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In case you are looking at those eight mock posters and wondering which of the nine Best Picture nominees is missing, I'll let you know that Midnight in Paris was the only poster that the Shiznit did not shop. Anyway, most everybody seems to have pretty much the same picks in the "Big Eight" categories and then there's a little more variety scattered among the technical achievements.
The Artist has been the front-runner for quite some time now and there still seems to be little doubt that any of the other eight nominees is going to be able to derail it. Instead, most of the suspense will likely come from the presentation in either of lead acting categories.
And on a personal note, I'm coming off the worst year I've ever had, predicting-wise, on this blog, so I can only assume that I'm bound to score better in my confidence-ranked predictions than I did in 2011. Will I dare pick anything outside the seeming consensus favorites?
Ever since I've started doing the graphics for these Four Bs quarterly updates, I have never had to employ that shade of purple for a team's record and standing. That's only one spot above the cellar, one shade away from the dreaded red.
Of course, as bad as that might sound, it should be noted that the record for this Hawks team is only one point better than that amount the team had after 62 games last year—and was still in second place in the division. That certainly speaks to the quality of the Central this year, even if the Hawks themselves are essentially going to once again need a strong finish to have any hope in the NHL postseason.
This past quarter saw a brutal nine-game losing streak which led to just about every type of call to action you could imagine. There was the speculation that Coach Q could or should lose his job (stupid), Patrick Kane should be traded (double stupid) and the many, many calls for Stan Bowman to trade for a goaltender (OK, maybe a little justified). And, of course, there were still those who wonder why the team let go of it's Cup-winning cast (some people will never understand, I guess). As long as were talking about the season the team won the Cup, let us not forget there was a prolonged losing streak involved during that season too (only eight games, I believe).
I don't really know what significant changes any fan should be expecting at this point in the year. What you see is pretty much what you have (and keep your fingers crossed that little fender bender Captain Serious got in to doesn't have a lingering, oh, concussion-like effect on his play), and while that's not bad, it's certainly bound to get tested pretty severely from here on out.
As best as I can tell, the Bulls got to the 33 games mark before any other team in the league. And considering a majority of the predictions I saw largely had some variation of a Miami-Oklahoma City prediction for this year's NBA Finals, perhaps it isn't all that surprising the Heat and the Thunder sit atop the conferences right now.
Of course, Chicago had been occupying that top spot in the East all the way up until yesterday's stunning loss to the otherwise fairly woeful New Jersey Nets. The Bulls' 11-5 record during this last stretch isn't terrible by any means, but there's also not much arguing that no loss, no game, was more important of those last 16 than the 97-93 Heat victory over the Bulls in Miami.
Go ahead, if you'd like, and tell yourself that winning so many other games helps numb the pain a little bit. Or that it was just one of four meetings with that team this year. Luol Deng wasn't even playing, after all.
Still, the game was there to be won. Derrick Rose, at the foul line, couldn't get either one of his attempts to fall. Brutal. And perhaps you can hope that maybe another group stuns the Heat early along the way in the playoffs, but it seems far safer (saner?) to me to admit that all roads for all teams will require going through Miami for an NBA Championship.
Yep. The number of posts during NFL seasons used to make this annual conclusion involve a number of loose ends to tie up. And the total number of posts had been going up every year for the past three (52 last year, 45 the year before that and 34 in apparently the first year), but this year? This will be only the 12th post about the NFL season.
And that's not to say it was a bad season, by any means. Another good Super Bowl, a pair of good Championship games and a few other memorable playoff games thrown in there. The regular season certainly had its usual share of moments and now there's the long six months until there's more football played.
I'd normally be showing grand totals amassed during confidence pool picks throughout the year, but I didn't participate in any of those this year. Yes, I hope to be back in them again next year, although I wouldn't count on myself to organize one.
I already talked about that fantasy stuff, and obviously with no confidence pools, there aren't any Power Rankings to post either. You may recall that this Bears season is not one I'm going to be recalling very warmly, and certainly not itching to revisit right now.
But, hey, at least we had a season. Oh, unless you were Peyton Manning. Sorry. And therein lies one of the most compelling stories to follow this off-season. A legendary quarterback now seeming bound to be wearing a different uniform at the start of next season after the Colts presumably draft Andrew Luck. I'm going to go ahead and guess there's no way the rookie can have the immediate impact that Cam Newton did this year.
Alas, there's a little bit of green this year in those playoff predictions made way back at the beginning of the season, but ultimately the success was minimal. The same sort of goes for the predictions I made during the playoffs, final standings which are below the fold.
