AFTER watching the 80th Annual Academy Awards live on ABC yesterday, it convinced me even more to take up an online degree in filmmaking after high school. There are lots of advantages for students like me who would like to take a shot at fame in Hollywood by directing movies when I’ll take the course online. First, I can act at the same time while studying because I’ll not be restricted to a university campus. Second, the tuition is really great because it is much cheaper because I don’t need laboratories to study filmmaking. It’s not like chemistry or electronics and communications engineering where you need to study the components of sugar or the latest in sonar technology, respectively.

But let’s go beyond the Academy Awards. There are actually other films worth being included in the Academy Award nominations but which were not. One of the most spectacular ones is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Imagine having a Locked-in Syndrome at the most peak of your sexual life. How do you feel that? For the uninitiated, Locked-in Syndrome is a physiological phenomenon where most of the external body is paralyzed except the eyes and the brain. The Locked-in Syndrome phenomenon has already been explored in one episode of House but in House, the guy experiencing Locked-in Syndrome was able to walk again in the end. In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby never recovered until death. His life for two years after the 1995 experience was one psychological agony if not physical. The guy can’t commit suicide for obvious lack of motor skills. If he chooses to stop inhaling air, he will just faint out and regain consciousness later. Translating that into one very good performance is worth an Academy Award but Mathieu Amalric’s portrayal of Jean-Dominique Bauby nudged him to become the next James Bond villain instead where his character is patterned after the very arrogant French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

The next movie I’m going to discuss is Juno of course about a teen who accidentally gets knocked up. In sharp contrast to the comedy Knocked Up where the 28-year-old Katherine Heigl is perfectly okay to be knocked up even without a spouse considering her age, Ellen Page’s teenage character Juno can surely be related and empathized with a lot of pregnant teenagers nationwide.