position to go into the merge having never lost an immunity challenge. One potential stumbling block, ironically, is a result of their complete dominance. Now that they have eight members to Ulong's four, they're going to have to put a lot more strategy into who they sit out in challenges. They could play the women in the reward and the men in the immunity, but that would be basically sacrificing the reward, because as bad as Ulong is, I doubt they could find a way to lose to Katie, Caryn, Janu, and Jenn. Of course, if one faction within Koror wanted to throw an immunity challenge in order to vote off someone at Tribal Council, the easiest way to do it without arousing suspicion would be by inopportune challenge assignments. Nevertheless, if they want to win both challenges, I think the best way to do so would be by playing Gregg, Coby, Janu, and Katie in the reward, and Tom, Ian, Jenn, and Caryn in the immunity. Of course, if they win one more immunity and there's no tribal shakeup and they wait to merge until ten, the numbers in the next challenge (8-3) will be such that it's impossible not to sit someone out twice.

The interesting part of last week's episode, though, was Gregg's strategic move. Apparently he saw that Katie, Ian and Tom were going to be difficult to separate when the time came, so he was on the weaker side of that alliance. Meaning that there are now three factions in Koror: Greater Greater Koror (Ian, Tom, and Katie), Lesser Greater Koror (Jenn and Gregg), and Lesser Koror (Coby, Janu, and Caryn). Gregg did the math and proposed to Coby a secret four person alliance between Janu and Coby and Gregg and Jenn, that would kick in after they had gotten rid of Caryn (and presumably Ulong). I had a post I was thinking of writing before Survivor: Palau premiered that would have basically laid out this strategy as a solid path to victory. As evidenced here, the biggest an alliance can get without breaking is probably four; any larger, and eventually someone will recognize that they're in a minority. This could happen with four too, which is why Coby and Gregg's arrangement is ideal. They have two solid pairs, as opposed to an alliance of three with an outlier. (Incidentally, Chris's best play last season was to convince Eliza that their alliance with Scout and Twila was the former, when actually it was the latter). The secrecy is important, because until you're in a tribe of seven or less, four is still not a majority, so an obvious bloc of four would represent a threat.

The trick with a strategy like this comes when it's down to the final four, and the alliance must start eating itself. If you have two solid pairs, it's impossible to put together a majority, and there's a good chance at forcing a tie. The easiest person to flip in this scenario is the person with immunity, because in the event of a tie, they'll lose their immunity and be forced to pick rocks out of a hat. No one with immunity would want to risk this, meaning they'll vote against their partner to avoid a tie. The counter-intuitive strategy then, would be for both members of a pair to throw the immunity challenge. This move, however, requires more trust than it's reasonable to expect in a Survivor endgame. Imagine proposing throwing the challenge to your partner: "If I get individual immunity it will force me to vote for you, and vice versa, so let's both give up on the challenge." A reasonable person hearing this would assume they were being played. It would be best, then, to leave final four immunity challenge alone.

Gregs

This is neither here nor there, but I've noticed a lot of Gregs on TV lately. There's a Greg on one of the teams in The Amazing Race 7. There's Dr. Gregory House on House. There's Dr. Greg Pratt on ER, and then there's Gregg on Survivor. It reminds me of a conversation I had with someone a few years ago. Her name was Angel, and I asked if she ever watched the show Angel. She said no. I asked if she ever watched Dark Angel. She said no. I asked if she ever watched Touched by an Angel. She said no. I said that that was too bad; if there were a show with my name in the title, I would watch it for sure. Then I realized there were two: Dharma & Greg and Greg the Bunny.

The weird thing about my name is that even though it's a common enough name that everyone has heard of it, I almost never meet people who share it. Throughout my entire academic career, I've never had a class with another Greg in it. In the four dorms I lived in in college, I was the only Greg. While I've met other Gregs in passing, the only one I could say I know is my father, and I don't call him by his name. And in the hundreds of people I've interviewed for the census, I've never come across another Greg. The reason I bring this all this up, is that if not for the media, I would never see other Gregs.

Pitch: Star Trek meets 24

The cancellation of Enterprise has given me a lot to think about regarding the future of Star Trek. Mostly this thinking takes the form of musing about what sort of show TPTB should create to bring it back. I have heard a lot of ideas around the internet, from a show set at Starfleet Academy, to a show about the Timeship Relativity, to a show about the crew of the Excelsior under Sulu. To be frank, most of these ideas seem like crap to me. The academy show would have to pile contrivance upon contrivance to get the cast into space exploring week after week. The time travel show would quickly collapse under the logical contortions required. And anyone who's sat through all 79 episodes of the original series and thought the Asian guy in the seat up front should get his own spin off is either insane or George Takei.

