Thoughts on the Oscar nominations?

This isn't a movie blog, but I write about film occasionally enough that I was curious for everyone's reaction to the just-announced Oscar nominations. Because there are so many other awards shows now, the nominees in most of the categories weren't a big surprise. But with the expansion of the Best Picture nominees from 5 to 10, there were a lot of wild cards. (If I had to guess, I'd say that "The Blind Side," "District 9," "A Serious Man," "Up" and "An Education" benefited most from the expansion.)

Of course, the run-up of other awards shows also means there won't be a ton of suspense about who wins, other than perhaps "Avatar" vs. "Hurt Locker" for Best Picture and director, but while we have a few weeks to kill before the big event, what did you think of the nominations? Anyone you hoped/expected to be nominated who wasn't? (For me, it was "500 Days of Summer" for original screenplay.) Any pleasant surprises? (For me, it'd be "In the Loop" for adapted screenplay.) Any nominee you're pulling for, even if they're not the obvious favorite? (I loved Clooney in "Up in the Air," and I'm sure Jeff Bridges is brilliant in "Crazy Heart" and is long overdue, but it'd also be cool to see Jeremy Renner win.)

Have at it.

'Lost' season 6 preview - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I get myself ready for the final season of "Lost" by looking back to the show's very first episode:

Last week, as preparation for tonight's final season premiere of "Lost," I spun up the series' pilot episode for the first time in years. A couple of hours later, I was left with two thoughts: 1) This remains one of the best pilots ever made, and 2) I have much more faith now that the end will make sense than I did in 2004.

The first observation won't surprise anyone who's seen the "Lost" pilot, which is packed with thrilling, iconic moments like Jack (Matthew Fox) frantically tending to survivors amid the burning wreckage of Oceanic 815; Jack, Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and Charlie (Dominic Monaghan) climbing through the plane's vertical, corpse-strewn first-class cabin; or Sawyer (Josh Holloway) gunning down a charging polar bear with no business being anywhere near a tropical island.

But what stuck out to me even more were the small moments that, in retrospect, pointed toward big revelations down the road.

You can read the full "Lost" column here, and I also wrote a quick recap of how season 5 ended.

To repeat two points from yesterday morning's post, 1)Do not, under any circumstances, post any comments including spoiler details about the upcoming season, whether gleaned from the leaked footage, reports of the Hawaiian screening of the premiere's first hour, promos, or whatnot; and 2)Because I haven't seen the premiere in advance, the earliest you can expect a post on it will be very late (as in post-midnight) tonight. And if I conk out before then, then sometime late tomorrow morning.

Very excited.

Life Unexpected, "Rent Uncollected": Family affair

A few quick thoughts on the latest "Life Unexpected" coming up just as soon as I fire up the DeLorean and grab the condoms...

Each week, it seems, we meet, and/or Lux meets, a different part of her family. In the pilot, she found her birth parents. In episode two, we discovered her surrogate family of fellow foster kids. Tonight brings in Lux's grandparents (and aunt) in the form of familiar TV faces Robin Thomas and Susan Hogan (as Baze's parents), Cynthia Stevenson (Cate's mom) and Alexandra Breckenridge (Cate's sister). At some point, the show will need to put the brakes on this before we get to "Episode 21: Lux is horrified when her second cousin Frank is murdered," but for now the expansion of the show's world - and the many potential character combinations, ala "Modern Family," that we now have - has felt natural and interesting.

And in showing us how Baze's dad disapproves of him, it continues the character's evolution into something more human and likable than just the generic Peter Pan character he could have been. I never thought much of Kris Polaha (good or bad) in his previous series gigs, but more than anything else, he's what has me wanting to keep watching "Life Unexpected" past this episode (the last I saw in advance via a screener).

Again, we get the push-pull of the Lux/Baze/Cate relationship, with everyone backing away and then coming back together for a more formal meeting between Baze, Cate and Lux's friends. I'd like to see the show evolve past that soon, but the performances, and moments like Lux halfway scamming her way into the popular clique(*), still have me enjoying it.

