The nominated films for this year’s Oscars were announced this week. This year there’s 10 nominees instead of 5, which I think is good since there’s a wider range of films nominated. Two of my favorites – District 9 and Up – probably wouldn’t have made it otherwise. Here’s my ratings and some thoughts on the films nominated

District 9 – The boldest, most original film of those nominated as well as being entertaining and action-orientated. I know it won’t win, but it would be my pick. A

Up in the Air – This is the mature movie Judd Apatow would like to graduate to. A simple premise that deepens as the movie develops. Clooney at his breezy, movie-star best. A

The Hurt Locker - Competently made Iraqi war movie with some nail-biting scenes where you really feel the all-present threat troops face. A-

Up – The first half is moving and magical but the second half is marred somewhat by a standard fight-to-the-death action scenes (with a lot of old guy jokes and references thrown in.) A-

An Education – Another movie that deepens nicely as the movie develops, it performs a neat trick by making a terrible decision its main character makes seem totally understandable. However it’s still hard to understand how the key relationship would have been so accepted by everyone else, even back in the early ‘60s. B+

Avatar – See my Up comments (minus the old-guy jokes). B

Precious – I was looking forward to seeing this film more than any other one, but was deeply disappointed. Great acting, underdeveloped script, pretentiously directed. C

A Serious Man – A one note movie. Boring. D

Haven’t seen The Blind Side or Inglourious Basterds yet.

I’m starting to think we have lost our collective minds. Where else but in modern American can what is sure to be an innocuous Presidential message to students get blown up all out of proportion?

Glenn Beck echoed many critics calling it an “indoctrination of your children.” ”This is something you’d see in North Korea or in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” complained Oklahoma State Senator Steve Russell.

Ah, no it’s not. You see, State Senator Russell, there’s an important difference between the United States and those other countries you mentioned. The United States is a democracy, where people have the right to free speech and where there’s a vigorous public debate. In our country, the President speaks and then the rest of us have the opportunity to agree or disagree and discuss or argue about it publicly. It is not at all like a country with a state-run media where The Leader speaks and everyone else is required to parrot the government line.

That is a huge distinction. In an enlightened place of learning, students are given all the information and viewpoints they need and we let them make up their own minds, even if we don’t agree with them. If we are truly “indoctrinating” them, we only give them one side of the argument and insist that it’s the only that deserves to be listened to. It makes one wonder who’s really doing the indoctrinating here.

The funny thing is I don’t expect President Obama to say anything remotely controversial. I expect him to welcome students back to school and stress the importance of education and studying hard. As an example, he’s probably going to point to his own life to show how a quality education enabled a African-American of modest means and a broken family like himself to eventually become president. If you stay in school and work hard, you can be anything you want to be, too.

Okay, so it’s probably not going to be anything historic, but I think it’s going to be a positive message for students to hear. If not, we can all start arguing about it when he’s done and make up our own minds.

The NY Times ran an interesting article a couple of days ago about how technology is changing our daily lives, starting with our very first waking moments.

This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.

This is true for me, except in my case it’s an iPod Touch. It’s the last thing I check before I go to sleep and the first thing I check when I get up in the morning. Why, I’m not sure. There’s hardly ever anything important that I’m finding out that can’t wait, but I like keeping up on what everyone is saying.

Fortunately I’m not faced with the responsibility of trying to manage the technology use of children like many of those cited in the article. If I were, I don’t think I would begrudge them keeping in touch with their friends through their gadgets, though I think there are certain times to put the devices away and get some work done or communicate with the people around them.

I think this would be a fascinating topic to explore with students. I wonder how early they begin to be to connect – both in age and time of the morning.

Roger Ebert has never struck me as a public scold, so it surprised me to see a recent blog post of his where he bemoaned the fact that young people don’t read film critics anymore, which, to him, is a sign that they’re getting dumber.

If I mention the cliché “the dumbing-down of America,” it’s only because there’s no way around it. And this dumbing-down seems more pronounced among younger Americans. It has nothing to do with higher educational or income levels. It proceeds from a lack of curiosity and, in many cases, a criminally useless system of primary and secondary education. Until a few decades ago, almost all high school graduates could read a daily newspaper. The issue today is not whether they read a daily paper, but whether they can.

Obviously Ebert is stretching his conclusion to include far more than movies, although that’s still the focus of his post. His main evidence is the lack of success of The Hurt Locker, the Iraq War movie that came out this summer. Young people are not going to see this film, Ebert complains. Most of them don’t want to try anything out of the ordinary.