I got my idea for the next Trek spinoff from a column in the Chicago Tribune. The writer suggest Star Trek try out 24's real time format. I think that's a terrible idea; the vast distances and travel times involved in space travel would mean that the show would be confined to a rather small area of space for a whole season. It would be even more static than DS9 before the Defiant--at least they had runabouts. But while the real time concept of 24 wouldn't translate well, other aspects would. In particular, Star Trek could take the other defining feature of 24's narrative style, namely season long story arcs. Star Trek has done similar stories before, in the beginning of the sixth season of DS9 when the Dominion occupied the station and in the last ten episodes of the series' run. The writers of Enterprise tried something similar last year with the Xindi arc, to a lesser effect; with a few exceptions, each episode told a distinct story, and they were largely separable from each other.

But the theft of ideas from 24 need not stop at its narrative style. Why not show the CTU of Starfleet? When I first considered this, I didn't think much of it, because terrorism wouldn't be a main focus in the Star Trek universe, which generally focused on Great Power conflicts. But as of the late 24th Century, the Klingons are allies, the Romulans are too weak from the events of Star Trek: Nemesis and the Dominion war to be much of a threat, the Cardassians have been decimated, the Dominion has withdrawn to the Gamma Quadrant, and the Borg are in disarray. The Federation's position after the Dominion War would be similar to America's after the Cold War. It would be the only great power left, meaning the threats it faces would be asymmetrical in nature. Hence Starfleet CTU. I picture something like 24, except the big threat of the season isn't a nuclear bomb, it's a terrorist group trying to blow up some Omega particles in the Solar system.

If Star Trek: CTU is too similar for Fox's lawyers to allow, then perhaps a different angle. I picture Chinatown in space: a private investigator, in the course of another investigation, stumbles onto a massive web of conspiracies that cut to the very heart of the Federation. Or maybe Star Trek meets Lost: a ship crashes onto an uncharted planet with no hope of rescue and the crew has to learn to survive on its own. It could be the show Voyager promised but never delivered!

The interesting thing about all this speculation about new series, is that it's not so crazy to think that I might someday help create one of these shows. I have often considered television and/or screen writing. Theoretically, I could get a good enough start in Hollywood in the next few years, that when Paramount finally decides to resurrect the franchise, they hire me as a writer. Hmmm.

Decades in Film

In the comments section of the post I linked to in my last post, there's an interesting debate raging about when exactly the 00s started. There are those that hold the common sense view that the 00s started January 1, 2000. Then there are the wiseasses that point out that because there was no Year Zero, the 00s didn't start until January 1, 2001. (No one likes a math geek, Scully). More interesting is the position that the 00s didn't start until September 11. The reasoning being that it was a defining moment that split history into a before and an after. I do subscribe to this view somewhat, but only in the political realm. There's no reason September 11 should have the same impact culturally, especially since movies and TV have barely felt the change. I can only think of one movie or TV show that has even touched the cultural impact of 9/11, and that's Rescue Me, the show about New York firefighters.

When I think about the defining sensibility of film in the 00s, it's probably the blurring of the lines between mainstream and indie. It's the decade where Miramax stopped being independent and became "independent". How can you be an independent studio and throw tens of millions of dollars into fancy, big production, famously cast, Oscar bait year after year. But mainstream studios, like Warner Bros. or Paramount are making small movies with the independent sensibility, like Wonder Boys or Million Dollar Baby. Another trend in filmmaking is the honing of visual-effects techniques to make them a seamless part of the storytelling. Someone once wrote to Roger Ebert that visual effects were to modern movies what song and dance numbers were to movies of the Golden Age. This has become less and less the case in the 00s, with movies like The Lord of the Rings, where digital effects are so pervasive that they cease to become surprising and new. Nowadays, the only limit on filmmaker's ability to give life to his or her imagination is not available technology, but a studio willing to put up the money. Both of these trends really started to take shape in 1999; the former with films like Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, American Beauty, and Three Kings, and the latter with The Matrix. So really the 00s began in 1999.

This is not so unusual. I'd say it's pretty rare for film decades to conform to their actual dates on the calendar. The first "decade" of film lasted from 1896, when the medium was invented, to 1915, when The Birth of a Nation, the first feature-length film to nail down the grammar of editing, cinematography and the rest of motion picture storytelling. The '20s of film lasted from Birth of a Nation to The Jazz Singer, the first sound film. The thirties lasted from The Jazz Singer to Citizen Kane. The fifties probably began with A Streetcar Named Desire, when Kazan and Brando brought The Method to film. The sixties are tricky to pin down; I'd guess that they began in 1960 itself, when Psycho and The Apartment signalled a more frank, mature handling of difficult subject matter. The 70s started with Easy Rider (and an assist from 2001). The funny thing about the eighties is that they started before the seventies ended, with Star Wars and the beginning of the end of the age of the Director. While Raging Bull is often cited as the last movie with a 70s sensibility, it's more like it's the last good movie, with the legendary flop Heaven's Gate as the Film that Killed the 70s. The 90s started in 1989 when sex, lies, and videotape and Do the Right Thing kicked off the indie revolution. Which bring us right back to the 00s.