(*) And that worked entirely because two of the girls didn't buy it at all. Had Lux successfully talked herself in with the whole crowd at once, it would have been too much, and too easy.

What did everybody else think?

How I Met Your Mother, "The Perfect Week": We want a Swisher, not a belly itcher!

A review of "How I Met Your Mother" coming up just as soon as I take a swat at the Hamburglar...

"The Perfect Week" featured plenty of elements that should have made me an absolute sucker for it. It was loaded with baseball jokes, from Ted playing pitching coach to Barney (while accompanied by the score from the original "Major League"(*), to Jim Nantz kicking his chair over at the idea that Marshall would invoke the jinx again, to the cameo by Nick Swisher, who has already vaulted his way into becoming my second-favorite Yankee(**). It had sops to "HIMYM" continuity, like the first mention of Victoria I can recall since the first season and Marshall's ongoing Sasquatch fixation, and meta jokes like Future Ted acknowledging he's a bad dad for telling his kids stories like this one. And much of the episode leaned on the show's most reliable source of humor: Barney's success with the ladies.

(*) It gets overlooked in some circles because it came out the year after "Bull Durham" and ripped off a bunch of elements from that movie (washed-up but wily catcher, pitcher with million dollar arm and no control, voodoo-practicing player, etc.), but it's still one of my favorite Underdog Sports Movies. You can hear a sample of the score here, and keep watching at least until you get to the end of the American Express commercial, which is the moment when I knew the guy playing Willy Mays Hays was gonna be a big star. Shame he forgot how to be funny (and when to pay his taxes).

(**) What can I say? The guy's just an endearing goofball who can hit a little. Of course, the gap between him and first-favorite Yankee Mariano Rivera is insurmountable, but watching Swisher (with more than a little help from CC Sabathia and AJ Burnett) completely reinvent the clubhouse dynamics of what had been a stultifying roster for a long, long time was a joy to behold. Plus, his haircuts are all stupid, including the one he wore tonight.

Yet the baseball jokes got repetitive after a while (though some later ones like Nantz's tantrum were funny anyway), and a lot of the gags sprinkled around it didn't work. Robin's Dale fixation in particular was one of the most annoying things Cobie Smulders has ever been asked to play (and it also feels like the show's done a lot of "Robin gets indignant that people don't realize how hot she is" gags of late), and the initial scene where Ted made his unfortunately-named student cry was Ross Gellar bad, even if some of the follow-up jokes made by the gang made my inner 9-year-old chuckle. And like "The Playbook" from earlier in the season, the Barney jokes began to feel like a crutch after a while.

Lot of strong elements, but not one of the season's stronger episodes.

What did everybody else think?

Chuck, "Chuck vs. the Nacho Sampler": Diversified assets

A review of tonight's "Chuck" coming up just as soon as I write this off as a business trip...

"He's turning into a spy. That's a good thing." -Casey
"Is it?" -Sarah

"Chuck vs. the Nacho Sampler" is bookended by a flashback to Chuck and Sarah's first meeting (both the version we saw in the pilot, and then a new version from Sarah's perspective), and the main plot is very reminiscent of season one's "Chuck vs. the Sandworm," where Chuck also befriended an asset with a similar story to his own. But "Nacho Sampler" wasn't just a retread. Rather, it was a sign of how far Chuck and Sarah have come since those early days - and also of how much more confident the show has become over even a season one highlight like "Sandworm."

Back in the "Vicki Vale" scene from the pilot, Sarah was a shark and Chuck was chum. The roles haven't entirely reversed two-plus years later, but Chuck has gotten harder, and Sarah softer. The Chuck of season one would never have been able to go through with sending Manoosh into isolation for the rest of his life, and Sarah would have been annoyed with his refusal to accept the dirty parts of the job. Now, it's Chuck (who's slowly learning the emotional costs of his new career) swallowing his empathy to complete the mission, and it's Sarah (who has learned to let her guard down and value friendship and family) who's troubled to see nice guy Chuck - whom she fell in love with because he wasn't another Casey or Bryce Larkin - able to be as cold as she used to be.

