I 'Aint Gonna Work On Maggie's Farm No More

I spend an unholy amount of time on Facebook. In someways I feel ashamed, but then I look out onto the streets of Gillingham and think: 'apart from mugging old women, there's not much else to do out there'. So I 'like' another set of stupid photos and waste away my evenings achieving nothing but turning my eyes slowly more square.

I suppose the other thing I could be doing (work doesn't count) is playing video games. And sorry for stating the obvio

us, but my they've changed. Not just graphically o

r how many different plastic instruments you can flog to the masses, but how we play video games. In some ways, I bet everyone thought we could get away with simply making games prettier and prettier and all would be well. Clearly not. I'm going to head back to Facebook to explain why.

If you replied to the question 'What did you do at the weekend?' with 'Instead of going out I watered some carrots and sheered some sheep', people would have thought you were some backwards inbred recluse. Unfortunately, around 80 million people worldwide give this same response, and they don't even have to break out the chequered wellies to have this riveting weekend.

Yes, FarmVille. God knows how Zynga (the publisher and developer of the game) thought that by letting people having their own 16x16 grid where they could plant fruit and veg, it'd turn a massive proportion of web users into something equivalent to a violent heroin addict.

The thing is though, this unbelievably simple game has got a bigger audience than Twitter. And most of the players are not just casual, half-interested folk. The nature of the way FarmVille is played means that people keep going back to it like a prostitute will keep going back to Soho. I (ashamedly) use to play FarmVille, way back in June last year when it was a fairly new and novel idea. Unfortunately, if you wanted to progress anywhere in the game, you had to structure your life around it. Crops would harvest and die in realtime, and as a result, if you were out when your lovely new pumpkins had grown, the likelihood was by the time you sat back down at your computer, they would have wilted and died. Because of this 'harvest or die' style, it led to conversations where a friend would say 'we have to leave by *insert time here* otherwise my wheat'll die and then I would have wasted 4 days growing them'.

I don't really know why I'm bothering to explain the concept of FarmVille because by the sounds of it, anyone with an internet connection has harvested some virtual crops. The thing that's interesting though, that whilst games developers pour millions of Pounds into creating super complex and pretty games for the home consoles, a game that looks like it was created in a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth is the one that has pulled in the most players. It's not clever, it's simple gameplay and it's graphically very poor. Yet somehow, it has caused my sodding Facebook 'news feed' to become full of FarmVille updates, and I'm not impressed.

It has also meant that I receive a ludicrous amount of gifts to accept on Facebook. I keep getting offered a free chicken for the farm I don't even have by some girl. I think it would be nicer if the girl got off Facebook, got a real chicken and cooked it, then offered to me. I'd be much happier then.

Do You Want Fries With That Qualification?

Ladies and gentlemen. Tonight is a night to celebrate. Tonight, we honour the commitment and hard work that your sons and daughters have put in over the past two weeks. We've had nothing but praise for them, and I like them all to come up to the stage one by one to collect their awards. Without further or do, I'd like to present all of these wonderful boys and girls, their Level 2 BTEC in working at McDonalds.

In my head, this is roughly how I'd think an award ceremony would go at a particularly shit school where kids are awarded for not setting the teacher alight every term. Well, now these miscreants have the chance to leave with maybe the odd-qualification, as ol' Ronald McDonald has stepped into the British education system armed with a hamburger and a shit-load of easy qualifications.

You see, in exchange for working for 10 days at a McDonalds restaraunt, teenagers can now get a level 2 BTEC qualification in 'Work Skills'. Essentially, it's the equivalent of a B or C at GCSE, or what I used to call 'hard work'.

According to Edexcel (the exam board who run the qualification), the experience will help to build 'team working skills' and improve teenagers communication. N0w I don't know another generation who can chat quite as much as ours. The last thing a teenager who spends all day on their phone, Facebook and MSN is to be taught how to communicate at work. And what team working skills can you possibly hope to achieve from working behind the counter at McDonalds? The only thing I can possibly think of is which nationality of employee is on fries duty and which is on adding human fluids to the burgers.

I am not at all impressed by this. I worked bloody hard for my GCSEs and for exam boards to be handing them out like fucking Happy Meal toys is taking the piss. What happened to a bit of social elitism i.e. the people that work the hardest get the rewards. Lets face it, the kids who are going to be taking this qualification are going to be the ones flipping burgers anyway, so essentially these 2 weeks are just practice. I'm waiting for the day when AQA start giving out A-Levels to people who busk...

Oscar Predictions

Everyone does them, so why not lil' ol' me? It'll be interesting to see how many of the big categories I get right.

Best Picture- The Hurt Locker

Best Director- James Cameron (Avatar)

Best Actor- Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart)

Best Actress- Carey Mulligan (An Education)

Best Supporting Actor- Christoph Waltz (Inglorious Basterds)

Best Supporting Actress- Mo'Nique (Precious)

Best Original Screenplay- The Hurt Locker (Mark Boal)

Best Adapted Screenplay- Up in the Air (Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner)

Best Animated Feature- Up

I think The Hurt Locker will come away with the most awards, but for what Cameron has achieved with Avatar, I think he deserves to get the Best Director award and the Academy might recognise that. I'd love for Inglorious Basterds to win big, and if I were deciding with my heart I'd have said Tarantino should get the Director and Original Screenplay award. Unfortunately, I'm going with my head so we shall see...

