Rich Heldenfels, Pop Culture Wanderer

-- This is the first year I can remember where I have seen all the best-picture nominees on the day the nominations were announced.* That may be an indication that the academy, following the brouhaha over the announced-then-dropped "popular film" category,  still saw fit to nominate a lot of movies that the mass audience has seen. Only not everything. I've been searching for ways to see some of the nominees in other categories; "At Eternity's Gate" has a best-actor nomination for Willem Dafoe and, according to Box Office Mojo, was in less than 200 theaters nationwide at its peak distribution, and that was a month ago. -- The academy's expanding the best-picture category will never really work until, at the very least, the directing and writing categories are also expanded. There are eight nominees for best picture this year, but only four of those movies were also nominated for best director. (The fifth directing nomination is for "Cold War,...

Topics: a new Paul Simon biography, Michael Beschloss on presidents in wartime, Green Book, Aquaman, Roma, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, A Very English Scandal,  and more. As I mentioned before, I have used my school break to enjoy some reading, and I have managed to squeeze in a couple of more books before classes resume tomorrow. One was Robert Hilburn's biography of Paul Simon, noteworthy because Simon cooperated -- well, mostly; he declared questions about his children and about an incident with his wife Edie Brickell off-limits. There is still plenty to talk about, particularly when it comes to Simon's writing process and the changes in it. You get the details of the makings of his landmark songs, plenty about his complicated relationship with Art Garfunkel, Simon's forays into an array of musical styles (and the resulting debate over his work with South African musicians in the apartheid era) and a close look at his later, less...

When I was in college, between the end of Christmas break and the first-semester exams was  Reading Period, about 10 days where students were given a chance to prepare for their tests. These days, I still have a Reading Period of sorts, between Christmas and the resumption of my teaching at the University of Akron, when I just dive into books. The current stack is above. It's not that I cannot read the rest of the time; before tackling my post-holiday reading, I spent happy time with an advance copy of The Sopranos Sessions , a detailed examination of the landmark series by my friends Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz, which is officially available in a week. I also read Thomas E. Ricks 's Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom, and dipped into the Library of America's collection of Carson McCullers' s Stories, Plays and Other Writings, which LOA had made available at a nice discount. For a school project, earlier in the fall, I had read Tara Westov...