At the same time, in learning how to cultivate and then burn an asset, Chuck starts to realize exactly how Sarah viewed him when they first met, and how their relationship might have gone if a few things had been different.

As I've said many times, the most frustrating part about shows that drag out Unresolved Sexual Tension between the leads is when artificial obstacles get thrown in the way, just because nobody wants the game to end yet. But even more than the introduction of Agent Shaw (who takes the week off) and Hannah (who's relegated to the Morgan B-story), I find it plausible that Chuck and Sarah are influencing the other to change so much that they're not meeting in the middle, but passing each other on the way to the other side. Even if it's, in fact, being done just because Fedak and Schwartz are reluctant to put the two together already, it feels like something that comes out of the paths these two characters have been on for the last 40 episodes, and it was very well-played (as usual) by Zachary Levi and Yvonne Strahovski.

Outside of the Chuck/Sarah issues, the Manoosh story was also a good Chuck/Casey one. With Shaw absent(*), Casey is once again in the role of the Operation Bartowski member who represents the official, remorseless view of spy-dom. He mocks Chuck's initial stumbles, as always - and the two have a priceless bit of physical comedy when Chuck is trying to get the laser pen out of Casey's pocket while they're shackled in Dubai - but he's also the one who thinks Chuck can do it in the first place, and the one who suggests Chuck give Johnny Walker black a whirl to assuage his guilt (as I'm sure Casey has done a time or 50 over his career).

(*) With the budget so lean this year, I'm assuming the producers didn't want to waste Brandon Routh's fee on an episode that didn't really need him.

And we also see Chuck's web of deception not only hurt Manoosh and disturb Sarah, but start to create friction with the people from his "real" life (which, more and more, is becoming as fake as any of Sarah's aliases). Devon is still having trouble being awesome about Chuck's secret, and Ellie and Morgan are both alarmed to discover, independently, that Chuck went to Paris and didn't tell either of them about it. Perhaps worst of all, Morgan has now assigned Jeff and Lester to put their super-stalking powers on the case to find out what Chuck's hiding and why; those guys may be perverted idiots, but other than maybe "Missile Command," stalking is what Jeff does best, and they did manage to get their way into Casey's secret locker compartment at the Buy More, and to crash Castle's electrical grid. Could we be heading for a circumstance where suddenly everyone in Nerd World suddenly knows about Spy World? Or will Jeffster screw it up? (They did, after all, interpret all of Casey's gear to mean he was a fellow stalker.)

Ryan McPartlin continues to do well playing an out-of-his-element Captain Awesome, and Josh Gomez managed to turn Morgan's goofy attempt to seduce Hannah on a dime into an excuse for us to feel sorry for the guy, once again left out of the loop of his best friend's life. But until that moment, Hannah's first week at the Buy More provided some huge, uncomfortable laughs, be it Morgan clambering over the desk of his new "office," or Jeff angrily insisting, "It's my constitutional right to fornicate!"

I know many people automatically assume that anyone new in Chuck's life must be a spy, and it's entirely possible that Hannah will turn out to be exactly that. Right now, though, I buy her as another Lou - a woman drawn to Chuck, whose affections are then disrupted by his spy gig (here with him constantly disappearing for "Yogurt Time"), and she had an unsurprisingly easy time at seeming horrified by Jeff and Lester's leering.

