Welcome again to We Have Always Lived in the Kraken, a pop culture blog transmitted directly to you from the belly of the beast. Here in the Notes we’ll show you this week’s posting schedule, but first, a little Seafood for Thought.
This is a rare win. Good job!
So another Oscars have come and past. There was tons of Oscarathon 2016 coverage including a live blog and live social media at our twitter and instagram accounts, @insidethekraken. Plus so many Jell-O shots! Spotlight was the mildly surprising big winner of the night, defying history and narrative momentum to become the first Best Picture to win only one other Oscar since 1952. Chris Rock did a great job straddling the line between attacking and honoring the Oscars. Things mostly went to according to script, other than Ex Machina‘s stunning Visual Effects win. The Oscars were able to prove that they are still willing to stand on their own in a chaotic season, which was refreshing. Mad Max led the field with six wins, including sweeping the technical awards (except for VFX). Emmanuel Lubezki and Alejandro González Iñárritu made history with their third and second straight win, respectively. This has been a strange award season, and it is nice that the Oscars did their best to at least make a unique statement, especially in a year as controversial as this one. The presenter were often actually funny, and the show was at least not boring. Sure, the scrolling thank you’s proved useless, and just gave the orchestra an excuse to play non-Leo winners off early, but that can be forgiven. Plus, Iñárritu gets massive props for ignoring the play off music and forcing it to stop. The Oscars have been a draining process this year, but at least The Revenant didn’t win Best Picture, which is a victory for me. I’ll admit that five to ten years from now we may wonder how Spotlight actually won, but I will stand strong and say here and now that this is a great movie that deserves high praise.
We here at the Kraken hope you have enjoyed our Oscar coverage, and look forward to taking a week off (mostly). Mad Max is still best movie, and I for one am ready to go to Valhalla, shiny and chrome.
David Robertson
A light schedule this week as we all recover from our Oscar ordeals (although behind the scenes, we’re still producing more podcasts for your waiting earholes). But you can still look forward to:
Tuesday: Kyu brings another three board games in this installment of The Loaded Die. This week he’s playing an ancient form of chess, a game about pirates, and a spooky children’s card game. That is, a spooky card game for children, not a card game for spooky children. What would that even look like?
Saturday: Baturdays continues with the very first story of the very first issue of Batman’s very first solo comic. Another major first: this one introduces the Joker, one of the best characters in all of pop culture. And the story is really great, too.
While we rest up, feel free to enjoy our archives. We’re really proud of how well they’ve grown so far, and glad that new readers discover them each day. Thanks for reading, everyone!
Catch of the Week:
Each and every week the residents here in the Kraken will offer one recommendation for the week that we think you all would enjoy. It might be a movie. It might be a book. Who knows? This is your… Catch of the Week.
Kyu: This week I’d like to not so much recommend as pour one out in memory of Gravity Falls, a great show that came to a thrilling conclusion not that long ago. A beautiful, smart, funny show about weirdness and family and growing up, Gravity Falls will long be remembered for excellent writing, wonderful character work, and building a whole world for itself in just two seasons. Would that all animation were as great as this. Bye, Gravity Falls. See you next summer.
Keskel: I’m recommending Riki-oh: The Story of Ricky.
https://youtu.be/OyXohnrEXVA
It is everything film can and will achieve. A low-budget, arguably illegal adaptation of an action fighting comic, it creates a new language to make up for the lack of proper English verbs (like “kicked a dog in half,” or “punched through one side of a man’s face and back out the other side”) to describe its awesomeness.
David: Now that the Oscars are done, I can finally offer a non-movie suggestion. So I am going with Fire Emblem Fates. I am a huge fan of the series, and this time it comes with three different stories, Birthright, Conquest, and Revelations. All are unique and offer one of the best tactical RPG experiences one can find. Play this game in some form!
That’s it for this week. We hope you continue to find the Kraken to your liking. The Kraken is vacationing in the Sargasso Sea; let’s hope he manages to crawl his way out by next week.