Day: January 27, 2011

Every year (late January/early February) I come home to the same creamy yellow room on the 2nd floor of the Hotel Santa Barbara, and my soul goes “aaahhh.” Great wifi, nice rugs, ice buckets, nicely-situated, small little shitty flatscreen TV, wonderful white bathroom, really nice aroma, etc. And a really great complimentary breakfast in the lobby (fruit, cereal, coffee, croissants, bagels & cream cheese) every day from 7 to 10 am.

Hotel Santa Barbara, room #206 — Thursday, 1.27, 8:44 pm.

I was consumed all today with flying and driving and shoring up advertising revenue. White rental car, driving around, breakfast diner, Camarillo, Ventura…check-in, groceries, all that stuff. And once I arrived in Santa Barbara and unpacked I just felt this urge to succumb to a vegetable mindset. Once you give in to that kind of thing, it’s mesmerizing. And it’s good for the soul. Restful, soothing. I am the walrus & the brussel sprouts.

Three days ago the great political trends-and-numbers analyzer Nate Silver , the author-creator of FiveThirtyEight (now a N.Y. Times column) who was way, way in front of most of the political statistician crowd during the 2008 presidential election, began analyzing the Best Picture Oscar race for Melena Ryzik‘s Carpetbagger column.

This was a day before the Oscar nominations, of course, but Silver’s view is basically that The Social Network will most likely win. The core of his reasoning is (a) that the Academy has been closely following the preferences of the BFCA/Critics Choice awards in recent years and…uuhhh, hold on…uhmm…oh, yeah…and that (b) the Academy’s instant-runoff voting system, “which is no more convoluted than, say, the voting process for Dancing With The Stars,” he says, favors David Fincher‘s film.

“Instant-runoff voting can make a difference when there is a choice between an ‘agreeable’ candidate and one that some people love,” Silver writes, “but other people can’t stand, perhaps tipping the balance toward the former choice. This may have been the situation last year, when we had a somewhat weaker field overall.

“The Social Network is much more than ‘agreeable’, though: yes, nearly everyone likes the movie, but also, some people think it’s absolutely epic . In our experiment, it got to both have its cake and eat it too, picking up a lot of first-place votes at the outset, but also serving as a failsafe for many voters once other films fell by the wayside. If its critical reviews are any guide, it needs to be considered the favorite to win Best Picture, and perhaps a prohibitive one.”

Several thoughts, riffs and reviews about the 2011 Sundance Film Festival are in my head, but Park City Transportation will be here in 11 minutes. I only had six full days of movie-watching here (i.e., last Friday to last night), and I caught only about 22 or 23 films. I’ll be in Los Angeles by 11 am or so. 90 minutes to disembark and rent the car, and then a two-hour drive up the coast to Santa Barbara with occasional stops (photography, seaside contemplation, whatever).