The Top Ten Films of the 00's

I've been resisting making lists since I started this blog, figuring that, once I got started I might never stop. But some of the political blogs I read are posting their lists of the top ten films of the 00's and since it's a subject near and dear to my heart, I thought I'd chip in my two cents:

1. Requiem for a Dream
2. Waking Life
3. Punch Drunk Love
4. Kill Bill (both volumes)
5. Memento
6. Wonder Boys
7. The Royal Tenenbaums
8. Minority Report
9. The Matrix Reloaded
10. High Fidelity

I should describe my methodology for making this list. In the past I've had minor updates, usually to insert, as I feel appropriate, a recent film I've seen. I also occasionally do a major revision, wherein I go over the list with as fresh eyes as I can muster and reorder accordingly. The way I do this is by first going through the films of each year (that I've seen) and picking out the best for each year. Strangely, despite not looking for a specific number, for each of the last four years, I've seen exactly eight films that pass muster. One those lists are complete, randomly pair them off and decide which of each pair is better. Conveniently, this time there were 32 films, which is a power of two. Anyway, this proceeds for the requisite number of rounds until I have one film that's better than all the rest. That goes number one on the list. Then I remove it from the brackets and repeat the tournment until I have ten films.

How do I decide which is better? Admittedly this is difficult, for a number of reasons. One of them is that some of the films I'm just more familiar with, because I own them and watch them more often. For The Royal Tenenbaums or Wonder Boys or Punch Drunk Love this has helped, because they're rich character studies that improve with familiarity. For other films that depend on surprise or a virgin viewing for effect, like Signs or The Matrix Reloaded, this can hurt. But ultimately if a film is going to last, it must deliver on repeat viewings. Terminator 2 is a movie much like The Matrix and its sequel, and it's well remembered and loved. The reason it has survived is that its action scenes still work even when they're familiar. The same seems to be true of the Matrix; we'll have to see for the sequel (Reloaded that is--Revolutions couldn't even deliver on the first viewing). One thing repeat viewing does do is help deflate my opinion of films that are somewhat shallow. For example, I don't think American Beauty or Traffic, as good as they are, will survive as classics, because after maybe three viewings they stop offering anything new.

Another difficulty, especially with films I haven't seen recently or that I've only seen once is that previous list standings tend to play a bigger role than they should. If I've previously judged one film better than another, it makes it difficult to reevaluate them. That's why I use the bracket system; the transitivity helps me make better judgements. For example, Bowling for Columbine was on my last list. This time it went up against The Fog of War in the first round and got eliminated. But Fog of War was eliminated by Amelie, even though Amelie didn't make the last top ten and B4C did.

In general, though, I make my decisions on film quality based on a number of criteria. Craftmanship is important. A film doesn't have to be perfect in every aspect, but glaring problems do hurt. For example, Minority Report has some writing problems, and Monster is seriously weighed down by Christina Ricci's performance. I don't give the same weight to every aspect in every film. Generally, since these are the creme de la creme of film, the better films will tend to be ones that have fewer flaws. My top three, example, are essentially perfect. Another important consideration is watchability. If I find I admire a film more than I like it--that while I hold it in great esteem, I don't really ever want to rewatch it--it will lose. That's how George Washington happened to fall off the list.

In the past the top three has been pretty stable: Waking Life, Requiem for a Dream, and Memento. In fact, this is the first list I've had since I saw Waking Life (the most recent film of the three) that hasn't had those three films in that order. It's looking like the top six will be relatively stable for a while. They may shift in position, but they're never going to fall off the list completely. They've achieved classic status in my mind. And the top two are staying put for good, I imagine. They're the only two films I've seen this century that have actually brought new techniques to bear on film-making. Basically they're the only films to advance the form in any meaningful way. In previous lists, I noticed that a lot of movies tended to jump into the number four position right after I saw them. That's because I wasn't willing to insert them into the top three and thus confer classic status upon them, but I did want to assert that they were superlative and stuck out in my mind. Thus, Gangs of New York, Signs, and The Matrix Reloaded all held that spot right after I saw them (Punch Drunk Love did too, but got bumped until I bought it and couldn't stop rewatching it). The bottom half of this list has fluctuated wildly the last few times I've updated it. I'm not sure exactly why. An interesting point to note, none of the films on my list are Best Picture nominees, let alone winners. Among them, they have eight Oscar nominations and only one win, that being Wonder Boys' Best Song Oscar.