Of course there are countless teenagers who seek and value good films. I hear from them all the time in the comment threads on this blog. They’re frank about their contemporaries. If they express a nonconformist taste, they’re looked at as outsiders, weirdoes, nerds. Their dates have no interest in making unconventional movie choices. They’re looked at strangely if they express no desire to see that weekend’s box office blockbuster. Even some of their teachers, they write, are unfriendly to them “always bringing up movies nobody has ever heard of.” If you hang around on these threads, you know the readers I’m referring to, including “A Kid,” who writes so well that if she hadn’t revealed her age (just turned 13) we would have taken her for a literate, articulate adult.

My question: Has it ever been any different? That last excerpt could’ve been written about me when I was growing up. Have teenagers ever taken film criticism seriously or flocked to the more offbeat movies? Face it, moviegoers have been flocking to mindless action movies for as long as I can recall, and it’s not just young people.

Yes, I saw The Hurt Locker, and it’s a great movie. I wish more people would have seen it — young people and adults alike. It gives us a vivid look at the thankless, life-risking work that our soldiers are doing. Why do so many more people want to see the escapism of Harry Potter or The Transformers or G.I. Joe instead? I don’t know. Maybe The Hurt Locker was badly marketed. Maybe after a long day’s work, people just want to shut out the world and watch something that makes them feel good. Probably there is a lot of groupthink at work. But it’s hardly the first time that a superior movie was ignored.

There’s a lot of change happening and there’s always the temptation to predict the end of civilization. There’s plenty of supporting evidence for such a hypothesis and always has been. I’m just going to need something a little more definitive before I believe it.

Before Christmas, I had the students create interactive QuickTime movies that gave information about each part of the plant when it was clicked. It works by mapping out those parts and linking them to slides where students type in that information. The movie I made above walks you through all of that. Here’s an example of the final result.

The students seemed to enjoy it. I think a big part of it is that they were able to put it on their blogs. It would have been easier though if we had them do a simpler one earlier in the year. That way they would have been more familiar with exporting the QuickTime movie and how to upload files in their blog. This was pretty hard for a first one (although they had experience doing one in third grade).

I’m sure there’s a lot of other topics you could make one of these interactive movies for. We had students make one earlier in the year about the regions of Texas – it’d be perfect for any geographic area. You could do the parts of the water cycle, parts of the body and parts of sentences, just to name a few. You can also use PowerPoint, if you don’t have Keynote.

If you want to try it with your students, you can use my documents. You need to have iWork ‘08 to open them however.

It looks like I’ve got my pictures showing up on my blog again, so I think I’m just about done moving the Edgemere Roadrunners website  from one webhosting company to another.

I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do it, but at the same time, I was preparing for it after Wesley Fryer had similar problems with Siteground, the same company I’d be using. Still, I imagined that he had a much bigger audience, so I was hoping my little elementary school site would avoid a similar fate. No such luck.

It happened last Wednesday. Ms. Ward brought her first class in to their blogs and about two-thirds of them had logged in and geotten started writing their posts when suddenly no one connecting to the website. Those students who hadn’t logged in, couldn’t, nor was it saving the drafts of those students who had begun typing in their posts. It was a huge mess.

I quickly figured out that this was just happening to my website, every other website was coming in fine. I logged into Siteground’s support site and reported my problem. To their credit, they responded quickly to my problem and had it fixed by the time Ms. Ward’s second class came in. What wasn’t so good was this: Apparently we had more than 10 simultaneous connections from the same IP address which was a violation of the terms of my webhosting plan. They said I needed to upgrade to a plan that costs $100 a month which wouldn’t have those restrictions.

Well, there was no way that was going to happen. I pay for this site out of my own pocket and there’s no way I can afford that. I immediately began a mad search for a replacement. I contacted several webhosting companies, telling each of them what I was using this website for, asking for a recommended plan and seeing if they had similar restrictions about simultaneous connections. I was shocked to discover many of them did. How can this be? If this is commonplace, how can any but the richest schools afford to buy commercial web space?

I got the best answer to this question from an employee at Dreamhost. First, he said they allowed 30 simultaneous connections from the same IP address. Second, he explained that it would be very unlikely to get anywhere near that number as those connections tended to be very brief. Thirst, he explained that his company didn’t consider going over 30 connections a “violation.” In the unlikely event that there were 31 connections at the same time, 30 would get through and the one that was left would have to wait until one of them were freed up. That’s it. Since the company has a good online reputation, I purchased a two year plan from them.

On Saturday, I moved the majority of the files over. It took me the better part of the day. By far, the most time-consuming part was uploading the blogs’ database. It’s over 100 MB big and I had to upload it in 7 MB chunks. It took forever!

But I did it! I got just about everything back to where it once was and very few people noticed any chance at all. It good to know I can make another change in the future if I need to and I don’t need to stick with a bad arrangement because I’m afraid of making the jump.

