Oscars? We don’t need no stinking Oscars!

As deserving (or not) as many of last night’s Oscar winners were, it was hard not to notice one glaring omission among the Best Picture and Best Director nominees: Sean Penn’s haunting adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.

Starring Emile Hirsch and Best Supporting Actor nominee Hal Holbrook, the film tells the true story of twentysomething Christopher McCandless, who boyishly wandered around the American West before dying of starvation in the Alaskan wilderness. While Krakauer’s book delved deeply into his subject’s motivations and psyche (was he selfish or stupid? Spiritually lost or psychologically ill?), Penn, who wrote and directed the film, smartly reduces his narrative just to McCandless’s quest — the places he saw (gorgeously shot by cinematographer Eric Gautier), the fellow American wanderers he met (Vince Vaughn is particularly winning as one of them), and how he and those he encountered were changed by the experience.

Beautiful, restrained, funny, and sad, Into the Wild is a celebration of our national instinct for liberty and the lengths to which true believers will go to find it. That golden guy doesn’t know what he’s missing.

From veryshortlist.com
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NVDL: There was some full frontal nudity in this film which probably relegated it 'art movie' status. The nudity was incidental in the way that when you are in the bush and you see a big fat oom or a little girl running around. It reinforces the sense that we people are also animals in a simple sense, and in the important sense that nature is where we belong.

It's Worrying What We Worry About (And What We Don't)

No surprise, the majority of people voted that they worry most about their appearance. Why not? The media emphasise this continually, print media demonstrate what beautiful men and women must be on a daily basis and so we unhappily spend much of our lives consciously attempting to aspire to these meretricious idols. And that's what it is - a form of idolatry. People worshipping other people.

It's gratifying that a significant portion think about their significant others (if if not quite as often as they think about themselves).
Then, what concerns us most: money and crime. In fact, certainly in this country, these are interlinked. I suppose you could argue that money is linked to everthing. Money determines how good we could look (pays for a gym membership, good clothes, plenty of pedicures). I would argue though that we worry least about what we ought to worry most about.

I had a conversation recently where my companion said: "You're wasting your time talking to people about this; we're already fucked. We're fucked."
To be honest I was quite shocked that he was probably even more certain that we were 'fucked' than I was.

Fossil fuels underpin everything we do. It's like the air we breath in the sense that once not there, very little else is possible. And energy is becoming more expensive and rare by the day. Why wouldn't it? Don't you see more and more consumers every day, more shopping malls. Aren't you spending more and more? The energy for all this excess has to come from somewhere. And it has to stop somewhere. There's a book that discusses this: The Limits To Growth. That's where we are now. Bumping our heads against a capacity ceiling.

In an ideal world I'd suggest that we do worry the most about ourselves, but not so much our appearance, but what sort people we are. Once on the right track, love another, and then have concerns about those things that impact ourselves and loved one's the most. Crime is what's wrong with this picture right now, and the lack of foresight to appreciate the conundrums of climate change and fossil fuels. In the scheme of things, in terms of absolute survival, how things look are less important than the true nature of what they are. And that begs the question:

Who are you, and what (good) are you capable of? Are you capable of resurrecting all that was once decent in human beings? Right now we are a vulgar and self indulgent bunch of animals. Our greed and our capacity to collect things, in addition to our aggression, has caused our species to fill the consciousness of this Earth with the equivalent of a crippling, splitting migraine headache. Right now, what is worrying this planet most, is us. We are the problem.