How Do You Review A Film That's Not A Film?

Warning: If you haven't seen Funny Games yet, this review contains spoilers.

Put a CD in a CD player and you expect sound. Put an orange in a blender and you expect juice. Put an Israeli in Palestine and you expect death. Put a movie on, and you expect to feel something.

Or so that's what I thought. Little things that you just expect to happen often leave you wide open to get a big smack of surprise in the face. So when I finished watching the remake of Michael Haneke's Funny Games, you can imagine the emptiness inside when I genuinely didn't know how to react.

At it's most basic, Funny Games is a thriller. A family made up of Tim Roth, Naomi Watts and their young son go to their vacation home on a quiet lake, only to find themselves hostage in their own home to Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet. The two men initiate a series of sadistic games including making the family members choose who dies first. Throughout the film Pitt's character Paul constantly breaks the 'fourth wall', communicating with the audience and teasing them how their expectations of the film will not match up to the events that occur.

Roth and Watts struggle somewhat with very little material. When trying to portray the same emotions for 110 minutes, their performances become very stale. Pitt and Corbet's performances are very difficult to comment upon. Draped in white like their saintly names suggest, these two drive the film. Whilst they are by far the most entertaining assets in the movie, everytime they are on screen the film becomes excruciating and agonising to watch. Thanks to their on screen actions of torture and sadism, the virtually soulless and emotionless portrayals of these characters induces the audience to hate everything about them, including their performances.

Funny Games is also a lesson as much it is entertainment. Haneke proves a point with the material, commenting on the Western world's love of violence as Peter (Corbet) and Paul nonchalantly dispatch of the family. Indeed, the films most entertaining moments are when Peter and Paul are on screen, toying with the family and making bets with them that they'll all be dead by a specific time. In the last act when Peter and Paul leave (in Paul's words to make the film more dramatic to give George (Roth) and Ann (Watts) a chance to escape), Haneke slows everything down dramatically, with hugely extended camera shots and long periods of little dialogue. During this time, I craved the return of the two antagonists just to inject a bit of entertainment back into the film.

And here lies my point. Haneke has made Funny Games in such a way to manipulate the viewer that you can't really pass judgement on it. It's difficult to have any kind of opinion of a film which channels your judgement into a narrow corridor. In Haneke's own words, 'if you don't walk out halfway through the film, then there's something wrong with you'. The thing is, if you don't walk out, your left with a very strange feeling inside of emptiness. Not whether it's good or bad. Not whether you feel utterly shocked at the splattering of a young child's insides over the walls of the house. Not whether you feel confused when Peter grabs the TV remote and rewinds the film to alter his actions. Just a hollow sensation as though you just missed out 2 hours of your life.

Watch Funny Games. Experience a completely different way of watching a film. But just don't to expect to be able to answer the question 'was it any good'? Because I've been sitting here for over an hour trying to answer the same question, and as you can tell by the complete lack of direction in this review, I'm still stumped.

Talk To My Agent

Me and Mark Thomspon

As far as mad weeks go, this has been up there quite high. If I was in a relationship with Jordan it would have been less eventful and hectic. Writing speeches, cancelling speeches, new shirt, new tie, press releases left right and centre...I don't like being the centre of this almighty spotlight.

Last night was the Bob Friend Memorial Lecture, where I was formally presented with the Scholarship that I won a few weeks back. It was an incredibly glitzy and overwhelming event, not least because the guest lecturer was Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, who gave his first public speech since the decision was made to cut both 6Music and the Asian Network as the BBC attempts to cut it's 'bloated' service.

Firstly, Thompson. I think he provided a really interesting lecture, constantly defending the Fourth Estate theory to the hills and how the journalist should always serve the people. He seemed much more chilled and relaxed than anytime before this week, presumably because he didn't have Jeremy Paxman snarling in front of him. It was also nice for him to congratulate me several times, so hopefully if I want a job at the BBC I can just prompt his memory by saying 'the baby-faced guy who won that award that you gave me'. And as far as slip ups go, Thompson saying, AND I QUOTE '...the BBC has links with al-Qaed- I mean al-Jazeera' was pretty damn special.

But enough about Mr. MT. This is my blog so I'm going to talk about yours truly. I can see know why celebrities are all so bitter and lonely. I'm not for a moment suggesting I'm up there with Brad & Ange or Tom Cruise and the like, but being dragged around by a press officer and being told who to talk to and pose for certain photos was certainly an eye-opening experience. Obviously it was 'my night' (not being a twat for a second here) so it was nice to be the centre of attention. But it's difficult. You just want to go and celebrate with your friends, and posing for photos does get a bit annoying, especially when you're not used to smiling that much...

Of course I had a fantastic evening. I'm not going to lie, but having my picture plastered everywhere gives you this warm little feeling inside (no I did not piss myself or anything else...) To be that recognised is pretty amazing and the fact you can 'Google' yourself feels awesome. But this fame-lark, I'm gonna have a Susan Boyle-style breakdown if I'm not careful.