We have only one more episode to go until the show takes a few weeks off for the Olympics. The season wasn't written with that break in mind (remember, it was originally going to premiere after the Olympics), but we seem to be building towards a crisis point in nearly all of Chuck's relationships. Two weeks ago, Agent Shaw watched, somewhat enviously, as Chuck basked in the company of his sister and brother-in-law, his best friend, and his two CIA partners. Tonight, we climax with Chuck drinking alone, Ellie and Morgan suspicious of him, and Sarah worrying that he's becoming something other than the man she fell for. And then, in the closing flashback, we're reminded again that the spy world Chuck is so eager to join is one not built on real relationships, but on deception and using other people for your own ends.

Not a happy place for Chuck, nor as jaunty and feel-good an episode as "Chuck vs. First Class," but "Chuck vs. the Nacho Sampler" felt even more important to our hero's development, and the unfurling of this season's story arc, as seeing him fly (sort of) solo last week.

Some other thoughts:

• This week in "Chuck" pop culture references: Chuck compares himself to celebrity zookeeper Jack Hanna. Chuck impresses Manoosh with his reading choice of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's "Y: The Last Man." Sarah's "Frak Off" belly shirt is, of course, a "Battlestar Galactica" joke to play to Manoosh's pre-established "BSG" fixation. One of the items on sale at Weap-Con is the "EM-50 mobile interrogation unit," where in "Stripes," the EM-50 was a mobile assault vehicle disguised as an RV. Casey's line about Chuck bringing a knife to a gunfight is lifted from Sean Connery in "The Untouchables." The French film that Morgan and Hannah discuss, on the other hand, was invented for purposes of the show, and the art department put the name of several "Chuck" writers (including this episode's authors, Matt Miller and Scott Rosenbaum) and crew members on the credits if you look closely. Anything I missed?

• Songs this week include Datarock's "Amarillion" (Hannah enters in her Nerd Herd uniform), "Danny Trejo" by Plastillina Mosh (Chuck smoothing things over with Manoosh), Calvin Harris' "Merrymaking at My Place" (Sarah seducing Manoosh), The Clash's vintage "Rock the Casbah" (the team arrives in Dubai) and "40 Day Dream" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros (the final montage).

• Two candidates for the still sponsor-less "Chuck" Plot Hole of the Week: 1)Since General Beckman found out that Devon knows Chuck's secret in "Operation Awesome" (if not before that) and is still letting him roam free, why is Chuck so terrified that if Ellie finds out, they go into witness protection? 2)Why would the buyers at Weap-Con be so willing to believe Manoosh's story about the sunglasses? Isn't it entirely possible that he's a martial arts master posing as a dweeb?

• Also, were you disappointed that we never got a Chuck/Manoosh fight scene? Or are you happy that Chuck's Intersect 2.0 skills have mostly turned out to be used for minor action beats (like Chuck using the nacho plate to save Sarah) rather than the new focus of the show?

• With so many funny people around her, Strahovski isn't usually called on to deliver jokes, but I laughed out loud at Sarah's smug, sing-song "Thank you!" after Casey acknowledged that Chuck was in over his head trying to secure an asset. (Though, frankly, that didn't make me laugh nearly as hard as the sight gag of Sarah in the "Frak Off" shirt.)

• After he watched the end of "Chuck vs. First Class," Fienberg complained to me that the Buy More's wind machine wasn't turned on when Hannah entered the store the way it usually is for Sarah, Carina, et al. Well, her entrance at the top of this episode belatedly solved that problem. I guess they were just waiting to get her into her Nerd Herd uniform (in a version that fell somewhere in between Sarah's stripper-iffic version from "Chuck vs. Tom Sawyer" and the anime-influenced one that Anna Wu favored).

• Manoosh was played by Fahim Anwar, in real life an aerospace engineer by day, stand-up comic by night. He wrote a bit about the experience of filming this episode on his blog.

• Which is more impressive and/or funnier: Morgan's new Ass Man office in the custodial closet, or Jeff's men's room stall office (from "Chuck vs. the Predator")? And should we assume that Jeff's office was a casualty of Emmett Millbarge's reign of terror over Buy Moria?

