Heh, I enjoyed seeing the codename theory get nuked.

American Graffiti:  Damn, George, what happened?  How'd we go from this to the painfully unnatural characters of the prequels? It's weird to imagine an alternate directorial career for George Lucas where he doesn't let his skills atrophy at the Skywalker Ranch for a few decades.  Or maybe this is autobiographical…

Regarding 80s nostalgia, in an episode about "songs from movies" I think that's particularly understandable, because the 1980s was the golden age of the movie soundtrack as a pop culture force.  Back then, blockbusters like Top Gun and The Karate Kid II came with hit original music as a vital part of the experience,…

I really want to like Sofia Coppola, but her movies are so boring.

Now that Ben Affleck made a movie about Iran, all the cool kids are doing it!

I'm amazed it took this long to bring Schindler's List out.

Amadeus is one of my top ten favourite films.

Watched three movies (two for the first time):

I think he did a bit of theatre, but whatever works he produced have pretty much been left out of the Browning canon.

Browning's "Andreas del Sarto" is the poem of his I remember the most, for its evocation of a guy who has enormous technical skill but can't see the forest for the trees in the great works of art of his era.

That part of "Jubilate Agno" was singled out my one of my Romantic Literature professors, just because she said the image of Smart, having been cast aside by pretty much all his human associates and shut up in a mental asylum, yet just so grateful to have this cat there with him, stuck with her.

One of my all-time favourites.  I especially enjoy how, even when you understand the more depressing implications, the final part still can't help but be rousing.

A lot of my favourites have already been mentioned here, so I'll just note a favourite minor work of Kipling, "James I".  Kipling seems to have really had it out for poor James, concluding the poem with these hilarious final lines:

I'm of the opinion that English poetry style went pretty rapidly downhill when the Victorian period ended.  There's still some good stuff, but the fun went out of the language.

and plays Alicia Keys’ “Girl On Fire” over images of young women today saying they’re still fighting the good fight

"I Gotta Feeling" is pleasant enough, even if it's not very good.  There are far, far worse Black Eyed Peas songs.  "The Time (Dirty Bit)" would be my candidate, for desecrating a classic bit of 80s cheese.

Conversely, the woman who plays Cosette took up with a Gestapo collaborator who was executed for treason after the war, and lost her citizenship rights as a result.

For Animated Feature, I'd prefer Wreck-It Ralph by a large margin; that was one of my top ten films of the year.  But I think Brave (which I thought was a middling piece of work) is the classier of the two, and they've been splitting precursors, so I think the Oscars will pick it over Ralph.  Wouldn't mind being wrong.

Picture:  Argo
Director:  Spielberg
Actor:  DDL
Actress:  Lawrence
Supporting Actor:  Waltz
Supporting Actress:  Hathaway
Original Screenplay:  Django Unchained
Adapted Screenplay:  Argo
Animated Film:  Brave
Foreign Film:  Amour
Documentary:  Searching for Sugar Man
Production Design:  Anna Karenina
Costume Design:  Anna Karenina
…

I thought that was a pretty decent episode.