The only two films without check marks are the ones I have not seen, and they are also, coincidentally, the only two I did not pick. One of which I thought had fallen off and the other that I thought would surely be hurt by the new voting system. So much for that. Instead of 10 nominees, the new selection process cuts the field all the way to ... nine.
As it turns out, I probably won't be doing many movie reviews this year. Sure I may fill out one of those Oscar ballots once I've seen all nine of the nominated films (the color of the check marks should hint at my initial opinions, for those familiar with the grading system around here), but I really am trying to avoid "Extremely Loud" with every fiber of my being.
Anyway, I ended up going 33 out of ... 44 on my picks. That doesn't sound very impressive at all, and indeed, Best Director was the only category I had every nominee predicted correctly this year. Extremely Loud aside, no other nominations truly shocked me, as many of the nominees I was incorrect about were replaced by expected contenders. The manner in which the Best Picture nominees were presented was also somewhat strange, not offered up in the traditional alphabetical order when the number of films was certain. Instead, with the amount of nominees unknown, that allowed the Academy to offer up this order with Extremely Loud as the last announced before readjusting the titles to the order used in the photo above (original source here). Whereas Tree of Life was expected to be the major test of how well a borderline film might far, Extremely Loud gets in and basically assure that under the new system, more films like The Blind Side will still very likely be right in the running.
So like I said, and as has been the case with a majority of what were usual BMC posts, I'm afraid that there's not likely to be enough time in these days between now and the actual Oscars ceremony to post reviews of all the nominated films. I do, however, anticipate offering up the usual predictions about that night, whatever that might be worth.
It's strange to think back to the last time these two teams met in a Super Bowl in 2008. As you might remember—or will certainly be reminded several thousand times today—the Patriots were trying to finish off a perfect NFL season, and then ended up having their last game be their only loss in arguably the greatest Super Bowl ever.
Considering how badly I wanted that New England team to finally send those miserable 1972 Dolphins to their graves knowing that their accomplishment was no longer unique, and maybe even lessened by having only won 17 games instead of 19, that game also represents the last year I got a Super Bowl prediction wrong.
The Patriots were overwhelming favorites in 2008, and while I wasn't keeping track of other people's predictions back then, there's a significantly larger percentage of people picking the Giants this time around. I just watched every single one of the political pundits at the Roundtable on "This Week" pick New York. If you look at the predictions elsewhere from people who have been making football picks all year, again the Giants seem to have emerged as a clear favorite.
Anyway, after having taken the year off from making weekly regular season predictions, I have fared pretty well thus far in playoff predictions. And despite the late surge in popularity for the Giants emerging as champions later this evening, the team I picked back at the beginning of the year is still alive as well. Will I stick with them?
In years past, I did a more regular update of my fantasy team's progress throughout the year. So you might be forgiven for immediately assuming that I didn't write anything about this year's fantasy football teams until now because I had a couple of duds. Still, you'd be wrong.
As it turns out, I ended up with what I can only call a fairly "idiot-proof" lineup in both leagues. And while I would like to boast about how this demonstrates my own genius, in truth, this year I just ended up being lucky more weeks than not.And remember, being lucky is always better than being good.
So for posterity's sake, I'll be posting the usual screencaps of my dominance (and the one week of really, really bad luck) below the fold. Join me if you're the least bit interested in this sort of stuff, but as I've indicated in the past with this category, I certainly understand if you don't.
While I indicated early on this season that I felt the Bears were going to be fighting to be a .500 team this year, the fact that the team ended up with same number of wins as losses does not represent the oh-so-brief span of potential there seemed to be midway through the year. Indeed, there was once a point this year where some of us Bears fans might have been feeling a bit more confident that things were going to be different that next time we ran into the Packers. And in this NFC, why couldn't Chicago compete again?
And the answer, of course, was first an injury to your star quarterback and then your star running back. Follow that with an abysmal losing streak that varied in levels of pain to witness, and you get a Bears team that naturally missed the playoffs.
Unlike a few years ago when the team held a press conference to commit sweeping changes while simultaneously retaining the exact same staff, general manager Jerry Angelo was gone and Mike Martz was out as offensive coordinator. So at least this off-season, there will be some new faces that can hopefully begin getting to work trying to figure out how this third place team is going to get back to the top of a pretty competitive division.
There was continued speculation for what seemed like more months than it actually was before the Bears introduced their agent of change as ...