• I loved "Chuck vs. First Class," but in retrospect I realize that Chuck did very little to ensure the success of his first solo mission (other than the fencing match with Stone Cold Steve Austin), and that most of the credit goes to Shaw, Sarah, and the magical Castle joystick. And, having recognized that, Chuck's attempt to get General Beckman to compliment him on his work went over as well with me as it did with Beckman.

• While most of the episode's jokes were landing beautifully, the running gag about the Weap-Con organizer trying to play off all of Operation Bartowski's shenanigans as weapons demonstrations never quite worked, and became a distraction in a few spots. It either needed more time to set up that guy, or else should have been ditched.

What did everybody else think?

The Grammys: It takes two to make a thing go right/wrong

Of the major showbiz awards shows, I only watch the Emmys for professional reasons, and at this point I mainly stick with the Oscars for work, as well. (It's a movie awards show, but it's also one of the most-watched TV shows of the year, so I tend to write about it.)

The Grammys, though, I watch for personal reasons. First, it helps me come out from behind my niche-y iPod playlists to get a reminder for a night of what's going on in popular music. Second, I'm a sucker for unconventional duets, which the Grammy telecast has offered up a lot of in recent years. Sometimes, they're incredible (Joss Stone and Melissa Etheridge sing Janis Joplin), and sometimes they fizzle, but they're always interesting to look at to see why one combination works, another doesn't, etc.

Last night, Taylor Swift was the big winner of the night, winning Album of the Year, but she was also part of the evening's most memorably awkward duet, when she teamed up with Stevie Nicks for a medley that included Nicks' "Rhiannon." Swift has carved out a very impressive career for herself by working hard, being very well-rehearsed (see her "surprised" reaction to every single awards victory she's had in the last year) and understanding her strengths (personality, songwriting, stagecraft) and weaknesses (limited vocal range). Placed next to Nicks, and handed a song that wasn't written with her skill set in mind, Swift gave the kind of performance where, if it had happened on "American Idol," Paula Abdul would have started her comments by telling Taylor how pretty she looked.

Hey, it happens, and on balance her night worked out very well for her. So, for those of you who also watched last night, what were some of your favorite and/or least favorite performances, and why?

Lost: Return to Craphole Island is imminent

My "Lost" preview column - inspired in part by my decision to re-watch the pilot on Friday for the first time in years - will be posted tomorrow morning. I haven't seen the premiere in advance(*), so we'll see how much physical and mental energy I have on reserve tomorrow night at 11 p.m. Ideally, I'll power through and stay up to write my premiere review, but it may have to wait until Wednesday morning.

(*) Once again, let me remind you of the No Spoilers section of the commenting rules around here. Between the four minutes of the premiere that leaked online, the screening of the premiere's first hour in Hawaii on Saturday, and the promo shown during last night's "Desperate Housewives," there's a lot of potential season six spoilage out there, and I want absolutely none of it discussed here. Got me?

In the meantime, I heartily endorse heading on over to A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago to read Isaac Spaceman's latest "Previously on Lost" post, his inspired semi-regular recap of all the weirdness out there on Craphole Island. (Here's last year's version, which may be the pinnacle of this particular gag. And here are the first and second versions.)

At one point, I had contemplated doing a Great Moments on "Lost" post with tons of Hulu embeds in time for the premiere, but other things got in the way, and it feels like something that, if I do it, feels more appropriate for right before the finale. After the jump, though, I've got one of my favorite "Lost" scenes, and one that's fairly unheralded because of the character involved. From season 2's "The Other 48 Days"...



Yes, Ana-Lucia was pretty justly unloved (and the Tailies turned out to be a waste of time), but that's one helluva scene between Michelle Rodriguez and Brett Cullen. And, in retrospect, Ana-Lucia's question about the Army knife has a lot more resonance. (Is that the first reference on the show to the military having once been on the island?)

Too much work to do today and tomorrow, but I'm sorely tempted to just camp out in front of my laptop and watch highlights from the previous five seasons.