newmoonstar | Canonical Sherlockian names, the uselessness of the Oscars, and production design

The local Sherlock Holmes Society to which I belong has decided to pick out names from the Canon for ourselves. I'm terribly amused by this, but I'm sure every female Holmes fan alive will pick Irene Adler as their first choice. Who wouldn't want to go by the name of the only woman to outwit the Master? But obviously I won't get it, so what to pick for my second choice? This IS a great decision in life, after all! ;-D

Why do they even give out Oscars anymore? I mean, besides the fact the people who deserve them never win them anyway, now that they've given an Oscar to a song called "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp", doesn't that just completely undermine their claim to any sort of prestige at all? If it weren't for the Red Carpet and all the designer dresses, I don't think the Oscars would survive. At least, I know I wouldn't give a crap about them.

I watched Amadeus last night for the first time in several years (incidentally one of only four films to win Best Picture at the Oscars that actually deserved it!) and I now have a desire to get into production design. I was watching this show on PBS about production designers in Hollywood, which is what made me want to go watch Amadeus again, and I was just thinking how much fun it would be the production designer for a period movie like Amadeus. As a history geek and a writer, I'm always looking at houses and furniture and objects and thinking how they would have looked when they were first made, how they would have been used, etc. I was just looking through a 1915 catalog from Gimbel's Department store, and along with thinking about which dresses the characters in a story I was writing would wear, I was also looking at the linens and the furniture and all the things they'd have in their house. And picking out all those things really does depend as much on understanding the characters and the period and the story as much as the clothes do. Costume design is my greatest love, but they're only half of evoking the feel of a certain time and place in a film. Why couldn't I do both?

When I was a kid and my friends and I put on plays, I was always the one who approved whether or not the sets and costumes were appropriate to the setting of the play; they all thought I was being geeky caring about that stuff, but I loved it. Maybe geekiness could be the road to a fun career.

I've been thinking about getting involved with local theater groups for a long time, but even that would be pretty difficult, since people in general tend to dismiss people who haven't done the whole college thing. Although in my opinion, you have to be a lot more earnestly driven to want to dedicate years of your life to researching and studying something OUTSIDE of school. Most people go to school because that's what everybody does, and they have to, and they pick the thing that seems the easiest or least repellant to them to study because they have to study SOMETHING. At least if they've invested all that time and money without even the prospect of any kind of 'official' academic recognition you know it's because they're really, REALLY passionate and serious about it.

But such is life. Geekdom can be it's own reward, after all. :)