Being a Minnesota Vikings fan while living in the Southwest isn’t easy. The local TV stations rarely show their games, so unless they’re playing Sunday, Monday or Thursday night, chances are I’m not going to see them.

So imagine how happy I was when I saw today’s Vikings-Giants game on today’s TV schedule. As you might know, this was a huge game. Not only is this the last regular-season game of the season, it had playoff implications as well. If the Vikings won, they would’ve been guarenteed to win their division and would be headed for the playoffs for the first time in years.

Unfortunately when I navigated to KASA with my remote a few minutes before the game was to start, I saw this message:

Niiiice! Every other channel was working fine except the one that was broadcasting the game I wanted to see! What were the odds of that happening? The channel wasn’t off just for a few minutes either, it was gone the entire game. In fact, right now it’s after 5:00 PM and the same message still appears. It sounded like it was a good game too. The Viking won the game, 20 to 19, as the result of a last-second field goal. Too bad I didn’t get a chance to see it.

Bored and tired of the constant high winds that have been battering Ruidoso during Christmas break, I set off for El Paso yesterday to do a few errands and catch a movie.

Slumdog Millionaire , the movie I saw, is certainly an interesting film – it stands apart in its setting, topic and structure. It’s both the most real film out there right now, by showing us living conditions in one of India’s slums, and also tells the biggest fairytale.

It tells the story of Jamal who, despite being an orphan with no formal education, gets on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and is able to answer the first 13 questions. It’s assumed he’s cheating, so before he appears on his final show to answer the last questions to win his fortune, he is interrogated as to how he came up with all those correct answers. Through a series of flashbacks, we find out how he learned each answer and we also learn about his life and his close bond with the beautiful Latika.

The film was made by the noted British director Danny Boyle, and it seems to me that he was trying to mix the grittier, complex elements of a Western film with the more sweeping, melodramatic elements of an Indian one. The movie never failed to hold my interest and it used the built-in drama of the Millionaire show as the glue that holds all the different elements together.

It’s the interrogation scenes that I didn’t buy. All of that for a game show contestant? Even going to the extreme of applying military-type of torture techniques like electrocution to get the truth out of him? Couldn’t they simply check the videotape to see if anyone was giving him signals?

The movie is rated R because of language and some violent language, so I wouldn’t recommend it for children. Adults and older teenagers who are looking for a movie that gives them a glimpse into a different part of the world should check it out.

Watch CBS Videos Online

I don’t see 60 Minutes very often anymore, but I’m sure glad I saw it this last Sunday. They ran a fascinating story about an elephant orphanage in Kenya that cares for young elephants after their mothers have been killed by poachers.

The people that work there are clearly extraordinary people. According to the story, they have to personally stay with the young elephant continuously because they have to replicate the best they can the experience it would have otherwise had with its mother. I also thought it was interesting that you blow into an elephant’s trunk so they can learn your scent.

I’d always heard that elephants were intelligent animals and that they had long memories, but I didn’t realize what a capacity for caring they had until I saw this story. How anyone could kill these animals is beyond me. Fortunately there are some caring people that are there to repair some of the damage that other humans cause.

One of the most maddening aspects of modern politics is this “either you’re with us or against us” mindset. If you hold one contrary opinion, you must be kicked out of the club, your ideas never considered again and called the enemy every time your name comes up.

The perfect display of this happened late last week when Pastor Rick Warren accepted President Elect Barack Obama’s invitation to give the invocation at next month’s inauguration ceremony. Obama got condemned by many of his supporters for extending the invitation and Warren got criticism from the evangelical community for accepting. Never mind that it’s exactly what both men should be doing.

Barack Obama has been elected president of the United States, not president of the Democrats. He represents the whole country – all of us – right now, and I think it’s great that he recognizes the importance of people that don’t necessarily represent his political base. Besides, if he’s going to get anything done, he needs to reach out and enlist the support of people who don’t agree with his entire agenda. Obama and Warren definitely don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, but it’d be a tremendous accomplishment they can make progress on those items they do agree on – like fighting poverty and global warming.

Similarly, Rick Warren’s job as a pastor is to spread the word of God, not advance the cause of conservatism. I would also guess this also means he shouldn’t just preach to the same old choir all the time, but to seek out new audiences to speak to. What sort of pastor would he be if passed up this historic opportunity?

I think both men made the right decision. I hope neither one compromises their principles, but I hope they continue to demonstrate what a civil dialogue should be. It doesn’t mean just talking just to the people you agree with. Both men represent our country, and I don’t think it’s too much to ask that both men be listened to with respect, if not total agreement.