Oscar Pool Ballot, 91st Academy Awards

It's time for the Awesomest Oscar Pool Ballot In The History Of Oscar Pool Ballots.

Every year I create a special ballot based on a typical Academy Awards printable ballot -- but on my ballot, each category has a different point value. The highest valued category is "Best Picture," while the mainstream films' categories are valued at two points. The non-mainstream categories (like the documentary and short film categories) are valued at one point.

This way, in a tight race for the winner of the pool, the winner most likely would not be determined by the non-mainstream films (in other words, blind guesses).

Download the ballot here for the 91st Academy Awards and use it at your Oscar party.

click here for larger

And if you're wondering why Tom Cruise is on my ballot... he's been on every one of my Oscar ballots. Because he's soooooooooo cool.

Scenes From Movies with Music From Other Movies

The amazing armored car chase from "The Dark Knight" (2008) was presented without any musical score from Hans Zimmer, so I always wondered how the sequence would play if it had other music underneath.

So I put a track from "Dunkirk" (also directed by Christopher Nolan and scored by Zimmer) underneath the chase sequence on Lower Wacker Drive in Chicago.

direct YouTube link
And then I wondered what the sequence would feel like if it had music from the truck chase in "Raiders of the Lost Ark", so here it is. The track is "Desert Chase".

direct YouTube link
Another one of my favorite car chases of all-time is the San Francisco chase in "Bullitt" (1968), which also doesn't have any musical score. So I again took the "Dunkirk" track ("Supermarine") and put it underneath the chase sequence.

direct YouTube link
I did all of these edits in near-real-time, meaning, I basically threw together the sequence and the track, did a tiny bit of editing and levels correction, then rendered the sequence (I spent only a little more time working on it than the sequence itself).
Original tweet.

Who is the Mystery Person Behind Han Solo? SOLVED!

It’s time for another edition of your favorite movie game show, “Wait, That Was Always There? No, Way!”

Here’s a scene from “Star Wars”.

direct YouTube link

You see it, right?

I never noticed this person behind Han. And it’s been there the entire time. And it doesn’t matter there’s a crew member clearing the edge of the set—in the editing room Marcia/Hirsch/Chew/George probably liked the pacing of this shot with this particular in-point.

There are so many lessons about cinema and filmmaking to be made with this example.

[I blame Auralnauts for pointing this out to me, since I never knew about this before yesterday. ]

Okay, so I cut together a shot from later in the sequence (just before the jump to hyperspace) with our “mystery crew member” shot. It sure looks like it’s Alec Guinness and the “mystery” shot is the tail of a take from the earlier shot. Pretty cool.

direct YouTube link
Original tweet.